Prose-writers burst the bonds of Bembo, trampled on Boccaccio, reveled in the stylistic debaucheries of Bartolo.

Painters, rendered academic in vain by those Fabii of Bologna who had striven to restore the commonwealth of art by temporizing, launched themselves upon a sea of massacre and murder, blood and entrails, horrors of dark woods and Bacchanalia of chubby Cupids.

The popular Muse of Italy meanwhile emerged with furtive grace and inexhaustible vivacity in dialectic poems, dances, Pulcinello, Bergamasque Pantaloon, and what of parody and satire, Harlequinades, and carnival diversions, any local soil might cherish.[198] All this revolt against precedent, this resurrection of primeval instinct, crude and grinning, took place, let us remember, under the eyes of the Jesuits, within the shadow of the Inquisition, in an age reformed and ordered by the Council of Trent.

Art was following Aretino, the reprobate and rebel.

He first amid the languors of the golden age--and this is Aretino's merit--discerned that the only escape from its inevitable exhaustion was by passing over into crudest naturalism.
[Footnote 198: See Scherillo's two books on the _Commedia dell'Arte_ and the _Opera Buffa_.] But for Chiabrera, the excellent gentleman, the patronized of princes, scrupulous upon the point of honor, pupil of Jesuits, pious, twisted back on humanism by his Roman tutors, what escape was left for him?
Obey the genius of his times he must.