In painting the school of Bologna, led by Lodovico Caracci (1555-1619) and his nephews, Agostino and the more noted and gifted Annibale, set the fashion. They endeavoured to combine faithfulness to nature with all the merits of all their predecessors, and are therefore called the eclectic school. They remained the cynosure of touring eyes until the middle of the nineteenth century. Sir Joshua Reynolds admired and praised them. Some of their disciples were for a long time almost as famous as Raphael. Domenichino's Last Communion of St. Jerome held a place of honour in the Vatican Gallery equal to Raphael's Transfiguration. Guido Reni's Aurora, painted on the ceiling of the casino in the Rospigliosi palace in Rome, had a tremendous vogue, and even now tourists, escaped from the critics, admire it privily. Guercino, Sassoferrato, and also the lachrymose Carlo Dolci are other celebrated members of the school. Another school, almost equally famous, was devoted to Naturalism,--imitation of starving old beggars and a general depiction of want, misery, and squalor. Of these painters the principal were Caravaggio (1569-1609), a Neapolitan, and his pupil Ribera, known as _Lo Spagnoletto_, because he was born in Spain. A later group, the Venetians of the eighteenth century, consisted of Canaletto, Bellotto, Guardi, and others who painted again and again the idle canals and pleasure-loving palaces of Venice. The greatest of this group was Tiepolo (1693-1770), who attained in a measure the grand manner of the great masters of the sixteenth century. In literature, though that also had flashes of seriousness, as in Filicaia's celebrated sonnet to Italy adapted by Lord Byron,-- Italia! O Italia! thou who hast The fatal gift of beauty-- the spirit of the Baroque, in its lightest and pleasantest manner, expressed itself to the full by means of the Academy of Arcadia. The unreality of the whole Italian world was concentrated in this Academy, which soon had branches, imitations, colonies all over the peninsula. It was founded in Rome (1692) by Gravina, a jurist, Crescimbeni, a priest, and other dilettanti, for the ennoblement of literature, the purification of taste, and other meritorious purposes. The members called themselves Arcadian shepherds and shepherdesses, took pastoral names, composed sonnets by the bushel, wrote one another's biographies, and were altogether delightfully silly. Goldoni, the playwright, gives a glimpse of these litterateurs in the eighteenth century as he observed them in Pisa.