it of Leo X and his two cardinals? On the other hand,
what a profusion of strong and noble men and women gaze at us from the
canvases of that time. They are a study of infinite variety and of
surpassing charm.

The secularization of art proceeded even to the length of affecting
religious painting. Susanna and Magdalen and St. Barbara and St.
Sebastian are no longer starved nuns and monks, bundled in shapeless
clothes; they become maidens and youths of marvellous beauty. Even the
Virgin and Christ were drawn from the handsomest models obtainable and
were richly clothed. This tendency, long at work, found its consummation
in Raphael Sanzio of Urbino.

[Sidenote: Raphael, 1483-1520]

It is one of those useful coincidences that seem almost symbolic that
Raphael and Luther were born in the same year, for they were both the
products of the same process--the decay of Catholicism. When, for long
ages, a forest has rotted on the ground, it may form a bed of coal, ready
to be dug up and turned into power, or it may make a field luxuriant in
grain and fruit and flowers. From the deposits of medieval religion the
miner's son of Mansfeld extracted enough energy to turn half Europe
upside down; from the same fertile swamp Raphael culled the most
exquisite {679} blossoms and the most delicious berries. To change the
metaphor, Luther was the thunder and Raphael the rainbow of the same
storm.

[Sidenote: Religious art]

The chief work of both of them was to make religion understanded of the
people; to adapt it to the needs of the time. When faith fails a man may
either abandon the old religion for another, or he may stop thinking
about dogma altogether and find solace in the mystical-aesthetic
aspect of his cult. This second alternative was worked to its limit
by Raphael. He was not concerned with the true but with the beautiful.
By far the larger part of his very numerous pictures have religious
subjects. The whole Bible--which Luther translated into the
vernacular--was by him translated into the yet clearer language of sense.
Even now most people conceive biblical characters in the forms of this
greatest of illustrators. Delicacy, pathos, spirituality, idyllic
loveliness--everything but realism or tragedy--are stamped on all his
canvases. "Beautiful as a Raphael Madonna" is an Italian proverb, and so
skilfully selected a type of beauty is there in his Virgins that they are
neither too ethereal nor too sensuous. Div