The simple beauty which distinguished the works of art of the fifteenth century , and the richness and dignity which they displayed in the sixteenth, were succeeded in the seventeenth by a style in which were exaggerated all the defects of the Renaissance, and from which almost all its merits were left out, and which reflected the unbridled licence and effeminate luxury of the age.
It was neither classical nor gothic. Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini β was the chief master of this style, and the extent to which: unmeaning and capricious decoration was indulged in is seen in his bronze Baldacchino i. His greatest architectural work is the colossal colonnade in front of St.
Peter's Fig. Bernini was also famous as a sculptor. One of his best works is a group of Apollo and Daphne, finished in his eighteenth year. His rival, Francesco Borromini β , endeavoured to outdo him by even greater exaggeration of ornament. From his buildings rectilinear forms disappear almost entirely,βeven the gables of the windows, the cornices, and the entablatures are broken and contorted, so that all regularity of design is last, and an effect produced of painful confusion and instability.
It seems to have freely burroughed from Les Merveilles de la peinture by Viardot. This ade naine 5. Bell Nanoy R E. Belsize Park Gardens, Hampstead, December, THE'HE framework and many of the illustrations of this book have been borrowed, with the per mission of the publishers, from a small ' Guide to the History of Art ' which has long been in use in German schools ; but this framework has been filled in by reference to standard English, German , and French authorities, and each division of the book has been supplemented by a chapter on Art in England.
If the ' Elementary History ' awake an interest in Art, and teach students to recognise and appreciate beauty under whatever form it is presented to the senses, the aim of the writer will have been fulfilled.
