deal with it, there is an immediate improvement
upon the model, and the appearance of truthfulness goes. Between the
absolute incapacity for dealing with ugliness of Michael Angelo, and the
power of compromising with it of Titian and Tintoret, Raphael stands
half-way: he can call in the assistance of colour just sufficiently to
create a setting of carefully harmonized draperies and accessories,
beautiful enough to allow of his filling it up with the most cruelly
ugly likeness which any painter ever painted. Far too much has been
written about Raphael in general, but not half enough about Raphael as a
portrait-painter; for by the side of the eclectic idealist, who combined
and balanced beauty almost into insipidity, is the most terribly,
inflexibly veracious portrait-painter that ever was. Compared with those
sternly straightforward portraits of his Florentine and Roman time,
where ugliness and baseness are never attenuated by one tittle, and
alloyed nobility or amiability, as with his finer models, like the two
Donis, husband and wife, and Bibbiena, is never purified of its
troubling element; compared with them the Venetian portraits are mere
insincere, enormously idealized pieces of colour-harmony; nay, the
portraits of Velasquez are mere hints--given rapidly by a sickened
painter striving to make those scrofulous Hapsburgs no longer mere men,
but keynotes of harmonies of light--of what the people really are. For
Velasquez seems to show us the temperament, the potentiality of his
people, and to leave us, with a kind of dignified and melancholy silence
as to all further, to find out what life, what feelings and actions,
such a temperament implies. But Raphael shows us all: the temperament
and the character, the real active creature, with all the marks of his
present temper and habits, with all the indications of his immediate
actions upon him: completely without humour or bitterness, without the
smallest tendency to twist the reality into caricature or monstrosity,
nay, perhaps without much psychologic analysis to tell him the exact
meaning of what he is painting, going straight to the point, and utterly
ruthless from sheer absence of all alternative of doing otherwise than
he does. There is nothing more cruelly realistic in the world, cruel not
only to the base originals but to the feelings of the spectator, than
the harmony of villainies, of various combinations of black and hog-like
bestiality, and fox and wolf-like cu