arded this system and placed in
the pendentives of the Sistine his colossal figures of the Prophets and
the Sibyls, each on its architectural throne. It was reserved for
Raphael to take a step that no earlier painter could have dreamed of and
to fill these triangular spaces with free groups relieved against a
clear sky which is the continuous background of the whole series. One
may easily think the earlier system more architecturally fitting, but
the skill with which these groups are composed, their perfect
naturalness, their exhaustless variety, the perfection with which they
fill these awkward shapes, as it were inevitably and without effort, is
nothing short of amazing. It is decoration of a festal and informal
order--the decoration of a kind of summer house, fitted for pleasure,
rather than of a stately chamber--but it is decoration the most
consummate, the fitting last word of the greatest master of decorative
design that the world has seen.

[Illustration: Plate 18.--Raphael. "The Deliverance of Peter."
In the Vatican.]

It is this master designer that is the real Raphael, and, but for the
element of design always present in the least of his works, the charming
illustrator, the mere "painter of Madonnas," might be allowed to sink
comfortably into artistic oblivion without cause for protest. But there
is another Raphael we could spare less easily, Raphael the
portrait-painter. The great decorators have nearly always been great
portrait-painters as well, although--perhaps because--there is little
resemblance between the manner of feeling and working necessary for
success in the two arts. The decorator, constantly occupied with
relations of line and space which have little to do with imitation,
finds in the submissive attention to external fact necessary to success
in portraiture a source of refreshment and of that renewed contact with
nature which is constantly necessary to art if it is not to become too
arid an abstraction. Certainly it was so with Raphael, and the master of
design has left us a series of portraits comparable only to those of
that other great designer whose fate was to leave little but portraits
behind him, Hans Holbein. Allowing for the necessary variation of type
and costume in their models and for the difference between an Italian
and a northern education, their methods are singularly alike. Raphael
has greater elegance and feeling for style, Holbein a richer color sense
and, above all, a fine