s we leave Perugia in Raphael's company, had been suggested
by the famous mystic treasure of its cathedral church, the marriage
ring of the Blessed Virgin herself.

Raphael's copy had been made for the little old Apennine town of Citta
di Castello; and another place he visits at this time is still more
[44] effective in the development of his genius. About his twentieth
year he comes to Siena--that other rocky Titan's hand, just lifted out
of the surface of the plain. It is the most grandiose place he has yet
seen; it has not forgotten that it was once the rival of Florence; and
here the patient scholar passes under an influence of somewhat larger
scope than Perugino's. Perugino's pictures are for the most part
religious contemplations, painted and made visible, to accompany the
action of divine service--a visible pattern to priests, attendants,
worshippers, of what the course of their invisible thoughts should be
at those holy functions. Learning in the workshop of Perugino to
produce the like--such works as the Ansidei Madonna--to produce them
very much better than his master, Raphael was already become a freeman
of the most strictly religious school of Italian art, the so devout
Umbrian soul finding there its purest expression, still untroubled by
the naturalism, the intellectualism, the antique paganism, then astir
in the artistic soul everywhere else in Italy. The lovely work of
Perugino, very lovely at its best, of the early Raphael also, is in
fact "conservative," and at various points slightly behind its day,
though not unpleasantly. In Perugino's allegoric frescoes of the
Cambio, the Hall of the Money-changers, for instance, under the mystic
rule of the Planets in person, pagan personages take their place indeed
side by side with the figures of the New [45] Testament, but are no
Romans or Greeks, neither are the Jews Jews, nor is any one of them,
warrior, sage, king, precisely of Perugino's own time and place, but
still contemplations only, after the manner of the personages in his
church-work; or, say, dreams--monastic dreams--thin, do-nothing
creatures, conjured from sky and cloud. Perugino clearly never broke
through the meditative circle of the Middle Age.

Now Raphael, on the other hand, in his final period at Rome, exhibits a
wonderful narrative power in painting; and the secret of that
power--the power of developing a story in a picture, or series of
pictures--may be traced back from him to Pintu