traced in the Spanish Ribera (see page 220) and the Neapolitan Salvator Rosa. They called themselves "Naturalists," as being opposed to the "ideal" aims alike of the Mannerists and the Eclectics; but they made the fatal mistake--a mistake which seems to have a permanent hold on a certain order of minds, for it is at the root of much of the art-effort of our own day--that there is something more "real" and "natural" in the vulgarities of human life than in its nobleness, and in the ugliness of nature than in its beauty (see below under 172, and under Salvator Rosa _passim_). The later Venetian pictures make a most interesting group. In the eighteenth century Venetian art experienced a partial revival, and the painters of this revival--Tiepolo, Longhi, Canaletto, and Guardi may here be well studied. [Illustration] FOOTNOTES: [27] It was this false striving after "the ideal," as Mr. Symonds points out, that caused Reynolds, with his obsolete doctrine about the nature of "the grand style," to admire the Bolognese masters. For Reynolds's statement of his doctrine see his _Discourses_, ii. and iii., and his papers in the _Idler_ (Nos. 79 and 82); for Ruskin's destructive criticism of it, see _Modern Painters_, vol. iii. pt. iv. ch. i.-iii. [28] The realism and the morbid taint in the religious pictures of the Italian decadence were in some measure the direct outcome of ecclesiastical teaching. "Depict well the flaying of St. Bartholomew," said a Jesuit father, "it may win hearts to piety." The comment of Shelley on the Bolognese Schools was this: "Why write books against religion when we may hang up such pictures?" THE EARLY FLEMISH AND THE GERMAN SCHOOLS "Why is it, probably, that Pictures exist in the world, and to what end was the divine art of Painting bestowed, by the earnest gods, upon poor mankind? I could advise once, for a little! To make this poor authentic earth a little memorable for us. Flaying of St. Bartholomew, Rape of Europa, Rape of the Sabines, Piping and Amours of goat-footed Pan, Romulus suckled by the Wolf: all this and much else of fabulous, distant, unimportant, not to say impossible, ugly and unworthy shall pass. But I say, Herewithal is something not phantasmal; of indisputable certainty, home-grown" (CARLYLE: _Friedrich_, bk. iv. ch. vi., slightly altered).