rather
delicate than strong, he united spiritual graces of the most amiable
nature. He was gentle, docile, modest, ready to oblige, free from
jealousy, binding all men to him by his cheerful courtesy.[255] In morals
he was pure. Indeed, judged by the lax standard of those times, he might
be called almost immaculate. His intellectual capacity, in all that
concerned the art of painting, was unbounded; but we cannot place him
among the many-sided heroes of the Renaissance. What he attempted in
sculpture, though elegant, is comparatively insignificant; and the same
may be said about his buildings. As a painter he was capable of
comprehending and expressing all things without excess or sense of labour.
Of no other artist do we feel that he was so instinctively, unerringly
right in what he thought and did.

Among his mental faculties the power of assimilation seems to have been
developed to an extraordinary degree. He learned the rudiments of his art
in the house of his father Santi at Urbino, where a Madonna is still
shown--the portrait of his mother, with a child, perhaps the infant
Raphael, upon her lap. Starting, soon after his father's death, as a pupil
of Perugino, he speedily acquired that master's manner so perfectly that
his earliest works are only to be distinguished from Perugino's by their
greater delicacy, spontaneity, and inventiveness. Though he absorbed all
that was excellent in the Peruginesque style, he avoided its affectations,
and seemed to take departure for a higher flight from the most exquisite
among his teacher's early paintings. Later on, while still a lad, he
escaped from Umbrian conventionality by learning all that was valuable in
the art of Masaccio and Fra Bartolommeo. To the latter master, himself
educated by the influence of Lionardo, Raphael owed more, perhaps, than to
any other of his teachers. The method of combining figures in masses,
needful to the general composition, while they preserve a subordinate
completeness of their own, had been applied with almost mathematical
precision by the Frate in his fresco at S. Maria Nuova.[256] It reappears
in all Raphael's work subsequent to his first visit to Florence[257]
(1504-1506). So great, indeed, is the resemblance of treatment between the
two painters that we know not well which owed the other most. Many groups
of women and children in the Stanze, for example--especially in the
"Miracle of Bolsena" and the "Heliodorus"--seem almost identical wi