to have been as lovely as his gifts were
great, and he passed his short life in a triumphant progress from city
to city and court to court, always working hard and always painting
so beautifully that he won the admiration of artists, princes, and
popes. His father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter living in the town
of Urbino, in Central Italy, but Raphael when quite young went to
Perugia to study with the painter Perugino, a native of that town.

Perugia stands upon a high hill, like the hill in the background of
the picture of the 'Knight's Dream,' only higher, for from it you can
overlook the wide Umbrian plain as far as Assisi--the home of St.
Francis--which lies on the slope of the next mountain. That beautiful
Umbrian landscape, in which all the towns look like castles perched
upon the top of steep hills, with wide undulating ground between,
occurs frequently in the pictures of Perugino, and often in those of
his pupil Raphael. If you have once seen the view from Perugia for
yourself, you will realize how strongly it took hold of the imagination
of the young painter. Raphael had a most impressionable mind. It was
part of his genius that, from every painter with whom he came in contact
he imbibed the best, almost without knowing it. The artists of his
day, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the other great men, were
each severally employed in working out once and for all some particular
problem in connection with their art. Michelangelo, a giant in
intellect, painter, sculptor, architect, and poet, studied the human
body as it had not been studied since the days of ancient Greece. His
sculptured figures on the tombs of the Medici in Florence rank second
only to those of the greatest Greek sculptors, and his ceiling in the
Sistine Chapel is composed of a series of masterpieces of
figure-painting. He devoted himself largely in his sculpture and his
painting to the representation of the naked human body, and made it
futile in his successors to plead ignorance as an excuse for bad drawing.
As a colourist he was not pre-eminent, and his few panel pictures are
for the most part unfinished.

Leonardo da Vinci, the older contemporary of Raphael, first in Florence
and afterwards in the north of Italy, left a colossal reputation and
but few pictures, for in his search after perfection he became
dissatisfied with what he had done and is said to have destroyed one
masterpiece after another. For him the great interest in the as