Raphael has been as undeservedly belittled and out of the fashion of late, as he was for centuries grossly overrated. [197] The latest claim, wherein he has been hailed in ecstatic fashion as " the greatest master of space-composition," could only have been made by writers on art who are not themselves artists. This new cult of " space composition " has no significance for an artist, who means by composition and by space quite other things. It is a literary cult, meaning the arrangements of composition in relation to the depth of a picture. In this faculty Raphael was no more a supreme master than many another painter. In the more vital faculty of arrangement and spacing, as artists under- stand it, in that power of arranging and filling the painted ground with such skill that the largeness of the composition creates and arouses, through our sense of vision, emotions such as the deep phrasing of great music creates in our hearing, Raphael more than once proved himself a master. But he was not particularly gifted in the power of creating space music. His art depends always on its utterance of gracefulness, uttered in the manner called grandiose. He developed certain fine spacings, 'tis true-but he repeated them overmuch.

The portrait of his great patrons, the bearded Pope Julius II. seated in a Chair, and the clean-shaven Pope Leo X. at the Pitti Palace in Florence, are of the finest examples of that portraiture which Raphael practised after his coming to Rome. The Prado holds his fine Cardinal Bibbiena ; the Pitti his Angiolo Doni and Maddalena Doni ; the S. Luca Gallery at Rome his so-called Violin-Player ; and the Borghese his so-called Perugino, the authorship of which is challenged, but which is, if by Raphael, his greatest portrait.

Raphael was now rich and greatly courted. Cardinal Bibbiena had proposed an " advantageous match " with his niece Maria, to which Raphael pledged himself, with what [198] intention of redeeming the pledge we shall never know- he was a tactful soul. He was living at the time with the beautiful daughter of a baker from Siena, his famed mistress the "Bella Fornarina." His ardent love-sonnets hint at many affairs of the heart.

During the last few years of his life in Rome, Raphael, as he had earlier done with his frescoes, handed over the greater part of his paintings to his pupils and assistants, of whom the most important were now Giulio Romano, Francesco Penni, and Perino del Vaga. But he himself painted, for Agostino Chigi's Villa Farnesina, the fresco of Galatea, and for the same merchant-prince the frescoes of the Chigi Chapel in S. Maria della Pace.

Raphael was at work upon his great Transfiguration, now at St. Peter's in Rome, when he caught fever whilst superintending some excavations, and died on the Good Friday of 1520, which happened to fall on his thirty-seventh birthday, the 6th of April. The beautiful Margaret, " La Fornarina," was with him as he lay dying ; but was put out of the room by the messenger of the Pope, who refused the dying man the benediction in her presence.

The Transfiguration was finished, after Raphael's death, by his favourite pupil, Giulio Romano.

Four months after Raphael died, the " Fornarina," Margaret Luti, daughter of Francesco Luti of Siena, was received into the congregation of Sant' Apollonia in Trastevere, a home for repentant Magdalenes-she whose face lives immortal in the Sistine Madonna, in the Donna Velata, and the St. Cecilia as well as other Madonna pieces.

Raphael, the sunny child of Fortune, basking ever in the warm rays of Success, was a born courtier. He saw life as a courtier. He read the gospels like a courtier. [199] His Madonnas, his infant-Christs, his saints, are the creations of a courtier. His superb Dispute of the Sacrament is a mighty significance as seen by a courtier. His chief friend, Count Baldassare Castiglione, was a courtier, and wrote The Book of the Courtier. Raphael is, and always will be, the literary man's ideal of a painter, " the most beloved of artists."

He has been hailed as "the most classically perfect student of pure beauty "-whatever that may mean. How he could be so without creating the greatest types of beauty, it were difficult to say ; and to say that he did so, were to ride for a fall.

Raphael is the painter of Grace, of gentle Temperance, of Sweetness-a sunny soul living in brightness, unruffled by tragedies or terrors ; radiant as the sun-god, smiling, blind to all discomforting things. He is the painter-poet of Loveliness. His brief life was a pageant of success. He was at least faithful to his mistress. His wealth of achievement is a world-wonder. He is the type of that part of the sumptuous life of Florence that went calmly along a flower-strewn way whilst the streets on every hand were racked with vice and suffering and violence. He was akin in spirit to the French court-painters of the years before the Revolution, except that he ever turned his eyes from naughtiness, and refused even to suspect the lords of the people of adulteries. Of the essential Renaissance Raphael spoke no word, uttered no indiscretion.

The art of Raphael, greatly honoured in the days when he wrought it in all the splendour of his brief and successful life, was grossly overrated for centuries as the supreme achievement of the Renaissance, and so continued almost into our own day. He was acclaimed the " king of painters," " the divine painter," who was none of these. All men who [200] took pen in hand, and desired to be considered cultured, all men who did the Grand Tour, every man who desired to acquire the reputation of learned or fashionable bloods- the professor of history or dictator of taste, the moralist and the scientist and the philosopher, grew to look upon Raphael as the lord of art-they fashioned their theories on it, floated their schemes of the works of man's brain upon it, made it the groundwork of their researches into what they falsely mistook to be art, and generally called by some such phrase as the Sublime and the Beautiful. The artists also, when they wrote of their art, or spoke of it, or theorised about it, bowed to this sorry conception of it. Reynolds knew that Raphael was not the greatest of artists, but he dared not say so.

The end was inevitable. A violent reaction followed, Raphael was flung from his pedestal-as the achievement of all Italy must and will be flung from its ridiculous pedestal-but, as inevitably, he has been grossly underrated and reviled and sneered at.