Michelangelo and Raphael. For nine years Raphael worked at the
decoration of the palace, always being pressed, hurried, and even
worried by two successive popes who employed him. The wall spaces which
he had to fill were often awkwardly broken up with windows and doors,
but he easily overcame whatever difficulties were encountered. To
succeed apparently without struggle was a peculiar gift granted to
Raphael above any other artist of his day. The frescoes painted by
him in the Vatican illustrated subjects from Greek philosophy and
medieval Church history, as well as from the Old and New Testament.
As an illustrator of sacred writ he never attempted that verisimilitude
in Eastern surroundings to which Hubert van Eyck leaned, neither was
he satisfied with the dress of his own day in which other painters
were wont to clothe their sacred characters. The historical sense,
which has driven some modern artists to much antiquarian research to
discover exactly what Peter and Paul must have worn, did not exist
before the nineteenth century. Raphael felt, nevertheless, that the
clothes of the Renaissance were hardly suitable for Noah and Abraham,
so he invented a costume of his own, founded upon Roman dress, but
different from oriental or contemporary clothes. The Scripture
illustrations of Raphael most familiar to you may probably be his
cartoon designs for tapestry in the South Kensington Museum, which
were bought by Charles I. In these you can see what is meant about
the clothes, but you will not be surprised at them, because the same
have been adopted by the majority of Bible illustrators ever since
the days of Raphael. His pictures became so popular that it was thought
whatever he did must be right. The dress was a mere detail in his work,
but it was easy to copy and has been copied persistently from that
day to this. It is curious to think that the long white robes, which
Christ wears in the illustrations of our present-day Sunday School
books and other religious publications, are all due to imitation of
Raphael's designs.

The first room he finished for Julius II. was so rich in effect and
beautiful in colour that the Pope could scarcely wait for more rooms
as fine. Raphael had to call in a large number of assistants to enable
him to cover the walls fast enough to please the Pope, and the quality
of the work began to deteriorate. The uneven merit of his frescoes
foretold the consequence of overwork despite his matchless facility
and power. But in his panel pictures, when he was not hurried, his
work continued to improve until he reached his crowning achievement
in the Sistine Madonna painted three years before his death.

Raphael was thirty-seven when he died in 1520, and very far from coming
to the end of his powers of learning. Each picture that he painted
revealed to him new difficulties to conquer, and new experiments to
try, in his art. We seem compelled to think that had he lived and
laboured for another score of years, the history of painting in Italy
might have been different. In Rome and Florence no successor attempted
to improve upon his work. His pupils and assistants were more numerous
than those of any other painter, but when they had obtained some of
his facility of drawing and painting they were contented. None of them
had Raphael's genius, yet all wished to paint like him; so that for
the following fifty years Rome and Florence and Southern Italy were
flooded with inferior Raphaelesque paintings, which tended to become
more slip-shod in execution as time went on, and more devoid of any
personal note. It was just as though his imitators had learnt to write
beautifully and then had had little to say.

Leonardo da Vinci died a few months before Raphael. Several of his
pupils were artists of ability, and lived to carry on his traditions
of painting in the north of Italy. Leonardo himself had been so erratic,
produced so little, and so few of his pictures survive, that many know
him best in his pupils' work, or through copies and engravings of his
great 'Last Supper'--a picture that became an almost total wreck upon
the walls of the Refectory in Milan, for which it was painted. His
influence upon his contemporaries at Milan was very great, so that
during some years hardly a picture was painted there which did not
show a likeness to the work of Leonardo. He had created a type of female
beauty all his own. The face will impress itself upon your memory the
first time you see it, whether in a picture by Leonardo or in one by
a pupil. You can see it in the National Gallery in the great 'Madonna
of the Rocks,' and in the magnificent drawing at Burlington House.
It is not a very beautiful face, but it haunts the memory, and the
Milanese artists of Leonardo's day never threw off their recollection
of it.

With far less power than Leonardo, one of his imitators, Bernardino
Luini, painted pictures of such charm and simplicity that almost
everyone finds them delightful. If you could see his picture of the
angels bearing St. Catherine, robed in red, through the air to her
last resting-place upon the hill, you would feel the beauty and peace
of his gentle nature revealed in his art. But the spell of Leonardo
vanished with the death of those who had known him in life. The last
of his pupils died in 1550, and with him the Leonardo school of painting
came to an end.

There is one more painter belonging to the full Renaissance too famous
to remain entirely unmentioned. This is Correggio, a painter affected
also by the pictures of Raphael and Leonardo, but individual in his
vision and his work. He passed his life in Parma, in the north of Italy,
inheriting a North Italian tradition, and hearing only echoes of the
world beyond. His canvases are thronged with fair shapes, pretty women
and dancing children, ethereally soft and lovely. But it is in his
native town that the angels soar aloft with the Virgin in the dome
of the cathedral, and the children frolic on the walls of the convent.
These are his masterpieces you would like best.

In 1550 the impetus given to painting in Italy by the Renaissance was
drawing to an end. The great central epoch may be said to have
terminated in Tuscany a few years after the deaths of Leonardo and