r craftsmanship, an unapproachable material
perfection. They have the same quiet, intense observation, the same
impeccable accuracy, the same preoccupation with the person before them
and with nothing else--an individuality to be presented with all it
contains, neither more nor less--to be rendered entirely, and without
flattery as without caricature. There have been portrait-painters who
were greater painters, in the more limited sense of the word, than these
two, and there has been at least one painter whose imaginative sympathy
gave an inner life to his portraits absent from theirs, but in the
essential qualities of portraiture, as distinguished from all other
forms of art, perhaps no one else has quite equalled them. One can give
no greater praise to the "Castiglione" or the "Donna Velata" than to say
that they are fit to hang beside the "Georg Gyze" or the "Christina of
Milan"; and at least one portrait by Raphael, the "Tommaso Inghirami,"
in the collection of Mrs. Gardner (Pl. 20)--the original of which the
picture in the Pitti Palace is a replica--has a beauty of surface and
of workmanship almost worthy of Holbein himself.

[Illustration: Plate 19.--Raphael. "The Sibyls."
Santa Maria della Pace, Rome.]

[Illustration: Plate 20.--Raphael. "Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami."
In the collection of Mrs. Gardner.]

Raphael's portraits alone, had he done nothing else, would justify a
great reputation, but they form so relatively small a part of his work
that they may almost be neglected in examining his claims to the rank
that used to be assigned him among the world's greatest artists. It is,
after all, his unique mastery of composition that is his chief title to
fame, and his glory must always be in proportion to the estimation in
which that quality is held. It was because composition was to him a
comparatively unimportant part of painting that Velazquez thought little
of Raphael. It is because, for them, composition, as a distinct element
of art, has almost ceased to exist that so many modern painters and
critics decry Raphael altogether. The decorators have always known that
design is the essence of their art, and therefore they have always
appreciated the greatest of designers. That is why Paul Baudry, in the
third quarter of the nineteenth century, idolized Raphael and based his
own art upon that of the great Umbrian. To-day, in our own country,
mural decoration is again becoming a living art, and the desire for the