It was so especially with the artist of | might seem, for its own sake, a whole whom Raphael first became certainly a octave of fantastic crime-not merely learner - Perugino. Giovanni Santi had under brilliant fashions and comely died in Raphael's childhood, too early persons, but under fashions and perto have been in any direct sense his sons, an outward presentment of life teacher. The lad, however, from one and of themselves, which had a kind of and another, had learned much, when, immaculate grace and discretion about with his share of the patrimony in them, as if Raphael himself had already hand, enough to keep him, but not brought his unerring gift of selection to tempt him from scholarly ways, he bear upon it all for motives of art. came to Perugia, hoping still further to With life in those streets of Perugia, as improve himself. He was in his eigh- with nature, with the work of his masteenth year, and how he looked just ters, the mere exercises of his fellowthen you may see in a drawing of his students, his hand rearranges, refines, own in the University galleries, of renews, as if by simple contact; but somewhat stronger mould than less gen- was met here half-way in its renewing uine likenesses might lead you to ex-office by some special aptitude for such pect. There is something of a fighter grace in the subject itself. Seemingly in the way in which the nose springs innocent, full of natural gaiety, eterfrom the brow between the wide-set, nally youthful, those seven and more meditative eyes. A strenuous lad! ca- deadly sins, embodied and attired in pable of plodding, if you dare apply that just the jaunty dress then worn, enter word to labor so impassioned as his now and afterwards as spectators, or to any labor whatever done at Perugia, assistants, into many a sacred forecentre of the dreamiest Apennine scen- ground and background among the ery. Its various elements (one hardly friends and kinsmen of the Holy Famknows whether one is thinking of Italian ily, among the very angels, gazing, connature or of Raphael's art in recounting versing, standing firmly and unashamed. them), the richly planted lowlands, the During his apprenticeship at Perugia sensitive mountain lines in flight one Raphael visited and left his work in beyond the other into clear distance, the more modest places round about, along cool yet glowing atmosphere, the ro- those seductive mountain or lowland mantic morsels of architecture, which roads, and copied for one of them Perulends to the entire scene I know not gino's "Marriage of the Virgin" sigwhat expression of reposeful antiquity, nificantly, did it by many degrees better, arrange themselves here as for set pur- with a very novel effect of motion pose of pictorial effect, and have gone everywhere, and that grace which natuwith little change into his painted back-ral motion evokes, and for a temple grounds. In the midst of it, on titanic in the background a lovely bit of old Roman and Etruscan foundations, his friend Bramante's sort of architecthe later Gothic town had piled itself ture, the true Renaissance or perfected along the lines of a gigantic land of Quattro-cento architecture. He goes rock, stretched out from the last slope on building a whole lordly new city of of the Apennines into the plain. Be- the like as he paints to the end of his tween its fingers steep, dark lanes wind life. That subject, we may note, as we down into the olive-gardens; on the leave Perugia in Raphael's company, finger-tips military and monastic build- had been suggested by the famous ers had perched their towns. A place mystic treasure of its cathedral church, as fantastic in its attractiveness as the the marriage ring of the Blessed Virgin human life which then surged up and herself. down in it in contrast to the peaceful Raphael's copy had been made for scene around. The Baglioni who ruled the little old Apennine town of Citta di there had brought certain tendencies of Castello; and another place he visits at that age to a typical completeness of this time is still more effective in the expression, veiling crime-crime, it development of his genius. About his

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twentieth year he comes to Siena. traced back from him to Pinturicchio, as that other rocky Titan's hand, just lifted that painter worked on those vast, wellout of the surface of the plain. It is lighted walls of the cathedral library at the most grandiose place he has yet Siena, at the great series of frescoes seen; has not forgotten that it was once illustrative of the life of Pope Pius the the rival of Florence; and here the Second. It had been a brilliant perpatient scholar passes under an influ-sonal history, in contact now and again ence of somewhat larger scope than with certain remarkable public events Perugino's. Perugino's pictures are for a career religious yet mundane, you the most part religious contemplations, scarcely know which, so natural is the painted and made visible, to accompany blending of lights, of interest in it. the action of divine service- a visible How unlike that Peruginesque conceppattern to priests, attendants, worship- tion of life in its almost perverse otherpers, of what the course of their invisi- worldliness, which Raphael now leaves ble thoughts should be at those holy behind him, but, like a true scholar, will functions. Learning in the workshop not forget. Pinturicchio then had inof Perugino to produce the like such vited his remarkable young friend works as the Ansidei Madonna- to hither, "to assist him by his counsels," produce them very much better than who, however, pupil-wise, after his his master, Raphael was already be- habit also learns much as he thus ascome a freeman of the most strictly sists. He stands depicted there in perreligious school of Italian art, the so son in the scene of the canonization devout Umbrian soul finding there its of Saint Catherine; and though his purest expression, still untroubled by actual share in the work is not to be the naturalism, the intellectualism, the defined, connoisseurs have felt his inantique paganism, then astir in the tellectual presence, not at one place artistic soul everywhere else in Italy. only, in touches at once finer and more The lovely work of Perugino, very forcible than were usual in the steadylovely, at its best. of the early Raphael going, somewhat Teutonic, Pinturicalso, is in fact "conservative," and at chio, Raphael's elder by thirty years. various points slightly behind its day, The meek scholar you see again, with though not unpleasantly. In Perugino's his tentative sketches and suggestions, allegoric frescoes of the "Cambio," the had more than learned his lesson; Hall of the Money-changers, for in- through all its changes that flexible stance, under the mystic rule of the intelligence loses nothing; does but add Planets in person, pagan personages continually to its store. Henceforward take their places indeed side by side Raphael will be able to tell a story in a with the figures of the New Testament, picture, better, with a truer economy, but are no Romans or Greeks, nor the with surer judgment, more naturally Jews Jews, nor is any one of them, and easily than any one else. warrior, sage, king, precisely of Peru- And here at Siena, of all Italian gino's own time and place, but still towns perhaps most deeply impressed contemplations only, after the manner with medieval character an impress of the personages in his church-work; it still retains-grotesque, parti-colored or, say, dreams - monastic dreams—parti-colored, so to speak, in its genthin, do-nothing creatures, conjured ius - Satanic, yet devout of humor, as from sky and cloud. Perugino clearly never broke through the meditative circle of the Middle Age.

Now Raphael, on the other hand, in his final period at Rome, exhibits a wonderful narrative power in painting; and the secret of that power- the power of developing a story in a picture, or series of pictures-may be

depicted in its old chronicles, and beautiful withal, dignified. It is here that Raphael becomes for the first time aware of that old pagan world, which had already come to be so much for the art schools of Italy. There were points, as we saw, at which the school of Perugia was behind its day. Amid those intensely Gothic surroundings in the cathe

of

tered he is under the influence of style in its most fully determined sense, what might be called the thorough-bass of the pictorial art, of a fully realized intellectual system in regard to its processes, well tested by experiment, upon a survey of all the conditions and various applications of it-of style as understood by Da Vinci, then at work in

dral library where Pinturicchio worked, might exclaim, of the peculiar, tremustood, as it remained till recently, un-lous, half-convinced, monkish treatment ashamed there, a marble group of the of that, after all, damnable pagan world. three Graces - an average Roman work, And our own generation certainly, with in effect the sort of thing we are used kindred tastes, loving or wishing to to. That, perhaps, is the only reason love pagan art as sincerely as did the why for our part, except with an effort, people of the Renaissance, and mediawe find it conventional or even tame. val art as well, would accept, of course, For the youthful Raphael, on the other of work conceived in that so seduchand, at that moment, antiquity, as tively mixed manner, ten per cent. of with "the dew of herbs," seemed even Raphael's later, purely classical therein "to wake and sing" out of the presentments. dust in all its sincerity, its cheerfulness That picture was suggested by a fine and natural charm. He turned it into a old intaglio in the Medicean collection picture; has helped to make his orig- at Florence, painted therefore after inal only too familiar, perhaps, placing Raphael's coming thither, and therefore the three sisters against his own favor- also a survival with him of a style limite, so unclassic, Umbrian background |ited, immature, literally provincial; for indeed, but with no trace of the Peru- in the phase on which he had now enginesque ascetic, Gothic meagreness in themselves; emphasizing rather, with a hearty acceptance, the nude, the flesh; made the limbs, in fact, a little heavy. It was but one gleam he had caught just there in mediæval Siena of that large pagan world he was, not so long afterwards, more completely than others to make his own. And when somewhat later he painted the exqui- Florence. Raphael's sojourn there exsite, still Peruginesque, Apollo and Marsyas, semi-mediæval habits again asserted themselves with delightfully blent effects. It might almost pass for a parable- that little picture in the Louvre of the contention between classic art and the romantic, superseded in the person of Marsyas, a homely, quaintly poetical young monk, surely! Only, Apollo himself also is clearly of the same brotherhood; has a touch, in truth, of Heine's fancied Apollo in exile," who, Christianity now triumph-logna; from the earlier naturalistic ing, has served as a hired shepherd, or works of Masolino and Masaccio; from hidden himself under the cowl in a the solemn, prophetic work of the vencloister; and Raphael, as if at work on erable Dominican, Bartolommeo, dischoir-book or missal, still applies sym- ciple of Savonarola. And he has already bolical gilding for natural sunlight. It habitually this strange effect, not only is as if he wished to proclaim amid newer lights-this scholar who never forgot a lesson - his loyal pupilage to Perugino, and retain still something of mediæval stiffness, of the monastic thoughts also, that were born and lin- Bartolommeo, Da Vinci, were masgered in places like Borgo San Sepolcro ters certainly of what we call "the or Citta di Castello. Chef-d'œuvre ! you ideal" in art. Yet for Raphael,

tends from his twenty-first to his twentyfifth year. He came with flattering recommendations from the court of Urbino; was admitted as an equal by the masters of his craft, being already in demand for work, then and ever since duly prized; was, in fact, already famous, though he alone is unaware - is in his own opinion still but a learner, and as a learner yields himself meekly, systematically to influence; would learn from Francia, whom he visits at Bo

on the whole body of his juniors, but on those whose manner had been long since formed; they lose something of themselves by contact with them, as if they went to school again.

tion, the loveliest of his Madonnas, perhaps of all Madonnas; and let it stand as representative of as many as fifty or sixty types of that subject, onwards to the Sixtine Madonna, in all the trium

serve the veritable atmosphere about it, the grand composition of the drapery, the magic relief, the sweetness and dignity of the human hands and faces, the, noble tenderness of Mary's gesture, the unity of the thing with itself, the faultless exclusion of all that does not belong to its main purpose; it is like a single, simple axiomatic thought. Note withal the novelty of its effect on the mind, and you will see that this master of style (that is a consummate example of what is meant by style) has been still a willing scholar in the hands of Da Vinci. But, then, with what ease, also, and simplicity, and a sort of natural success not his !

loyal hitherto to the traditions of Umbrian art, to its heavy weight of hieratic tradition, dealing still somewhat conventionally with a limited, non-natural matter-for Raphael to come from Siena, Perugia, Urbino, to sharp-witted, phancy of his later days at Rome. Obpractical, masterful Florence was in immediate effect a transition from reverie to realities—to a world of facts. Those masters of the ideal were for him in the first instance, masters also of realism, as we say. Henceforth, to the end, he will be the analyst, the faithful reporter, in his work, of what he sees. He will realize the function of style as exemplified in the practice of Da Vinci, face to face with the world of nature and man as they are; selecting from, asserting one's self in a transcript of its veritable data; like drawing to like there, in obedience to the master's preference for the embodiment of the creative form within him. Portrait-art had been nowhere in the school of Peru- It was in his twenty-fifth year that gino, but was the triumph of the school Raphael came to the city of the popes, of Florence. And here a faithful an- Michelangelo being already in high alyst of what he sees, yet lifting it favor there. For the remaining years withal, unconsciously, inevitably, re- of his life he paces the same streets composing, glorifying, Raphael, too, with that grim artist, who was so great becomes, of course, a painter of por- a contrast with himself, and for the first traits. We may foresee them already in time his attitude towards a gift different masterly series, from Maddalena Doni, from his own is not that of a scholar, a kind of younger, more virginal sister but that of a rival. If he did not beof La Gioconda, to cardinals and popes come the scholar of Michelangelo it -to that most sensitive of all portraits, would be difficult, on the other hand, to the "Violin-player," if it be really his. trace anywhere in Michelangelo's work But then, on the other hand, the influ- the counter influence usual with those ence of such portraiture will be felt who had influenced him. It was as if also in his inventive work, in a certain he desired to add to the strength of reality there, a certain convincing Michelangelo that sweetness which at loyalty to experience and observation. first sight seems to be wanting there. In his most elevated religious work he Ex forti dulcedo; and in the study of will still keep, for security at least, close Michelangelo certainly it is enjoyable to nature, and the truth of nature. His to detect, if we may, sweet savors amid modelling of the visible surface is lovely the wonderful strength, the strangeness because he understands, can see the and potency of what he pours forth for hidden causes of momentary action in us; with Raphael, conversely, somethe face, the hands-how men and thing of a relief to find in the suavity animals are really made and kept alive. of that so softly moving, tuneful existSet side by side, then, with that por- ence, an assertion of strength. There trait of Maddalena Doni, as forming was the promise of it, as you remember, together a measure of what he has in his very look as he saw himself at learned at Florence, the "Madonna del eighteen; and you know that the lesGran Duca," which still remains there. son, the prophecy of those holy women Call it on revision, and without hesita-and children he has made his own, is

that "the meek shall possess." So, antique world, pagan art, pagan life, when we see him at Rome at last, in and is henceforth an enthusiastic archæthat atmosphere of greatness, of the ologist. On his first coming to Rome a strong, he too is found putting forth papal bull had authorized him to inspect strength, adding that element in due all ancient marbles, inscriptions, and proportion to the mere sweetness and the like, with a view to their adaptacharm of his genius; yet a sort of tion in new buildings then proposed. strength, after all, still congruous with A consequent close acquaintance with the line of development that genius has antiquity, with the very touch of it, hitherto taken, the special strength of blossomed literally in his brain, and the scholar and his proper reward, a under his facile hand, in artistic crepurely cerebral strength- the strength, ations, of which the "Galatea" is inthe power of an immense understand-deed the consummation. But the ing.

frescoes of the Farnese palace, with a Now the life of Raphael at Rome hundred minor designs, find their places seems as we read of it hasty and per- along that line of his artistic activity, plexed, full of undertakings, of vast and did not exhaust his knowledge of works not always to be completed, of antiquity, his interest in and control almost impossible demands on his in- of it. The mere fragments of it that dustry, in a world of breathless com- still cling to his memory would have petition, amid a great company of composed, had he lived longer, a spectators, for great rewards. You monumental illustrated survey of the seem to lose him, feel he may have lost monuments of ancient Rome. himself, in the multiplicity of his enTo revive something of the proporgagements; might fancy that, wealthy, tionable spirit at least of antique buildvariously decorated, a courtier, cardinal ing in the architecture of the present, in petto, he was "serving tables." But, came naturally to Raphael as the son you know, he was forcing into this brief of his age; and at the end of another space of years (he died at thirty-seven) of those roads of diverse activity stands more than the natural business of the Saint Peter's, though unfinished. What larger part of a long life; and one way a proof again of that immense intelliof getting some kind of clearness into gence, by which, as I said, the element it, is to distinguish the various diver- of strength supplemented the element gent outlooks or applications, and group of mere sweetness and charm in his the results of that immense intelli- work, that at the age of thirty, known gence, that still untroubled, flawlessly hitherto only as a painter, at the dying operating, completely informed under- request of the venerable Bramante standing, the purely cerebral power, acting through his executive, inventive or creative gifts, through the eye and the hand with its command of visible color and form. In that way you may follow him along many various roads till brain and eye and hand suddenly fail in the very midst of his work along many various roads, but you can follow him along each of them distinctly.

At the end of one of them is the "Galatea," and in quite a different form of industry, the data for the beginnings of a great literary work of pure erudition. Coming to the capital of Christendom, he comes also for the first time under the full influence of the

himself, he should have been chosen to succeed him as the director of that vast enterprise. And if little in the great church, as we see it, is directly due to him, yet we must not forget that his work in the Vatican also was partly that of an architect. In the Loggie, or open galleries of the Vatican, the last and most delicate effects of Quattro-cento taste came from his hand, in that peculiar arabesque decoration which goes by his name.

Saint Peter's, as you know, had an indirect connection with the Teutonic reformation. When Leo X. pushed so far the sale of indulgences to the overthrow of Luther's Catholicism, it was done after all for the not entirely selfish