The Rationalist kept the arts and cast aside the religion. This
rationalistic art is the art commonly called Renaissance, marked by a
return to pagan systems, not to adopt them and hallow them for
Christianity, but to rank itself under them as an imitator and pupil. In
Painting it is headed by Giulio Romano and Nicolo Poussin; in
Architecture by Sansovino and Palladio.

SECTION XXXVII. Instant degradation followed in every direction,--a
flood of folly and hypocrisy. Mythologies ill understood at first, then
perverted into feeble sensualities, take the place of the
representations of Christian subjects, which had become blasphemous
under the treatment of men like the Caracci. Gods without power, satyrs
without rusticity, nymphs without innocence, men without humanity,
gather into idiot groups upon the polluted canvas, and scenic
affectations encumber the streets with preposterous marble. Lower and
lower declines the level of abused intellect; the base school of
landscape [Footnote: Appendix II, "Renaissance Landscape."] gradually
usurps the place of the historical painting, which had sunk into
prurient pedantry,--the Alsatian sublimities of Salvator, the
confectionery idealities of Claude, the dull manufacture of Gaspar and
Canaletto, south of the Alps, and on the north the patient devotion of
besotted lives to delineation of bricks and fogs, fat cattle and
ditchwater. And thus Christianity and morality, courage, and intellect,
and art all crumbling together into one wreck, we are hurried on to the
fall of Italy, the revolution in France, and the condition of art in
England (saved by her Protestantism from severer penalty) in the time of
George II.

SECTION XXXVIII. I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done
anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape