Vasari's and Cellini's criticisms of a master they both honestly revered, may suffice to illustrate the false method adopted by these mimics of Michael Angelo's ideal. To charge him with faults proceeding from the weakness and blindness of the decadence--the faults of men too blind to read his art aright, too weak to stand on their own feet without him--would be either stupid or malicious. If at the close of the sixteenth century the mannerists sought to startle and entrance the world by empty exhibitions of muscular anatomy misunderstood, and by a braggadocio display of meaningless effects--crowding their compositions with studies from the nude, and painting agitated groups without a discernible cause for agitation--the crime surely lay with the patrons who liked such decoration, and with the journeymen who provided it. Michael Angelo himself always made his manner serve his thought. We may fail to appreciate his manner and may be incapable of comprehending his thought; but only insincere or conceited critics will venture to gauge the latter by what they feel to be displeasing in the former. What seems lawless in him, follows the law of a profound and peculiar genius, with which, whether we like it or not, we must reckon. His imitators were devoid of thought and too indifferent to question whether there was any law to be obeyed. Like the jackass in the fable, they put on the dead lion's skin of his manner, and brayed beneath it, thinking they could roar. Correggio, again, though he can hardly be said to have founded a school, was destined to exercise wide and perilous influence over a host of manneristic imitators. Francesco Mazzola, called Il Parmigianino, followed him so closely that his frescoes at Parma are hardly distinguishable from the master's; while Federigo Baroccio at Urbino endeavoured to preserve the sensuous and almost childish sweetness of his style in its integrity.[399] But the real attraction of Correggio was only felt when the new _barocco_ architecture called for a new kind of decoration. Every cupola throughout the length and breadth of Italy began then to be painted with rolling clouds and lolling angels. What the wits of Parma had once stigmatised as a _ragoût_ of frogs, now seemed the only possible expression for celestial ecstasy; and to delineate the joy of heaven upon those multitudes of domes and semi-domes was a point of religious etiquette. False lights, dubious foreshortenings, shallow colourings, ill-studied forms, and motiveless agitation suited the taste that cared for gaudy brightness and sensational effects. The painters, for their part, found it convenient to adopt a mannerism that enabled them to conceal the difficult parts of the figure in feather beds of vapour, requiring neither effort of conception nor expenditure of labour on drawing and composition. At the same time, the Caracci made Correggio's style the object of more serious study; and the history of Bolognese