r set purpose of pictorial
effect, and have gone with little change into his painted backgrounds.
In the midst of it, on titanic old Roman and Etruscan foundations, the
later Gothic town had piled itself along the lines of a gigantic land
of rock, stretched out from the last slope of the Apennines into the
plain. Between its fingers steep dark lanes wind down into the olive
gardens; on the finger-tips military and monastic builders had perched
their towns. A place as fantastic in its attractiveness as the human
life which then surged up and down in it in contrast to the peaceful
scene around. The Baglioni who ruled there had brought certain
tendencies of that age to a typical completeness of expression, veiling
crime--crime, it might seem, for its own sake, a whole octave of
fantastic crime--not merely under brilliant fashions and comely
persons, but under fashions and persons, an outward presentment of life
and of themselves, which had a kind of immaculate grace and discretion
about them, as if Raphael himself had already brought his unerring gift
of selection to bear upon it all for motives of art. With life in
those streets of Perugia, as with nature, with the work of his masters,
with the mere exercises of his fellow-students, his hand rearranges,
refines, renews, as if by simple contact; [43] but it is met here
half-way in its renewing office by some special aptitude for such grace
in the subject itself. Seemingly innocent, full of natural gaiety,
eternally youthful, those seven and more deadly sins, embodied and
attired in just the jaunty dress then worn, enter now and afterwards as
spectators, or assistants, into many a sacred foreground and background
among the friends and kinsmen of the Holy Family, among the very
angels, gazing, conversing, standing firmly and unashamed. During his
apprenticeship at Perugia Raphael visited and left his work in more
modest places round about, along those seductive mountain or lowland
roads, and copied for one of them Perugino's "Marriage of the Virgin"
significantly, did it by many degrees better, with a very novel effect
of motion everywhere, and with that grace which natural motion evokes,
introducing for a temple in the background a lovely bit of his friend
Bramante's sort of architecture, the true Renaissance or perfected
Quattro-cento architecture. He goes on building a whole lordly new
city of the like as he paints to the end of his life. The subject, we
may note, a