ricchio, as that painter
worked on those vast, well-lighted walls of the cathedral library at
Siena, at the great series of frescoes illustrative of the life of Pope
Pius the Second. It had been a brilliant personal history, in contact
now and again with certain remarkable public events--a career religious
yet mundane, you scarcely know which, so natural is the blending of
lights, of interest in it. How unlike the Peruginesque conception of
life in its almost perverse other-worldliness, which Raphael now leaves
behind him, but, like a true scholar, will not forget. Pinturicchio
then had invited his remarkable young friend hither, "to assist him by
his counsels," who, however, pupil-wise, after his habit also learns
much as he thus assists. He stands depicted there in person in the
scene [46] of the canonisation of Saint Catherine; and though his
actual share in the work is not to be defined, connoisseurs have felt
his intellectual presence, not at one place only, in touches at once
finer and more forcible than were usual in the steady-going, somewhat
Teutonic, Pinturicchio, Raphael's elder by thirty years. The meek
scholar you see again, with his tentative sketches and suggestions, had
more than learned his lesson; through all its changes that flexible
intelligence loses nothing; does but add continually to its store.
Henceforward Raphael will be able to tell a story in a picture, better,
with a truer economy, with surer judgment, more naturally and easily
than any one else.

And here at Siena, of all Italian towns perhaps most deeply impressed
with medieval character--an impress it still retains--grotesque,
parti-coloured--parti-coloured, so to speak, in its genius--Satanic,
yet devout of humour, as 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 cathedral library where Pinturicchio worked, stood,
as it remained till recently, unashamed there, a marble group of the
three Graces--an average Roman work in [47] effect--the sort of thing
we are used to. That, perhaps, is the only reason why for our part,
except with an effort, we find it conventional or even tame. For the
youthful Raphael, on the other hand, at that moment,