Painting felt this change; and the secularisation, which was inevitable, passed onward into paganism.

Yet the art itself cannot be said to have suffered, when on the threshold of the sixteenth century stand the greatest painters whom the world has known--neither Catholics nor Heathens, but, in their strength of full accomplished art and science, human.

After Italy, in the course of that century, had been finally enslaved, then, and not till then, painting suffered from the general depression of the national genius.

The great luminaries were extinguished one by one, till none were left but Michael Angelo in Rome, and Tintoret in Venice.

The subsequent history of Italian painting is occupied with its revival under the influences of the counter-Reformation, when a new religious sentiment, emasculated and ecstatic, was expressed in company with crude naturalism and cruel sensualism by Bolognese and Neapolitan painters.
I need scarcely repeat the tale of Cimabue's picture, visited by Charles of Anjou, and borne in triumph through the streets with trumpeters, beneath a shower of garlands, to S.Maria Novella.[123] Yet this was the birthday festival of nothing less than what the world now values as Italian painting.