Among these a prominent place should be given to an alteration in the intellectual interests of the Italians themselves.

The original impulses of the Renaissance, in scholarship, painting, sculpture, architecture, and vernacular poetry, had been exhausted.
[Footnote 7: I may here state that I intend to use this term Counter-Reformation to denote the reform of the Catholic Church, which was stimulated by the German Reformation, and which, when the Council of Trent had fixed the dogmas and discipline of Latin Christianity, enabled the Papacy to assume a militant policy in Europe, whereby it regained a large portion of the provinces, that had previously lapsed to Lutheran and Calvinistic dissent.] Humanism, after recovering the classics and forming a new ideal of culture, was sinking into pedantry and academic erudition.

Painting and sculpture, having culminated in the great work of Michelangelo, tended toward a kind of empty mannerism.

Architecture settled down into the types fixed by Palladio and Barozzi.

Poetry seemed to have reached its highest point of development in Ariosto.