Raphael is a great significance in art-if not the mighty significance he was once declared to be. In the glamour that the intellectual snobbery of the Æsthete and the Cultured cast about him, he was hailed as uttering in his Madonnas and child-Christs a wondrously reverent and spiritual significance which is exactly what his whole achievement lacks. His art is devoid of that wondrous and exquisite and subtle mystic religious fervour that marked the art of the great painters of the fourteen-hundreds. Florence, in his day, was herself wholly devoid of it-and Rome even more void. Raphael wrought his grandiose and graceful art for beauty's sake alone ; and for such beauty as expressed the aristocratic ideal of beauty that was the sumptuous and splendid aim in the palaces of [201] the great. He painted country-girls for Madonnas-they are neither country-girls nor Madonnas, but the country-girl as the courtiers in palaces would see her, dressed for the part, elegantly graceful, and as nice as possible for her majestic and awful destiny.

Raphael is the type of his age. Italy had spent herself in the feverish and astounding activities of the Renaissance to lead the world in the New Learning, to stand in the New Dawn as the lord of the great advance of the human soul. Italy arose like a splendid young giant from the sloth of the past, who arrays himself in the splendour and knowledge of past ages, but has no vision beyond the edge of his narrow world. She was too steeped in her ancient glory, too weighted with the armour of her ancient beliefs, to arise out of the wreckage that her awakening wrought. The new life, the new revelation, was to pass to a more vigorous breed, less weighted by ancient traditions, more stern of purpose, more disciplined of will, that hated the sham forms of liberty without freedom as much as the æsthetic Italians adored them-to a race that had its heart in its home, not in an awestruck delight in the splendour of the palaces of its lords.

Raphael was what the pedants called " eclectic," a borrower and user of other men's splendour-and a Mighty Borrower he was. He took the best from all that the art of Italy had wrought in his native land of Umbria, with the art that he found in Florence and Rome, the lands of his adoption ; he selected from the great ones, and welded their artistry into his hand's skill, wrought a style of his own out of their various achievements, and employed it to utter his own vision in so far as he had a vision. But his was a receptive genius, nearer to woman than man ; he created but little, he gave forth of the abundance of the [202] vision of others, as he saw their various artistries and the craft of their hands. But he added little more. He summed up their essayings and advances along the development of art into a final completeness by creating a complex style that should combine all their splendours. He was the very child of the Italy of the age, which stood calculating her advance, and making an account of her achievement. He was in that measure greatly an academical- his vision was the vision of the Renaissance that created him as its collector of her significances. His genius and exquisite sensitiveness to his atmosphere made him a superb instrument.

I have said that he was receptive rather than creative, of the feminine rather than the masculine in his sensing. His portraits, whether by himself, or Viti, or Bazzi il Sodoma, or others, show him frail and delicate of feature to effeminacy. A great authority on the study of the human being as an animal, that they call by the heathenish name of anthropologist, on being handed a cast of Raphael's skull, took it to be the skull of a woman.

So did his art fitly give utterance to sweetness and grace rather than strength and dramatic power. In the frescoes of the Stanze and Loggie at the Vatican he gave forth all the greatest that was in him ; and proved himself a superb illustrator. If any painter's art was " literary " it was Raphael's ; he proved that great art has nothing to do with illustration or lack of illustration. He came into an Italy as pagan as it was Christian, and wholly neither ; but rather Italy herself essaying to see herself, but unable to hear herself for the clap-trap of the ages.

Neither a supreme colourist nor a supreme draughtsman, his craftsmanship often smudgy and nerveless, the moment he attempted to rival the majesty of Michelangelo, [203] as in his Entombment in the Borghese Gallery at Rome, he revealed his innate academic vision and lack of life-his unvirile grip of the intensity and reality of life.

Raphael is a marked contrast to Leonardo da Vinci. If Leonardo's achievement be not as great as his genius, Raphael's achievement is his fullest capacity. Raphael knew naught of the mysteries. His gifts were exactly fitted to what genius he had. He always sang in tune- the tune dominates all his work. He is the master of Grace-Grace was his god. Of the sublime he rarely gives a hint. He was incapable of terror, of sternness, of the tragic, of drama. He was the lord of Virginity. In his sedate and graceful work is no hint that the Baglioni were fighting in the streets of Perugia, no hint that the plains of Ravenna were red with blood. Raphael sees life as a May Day festival in a sumptuous church. His quality is Sweetness. He uttered not his age, but himself. A gentle, modest man, free from jealousies, obliging and kindly of habit, he bound all men to him by his blithe courtesy.

GIULIO PIPPI, better known as GIULIO ROMANO (1492-1546), whose works are often credited to his master, as in the Madonna with the Infant Christ and St. John at the National Gallery in London, developed all those qualities of decline which threatened Renaissance art even in Raphael's achievement. Going to Mantua three years after the death of Raphael, he painted the frescoes in Federigo Gonzaga's palace which are his finest works. Raphael himself had little to add to the creative development of art ; he was a mighty gleaner, with superb genius for gathering into one statement the varied activities of his forerunners. But Giulio Romano and his fellow-pupils brought no new vision to art whatsoever ; they but [204] employed the prescription that Raphael had written, and were wholly academic, which is to say decadent.

It is the habit of the literary, of those who essay to understand the significance of art from the historic or æsthetic or other theoretic attitude, as the professor and the critic, to see only in the achievement of the ages certain technical superficialities. The most pronounced and dogged conclusion, by constant reiteration now passed into an æsthetic creed, is that Raphael and Michelangelo having completed the utterance of art in Italy, Italian art fell into utter decadence.

It happened to do no such thing, as we shall see.

As a matter of fact, the academic vision which formed so large a part of Raphael's art, and which is the only real decay in art, did become the sole gift to his pupils. It is true also, though not fully recognised, that this evil, largely due to Raphael, did exert a baleful influence throughout the coming ages. The stupendous genius of Michelangelo, and the vogue which grew about the weaker art of Raphael, became a curse for centuries to all artistic endeavour-a curse compelled upon the artists by the critics and " æsthetic " writers, as I shall show. But of that more later.

We are come to the art of one who stands for all that is sublime, gigantic, stupendous in Italian art-who by the grandeur of his conception, of his design, and his mastery of the human form, for the high emotions aroused by the sense of immensity, stands head and shoulders above the whole achievement of his race-Michelangelo Buonarroti.

XXV
MICHELANGELO
"THE ENTOMBMENT"
(NATIONAL GALLERY)
This masterly work is of enormous interest to the art-world as showing the methods by which the giant of Italy wrought his undying masterpieces. The darkness of the Sistine Chapel makes it difficult to reproduce in colour the supreme works of his genius in painting.