In late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Rome, a rhetorical war raged among intellectuals in the attack and defense of language, literature, and the visual arts. This book examines the cultural upheaval that accompanied attacks on the baroque predilection for ornament, extended visual metaphors, grandiloquence, and mystical rapture. Rome's Academy of the Arcadians emerged as a potent social and cultural force in the final decade of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century provided a setting for arguments on artistic taste and reforms in literature and religion. This book describes the waning days of the baroque and ends with an analysis of the Parrhasian Grove.