It represents that temper and that culture before the decline of the same influence, when the Counter Reformation was in active progress and the Papal pretensions to absolute dominion had received no check.
[Footnote 213: The three founders of the school were thus born precisely during the most critical years of the Council.

They felt the Catholic reaction least.

That expressed itself most markedly in Domenichino, born seventeen years after its close.] [Footnote 214: Nich.

Poussin, b.

1594; Claude, 1600; Gaspar Poussin, 1613; Salvator Rosa, 1615; Luca Giordano, 1632; Canaletto, 1697.] We should be wrong, however, to treat the Eclectics as though they succeeded without interruption to that 'giant race, before the flood.' Their movement was emphatically one of revival; and revival implies decadence.