Dispirited by the violence of these manœuvres, the deputies began to give way to the cabal of the monopolists, allotting the frescoes to Correnzio and Caracciolo, and flattering Spagnoletto with the hope of being intrusted with the altar-pieces; when all at once, repenting of their agreement, they ordered the two fresco painters to throw up their work, and transferred the whole of the chapel to Domenichino, at the splendid price of a hundred ducats for every entire, fifty for each half figure, and twenty-five for every head.[121] They likewise took measures for his personal safety, by obtaining the Viceroy's protection, but in vain. The faction, not content with crying him down as a cold insipid painter and discrediting him with those who see with their ears and fill every place, alarmed him with anonymous letters, threw down what he had painted, mixed ashes with his materials to crack the ground he had prepared, and, by a stroke of the most refined malice, persuaded the Viceroy to give him a commission of some pictures for the Court of Spain. These, when little more than dead-coloured, they carried from his study to court, where Ribera superciliously ordered what alterations he thought proper, and then, without allowing him leisure to terminate the whole, dispatched them to Spain. The insolence of the rival, the complaints of the deputies on the successive interruptions of their work, and hence the suspicion of mischief, induced Domenichino at last secretly to depart for Rome, in hopes of being able from thence to bring his affairs into a better train,--and not without success; the rumours of his flight subsided, new measures for his safety were taken, he returned to Naples, and, without more interruption, completed the greater part of the frescoes, and considerably advanced the altar-pieces. Here death surprised him, accelerated, as some have suspected, by poison, certainly by repeated causes of disgust from his relations, competitors, and, above all, the arrival of his old adversary Lanfranco. He succeeded to Domenichino in the remaining fresco, Spagnoletto in one of the oil pictures, and Stanzioni in another. Caracciolo was dead; Belisario, excluded by age from sharing in the spoil, soon after was destroyed by a ruinous fall from a scaffold. Nor had Ribera, if the prevailing fame be true,[122] a desirable end; dishonoured in his daughter, gnawed by remorse for the vile persecutions in which he had shared, odious to himself, and sick of light, he escaped to sea, and none tells where he perished. Opposed at its onset by these three, the School of Bologna triumphed after their demise, and Naples was divided into its imitators; for the mannered style of Cesari, which approached that of Belisario, terminated with Luigi Roderigo, and his relative Gian Bernardino.