is earlier and
more delicate manner, so full of charm and a sort of daintiness, one
must go to Lucca, where his picture of Madonna with St. Stephen and St.
John Baptist hangs in the Duomo. The grand and almost pompous works in
Florence, splendid though they may be in painting, in composition, in
colour, scarcely move us at all, so that it might almost seem that in
following Savonarola he lost not the world only but his art also, that
refined and delicate art which comes to us so gently in his earliest
pictures. Something passionate and pathetic, truly, may be found in the
Pieta here, together with a certain dramatic effectiveness that is rare
in his work. With what an effort, for instance, has St. John lifted the
body of his Master from the great cross in the background, how
passionately Mary Magdalen has flung herself at His feet; yet the
picture seems to be without any real significance, without spirituality
certainly, only another colossal group of figures that even Michelangelo
has refused to carve.

[Illustration: PIETA

_By Fra Bartolomeo. Pitti Gallery_

_Anderson_]

On coming to the work of Raphael, to the work of Titian, we find the
great treasure of the Pitti Gallery, beside which the rest is but a
background: it is for them really, after all, that we have come here.

Raphael Sanzio, the "most beloved name in the history of painting," was
born at Urbino in 1483. The pupil first of his father maybe, though
Giovanni died when his son was but eleven years old, and later of
Timoteo Viti, we hear of Raphael first in the bottega of the greatest of
the Umbrian painters, Perugino, at Perugia. Two works of Perugino hang
to-day in the Pitti Gallery, the Madonna and Child (219) and the
Entombment (164), painted in 1495, for the nuns of S. Chiara. Vasari has
much to say of the latter, relating how Francesco del Pugliare offered
to give them three times as much as they had paid Perugino for the
picture, and to cause another exactly like it to be executed for them by
the same hand; but they would not consent, because Pietro had told them
he did not think he could equal the one they possessed. It is really
Umbria itself we see in that lovely work, which has impressed
Bartolommeo so profoundly, the Lake of Trasimeno, surrounded by villages
that climb the hills just as Perugino has painted the little city in
this picture. And it is in this mystical and smiling country, where the
light is so soft and tender, softer than o