Kugler saw two periods of decline in Italian painting. The first was during the sixteenth century and did not affect Venice:
Artists [in Florence and Rome] directed their attention to mere imitation, or rather to a spiritless and mannered exaggeration of the motives found in earlier master-works... Many of their pictures consist of a multitude of figures one over the other, so that it is impossible to say what part of the ground-plan they occupy; figures which tell nothing, half-naked models in academic positions. Heavy colours thinly applied, and defective modelling, supersede the earlier energetic execution. ( Kugler, ed. Eastlake, Handbook of the History of Painting, Part One, The Italian Schools, First Edition, p. 382).
Kugler, ed. Eastlake, Handbook of the History of Painting, Part One, The Italian Schools, First Edition, p. 384 comments that 'the completest degeneracy is to be found in Rome'. Kugler saw the causes for this decline in Hegelian terms. The time of greatest political power of the papacy was the time of the greatest Italy painters, but the internal contradictions in a political system which gave worldly power to the Pope was the cause of the fall in political, religious, and artistic terms. There was a period of some restoration seen in the work of the Carracci in Bologna, and Domenichino, and Guido Reni - none of them meeting with Ruskin 's approval.
The final decline was completed by the beginning of the nineteenth century when Italy 'only dreams of past renown. The Arts have quitted her, to seek a new home in other lands' ( Kugler, ed. Eastlake, Handbook of the History of Painting, Part One, The Italian Schools, First Edition, p. 422).