antiquity, as with
"the dew of herbs," seemed therein "to awake and sing" out of the dust,
in all its sincerity, its cheerfulness and natural charm. He has
turned it into a picture; has helped to make his original only too
familiar, perhaps, placing the three sisters against his own favourite,
so unclassic, Umbrian background indeed, but with no trace of the
Peruginesque ascetic, Gothic meagreness in themselves; emphasising
rather, with a hearty acceptance, the nude, the flesh; making the
limbs, in fact, a little heavy. It was but one gleam he had caught
just there in medieval Siena of that large pagan world he was, not so
long afterwards, more completely than others to make his own. And when
somewhat later he painted the exquisite, still Peruginesque, Apollo and
Marsyas, semi-medieval habits again asserted themselves with
delightfully blent effects. It might almost pass for a parable--that
little picture in the Louvre--of the contention between classic art and
the romantic, superseded in the person of Marsyas, a homely, quaintly
poetical young monk, surely! Only, Apollo himself also is clearly of
the same brotherhood; has a touch, in truth, of Heine's fancied Apollo
"in exile," who, Christianity now triumphing, has served as [48] a
hired shepherd, or hidden himself under the cowl in a cloister; and
Raphael, as if at work on choir-book or missal, still applies
symbolical gilding for natural sunlight. It is as if he wished to
proclaim amid newer lights--this scholar who never forgot a lesson--his
loyal pupilage to Perugino, and retained still something of medieval
stiffness, of the monastic thoughts also, that were born and lingered
in places like Borgo San Sepolcro or Citta di Castello. Chef-d'oeuvre!
you might exclaim, of the peculiar, tremulous, half-convinced, monkish
treatment of that after all damnable pagan world. And our own
generation certainly, with kindred tastes, loving or wishing to love
pagan art as sincerely as did the people of the Renaissance, and
medieval art as well, would accept, of course, of work conceived in
that so seductively mixed manner, ten per cent of even Raphael's later,
purely classical presentments.

That picture was suggested by a fine old intaglio in the Medicean
collection at Florence, was painted, therefore, after Raphael's coming
thither, and therefore also a survival with him of a style limited,
immature, literally provincial; for in the phase on which he had now
entered he i