The decline of Italian art: its causes and results--Artists of Urbino--Girolamo della Genga, and his son Bartolomeo--Other architects and engineers. The zenith of Italian art, especially of Italian painting, was attained between 1490 and 1520. That brief span, scarcely a generation of human life, not only embraced the entire artistic life of Raffaele and witnessed the finest efforts of Leonardo, Luini, Bellini, Giorgione, Francia, Ghirlandaio, Fra Bartolomeo, Sodoma, Perugino, Pinturicchio, Spagna, and Salerno; it also ripened the earlier and better fruits of Buonarroti's genius, of del Sarto's too quickly degenerate palette, and of Titian's "Pencil pregnant with celestial hues." It saw the metropolitan St. Peter's commenced, the Stanze and Logge well advanced; it assembled in the Vatican halls the noblest band of painters ever united by one scholarship. That bright spot, the Pausilippo of our pictorial journey, has been passed. Our onward way lies through dreary days of progressive degeneracy, often fitfully illuminated by its reflected lights, but more rarely gladdened by gleams of original genius, or efforts of self-forgetting zeal. In reviewing the history of painting, its stages of progress will be readily distinguished. The Byzantine period may be regarded as its starting point of stationary conventionalism.[*200] This was followed by an age of sentiment, when earnest thought gradually ameliorated penury of invention, and supplied intensity to expression. To it succeeded an epoch of effort, the hand failing to realise the aims of mind,[*201] the eye awaking to truths of nature, but bewildered by their hidden meanings. Next came the age of mastery;[*202] one of difficulties surmounted and doubts made clear. But the summit when attained was speedily quitted; the period of facility was too soon one of decline. In the words of Fuseli, painters then "uniformly agreed to lose the subject in the medium." Mechanism became the great object, copiousness a prized merit, until mediocrity sought refuge in a multitude of figures, or fell back upon theatrical artifice. The close of the fifteenth century was indeed a cycle of rapid progression, opening many new channels for the efforts of mind, and it was in Italy that this expansion was primarily felt. The ultramontane invention of printing was then eagerly adopted; the cultivation of revived philosophy, and the convulsions consequent upon foreign inroads, introduced elements of change into the Peninsular mind as well as its politics. In nothing was this movement more felt than in the fine arts. During early times, the ideas of artists exceeded their means of expression.[*203] Yet their works, even when trammelled by fetters, partly of limited skill, but more of traditionary mannerism, are often fit exponents of simple thoughts, while the coincidence between the conception and style renders solecisms of execution less startling. The forms may be timid