When the Christian mythology, which had supplied art with subjects derived from inspired writ or venerated tradition, was supplanted by an idolatry of nature content to feed spiritual longings with common forms copied without due selection from daily life, men no longer painted what religion taught them to believe, but what their senses offered for imitation, modified by their own unrestrained fancies. Painting thus became an accessory of luxurious life, and its productions were regarded somewhat as furniture, indicating the taste rather than the devotion of patrons and artists. These accordingly followed a wider latitude of topics and treatment. In proportion as devotional subjects fell out of use, a demand arose for mythological fable and allegory. Profane history, individual adventure or portraiture, supplied matter pleasing to vanity, profitable to adulation. But while the objects of painting became less elevated, its mechanism gained importance; it became ostentatious in sentiment, ambitious in execution. The aim of professors, the standard of connoisseurs, declined from the ideal to the palpable. A fresh field for exertion was thus opened up. Schools attained celebrity from their successful treatment of technical difficulties. Michael Angelo attracted pupils by his power in design; Titian by his mastery in colour; Correggio by his management of light; while the eclectic masters of Bologna vainly aspired to perfection by nicely adjusting their borrowed plumes; and the _tenebristi_ of Naples sought, by impenetrable shadows, to startle rather than to please. A demand for domestic decoration led to further exercise of ingenuity. Landscapes, first improved by the Venetian masters as accessories, became a new province of art; and transcripts from nature in her scenes of beauty were succeeded by the clang of battles, the inanities of still life, the orgies or crimes of worthless men.[*212] In architecture and in sculpture, the departure was scarcely less remarkable from the pure style and simple forms of the fifteenth century: a free introduction of costly materials and elaborate decoration deteriorated taste, without compensating for the absence of ideal beauty. The masters of this, which we may distinguish as the "newest" manner, must accordingly be tried by a new standard. Those of the silver and golden ages, Angelico and Raffaele, sought a simple or vigorous development of deep feeling; the Giordani and Caravaggii, men of brass and iron, whose technical capacity outstripped their ideas, aspired not beyond effect. Effect is, therefore, the self-chosen test to which artists of the decline should be subjected, though it may detect in them false taste and vulgar deformity. Under their guidance, energy was substituted for grandeur, bustle for dramatic action; while flickering lights and fluttering draperies ill replaced the solidity and stateliness of earlier men. Art thus, like literature, became copious rather than captivating.