of painting (he was well educated and bookish), Domenichino was devoted to music, not as a performer but to the invention of instruments suited to the stile moderno or to what Monteverdi dubbed the "seconda pratica." Like Domenichino's paintings, its sources were in ancient models and aimed at clarity of expression capable of moving its audience. As the Florentine composer Giulio Caccini held and Domenichino surely believed, the aim of the composer/artist was to "move the passion of the mind." To achieve that goal, Domenichino paid particular attention to expressive gestures. Some 1750 drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle attest to the assiduous study underlying Domenichino's work—figural, architectural, decorative, landscape, even caricature—and to the painter's brilliance as a draftsman. In Roger de Piles' Balance of 1708, an effort to quantify and compare the greatness of painters in four categories (no artist ever achieved a score above 18 in any category), the French critic awarded Domenichino 17 points for drawing (dessein), 17 for expression, 15 for composition, yet only 9 as a colorist. Domenichino's composite score of 58 nonetheless was surpassed only by Raphael and Rubens, and it equalled that of the Carracci. Criticism from Ruskin The Balance reflects Domenichino's high standing in the history of European taste— until John Ruskin in the 1840s wrote his devastating attacks on Bolognese Baroque painting in his Modern Painters. The Carracci and their followers were condemned by Ruskin as being "insincere". For Ruskin, there was no entirely sincere nor any great art from the seventeenth century and all was doubly damned as being "eclectic." Modern scholarship, led by Luigi Serra, John Pope-Hennessy, Evelina Borea and Richard Spear, who in 1982 published the first catalogue raisonné of all of Domenichino's paintings and preparatory drawings, has resurrected the artist from the Victorian graveyard and reestablished his place among the most important and influential painters of seventeenth-century Italy. In 1996 the first major exhibition of his work was held at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome. Selected works Saint John the Evangelist, 1621–1629 (auctioned in London in December 2009 for more than £9.2 million, acquired by another buyer on condition that it be put on public display for three months every year). The Virgin, Infant Jesus, and John the Baptist (The Madonna of Silence), c. 1605, Louvre Museum A Virgin with a Unicorn, c. 1604–05, Farnese Gallery, Palazzo Farnese, Rome; fresco based on a design by