In Naples were other eclectics of greater technical force who painted under Caravaggio and Ribera, the former the "King of the Dark lings,s the latter a Spaniard, known in Italy as Spagnoletto. Here, too, was the prince of modern landscape Italian painters, Salvator Rosa. In Genoa the eclectics were Bernardo Strozzi, a disciple of Caravaggio; and Benedetto Castiglione a student of Van Dyck, the great Fleming. This master influenced also a Sicilian painter, Pietro Novelli, called 11 Monrealese. Tuscany had her eclectics, the more famous among them being the "sweet Carlo Dolce and the antiquated Pietro Berretini da Cortona, the last-named a decorator .who was vulgar, incorrect and mannered and whose work hastened art's decay.
When, at the dawn of the 18th century art began to degenerate, it became gayer, assumed smaller and more cheerful proportions, became sinuous as ivy, twined itself like ivy, moved like a snail, became sketchy, issued in spurts, poured itself forth in sentimental cascades of Arcadia. Human figures lost their bones and were re leased from the prison of enormous mantles of marble amid rocks and clouds, with hair streaming in the wind, their arms in awkward and convulsed gesticulation. Then it was that classical antiquity beckoned anew, a siren lur ing the modern artist. Pope Benedetto XIV from his throne outlawed the crusade for cies-, sicism; and Winckelman suddenly sounded a call to arms around the Greco-Roman simidocri. The antique entered brusquely into the midst of the crowd of cicisbei, and advanced with a frown and looking grave, severe and dominat ing amid the uproar of knaves. It was proper then that art, lacking high ideals, should turn to social life, renewing affectations, but also collecting a treasure of observation and of truth in the hands of Leone Ghezzi, of the Longhi and others. Erudition, philosophy and science entered to arrest art in its search for reality, and Winckelman, with his idealistic enthusiasm for antique beauty, united all in admiration of that civilization which in Pompeii and Hercu laneum arises like a phoenix from its ashes. An exponent of classic art and the founder of scientific archaeology, Winckelman was a great German art critic living in Ronie.
Decorative painting in the Settecento (18th century) had displayed its splendors in Venice through the brushes of Gian Battista Tiepolo, Piazzetta and Sebastian Ricci; but in that cen tury there was, in general, a division in artistic work; some were landscape painters, among whom Zuccarelli, a Venetian is admired; others were painters of ruins and architectural com positions, the best of these being Giovanni Paolo Pannini; and still others painted flowers and fruit, and street scenes. Of these last An
tonio Canale called Canaletto. Bernardo Bel loto and Francesco Guardi were unsurpassed. Ippolito Caffi, killed in the Battle of Lissa, 1866, was probably the last follower of Canaietto.
In 18th century .sculpture, Caiucva was, rep resentative of his school, even in its varying tendencies. A terra-cotta relief in the seminary in Venice, shows this master's youthful fond-, ness for the baroque. Subsequently his style was expressed in an assimilation of the antique. He persuaded himself that it was necessary to look at nature °with the eyes of antiquity.° But the blending of the antique, with the new art was, until the end of the Settecento (18th cen tury) the dream of artists and scholars. To depict faces in whose profiles the forehead and nose were a continuous straight line; the forehead brevis of Marziale or tennis of Arazio; the forehead of the same length as the nose and equal in length to the rest of the face from the nose to the end of the chin; to arrange the hair in a curve so as to make the face oval, to mark the fine eyebrows, to round the chin gracefully; all this was to construct the human body on an algebraic formula. Hence appeared expres sionless faces, oval in shape, with soft effem inate cheeks, the surface of the face rounded and smooth, with curls on the fprehead and carefully twisted tresses. These heads did not breathe, but grew artificially in a hothouse, without the warmth of imagination, without the rose of life. Classic art was .a fossil tree that can no longer delight men with its shade. Canova hoped that he might cause the trunk of this tree to send forth sprouts and burst into green foliage again; and full of impulse for classic beauty, he began one of the many return movements towards the antique which so often started in Italy, at every advance of civilization, all of which have been fruitless. From time to time the tide of Italy's seas ebbs and flows to antique shores, where there are no longer sirens, tritons or nereids.