That this proposition is not extravagant, the history of music in England will suffice to prove. Before the victory of Puritan principles in Church and State, the English were well abreast of other races in this art. During the sixteenth century, Tallis, Byrd, Morland, Wilbye, Dowland and Orlando Gibbons could hold their own against Italian masters. The musical establishments of cathedrals, royal and collegiate chapels, and noble houses were nurseries for artists. Every English home, in that age, like every German home in the eighteenth century, abounded in amateurs who were capable of performing part-songs and concerted pieces on the lute and viol with correctness. Under the régime of the Commonwealth this national growth of music received a check from which it never afterwards recovered. Though the seventeenth century witnessed the rising of one eminent composer, Purcell; though the eighteenth was adorned with meritorious writers of the stamp of Blow and Boyce; yet it is obvious that the art remained among us unprogressive, at a time when it was making gigantic strides in Italy and Germany. It is always dangerous to attribute the decline of art in a nation to any one cause. Yet I think it can scarcely be contested that the change of manners and of temperament wrought in England by the prevalence of Puritan opinion, had much to answer for in this premature decay of music. We may therefore fairly argue that if the gloomy passion of intolerant fanaticism which burned in men like Caraffa and Ghislieri had prevailed in Italy—a passion analogous in its exclusiveness to Puritanism—or if no composer, in the place of Palestrina, had satisfied the requirements of the Council and the congregation, the history of music in Italy and Europe to us-wards would have been far different.
These considerations are adduced to justify the importance attached by me to the episode of which Palestrina was the hero. Yet it should not be forgotten that other influences were at work at the same time in Italy, which greatly stimulated the advance of music. If space permitted, it would be interesting to enlarge upon the work of Luca Marenzio, the prince of madrigal-writers, and on the services rendered by Vincenzo Galileo, father of the greatest man of science in his age, in placing the practice of stringed instruments on a sound basis. It should also be remembered that in the society of Filippo Neri at Rome, the Oratorio was taking shape, and emerging from the simple elements of the Spiritual Laud and Aria Divota. This form, however, would certainly have perished if the austere party in the Church had prevailed against the lenient for the exclusion of figured music, from religious exercises.
There was, moreover, an interesting contemporary movement at Florence, which deserves some detailed mention. A private academy of amateurs and artists formed itself for the avowed purpose of reviving the musical declamation of the Greeks. As the new ecclesiastical style created by Palestrina grew out of the Counter-Reformation embodied in the decrees of the Tridentine Council, so this movement, which eventually resulted in the Opera, attached itself to the earlier enthusiasms of the Classical Revival. The humanists had restored Latin poetry; the architects had perfected a neo-Latin manner; sculptors and painters had profited by the study of antique fragments, and had reproduced the bas-reliefs and arabesques of Roman palaces. It was now, much later in the day, the turn of the musicians to make a similar attempt. Their quest was vague and visionary. Nothing remained of Greek or Roman music. To guide these explorers, there was only a dim instinct that the ancients had declaimed dramatic verse with musical intonation. But, as the alchemists sought the philosopher's stone, and founded modern chemistry; as, according to an ancient proverb, they who search for silver find gold; so it happened that, from the pedantic and ill-directed attempts of this academy proceeded the system on which the modern Oratorio and Opera were based. What is noticeable in these experiments is, that a new form of musical expression, declamatory and continuous, therefore dramatic, as opposed to the lyrical and fugal methods of the contrapuntists, was in process of elaboration. Claudio Monteverde, who may be termed the pioneer of recitativo, in his opera of Orfeo; Giacomo Carissimi, in whose Jephtha the form of the Oratorio it already outlined, were the most eminent masters of the school which took its origin in the Florentine Academy of the Palazzo Vernio.
To pursue the subject further, would be to transgress the chronological limits of my subject. It is enough to have attempted in this chapter to show how the destinies of Italian music were secured and its species determined in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. How that art at its climax in the eighteenth century affected the manners, penetrated the whole life, and influenced the literature of the Italians, may be read in an English work of singular ability and originality.[212]
CHAPTER XIII
THE BOLOGNESE SCHOOL OF PAINTERS
Decline of Plastic Art—Dates of the Eclectic Masters—The Mannerists—Baroccio—Reaction started by Lodovico Caracci—His Cousins Annibale and Agostino—Their Studies—Their Academy at Bologna—Their Artistic Aims—Dionysius Calvaert—Guido Reni—The Man and His Art—Domenichino—Ruskin's Criticism—Relation of Domenichino to the Piety of His Age—Caravaggio and the Realists—Ribera—Lo Spagna—Guercino—His qualities as Colorist—His Terribleness—Private Life—Digression upon Criticism—Reasons why the Bolognese Painters are justly now neglected.
After tracing the origin of modern music at its fountain head in Palestrina, it requires some courage to approach the plastic arts at this same epoch.