ater range in gradated color, and reinforcing the increased
knowledge of light and shade, aided in the evolution of decoration
into the "easel picture," complete in itself. Released from its
subjection to architecture, increasing its technical resources, and
widening its interests in the matter of subject so as to include all life,
painting becomes an independent and self-sufficing art.

Coincident with the development of painting as a craft, a mighty
change was working itself out in the national ideals and in men's
ways of thought and feeling. Already in Giotto's time the spirit of
individualism had begun to assert itself in reaction from the
dominance of an all-powerful restrictive ecclesiasticism, but the age
was still essentially pietistic and according to its lights, religious.
The fifteenth century witnessed the emancipation from tradition.
The new humanism, which took its rise with the rediscovery of
Greek culture, extended the intellectual horizon and intensified the
enthusiasm for beauty. Men's interest in life was no longer narrowly
religious, but human; their art became the expression of the new
spirit. Early Christianity had been ascetic, enjoining negation of life
and the mortification of the flesh. The men of the Renaissance, with
something of the feeling of the elder Greeks, glorified the body and
delighted in the pride of life. Pagan myths and Greek legends take
their place alongside of Bible episodes and stories of saints and
martyrs, as subjects of representation; all served equally as motives
for the expression of the artist's sense of the beauty of this world.

To this new culture and to these two centuries of growth and
accomplishment in the practice of painting Raphael was heir. With a
knowledge of the background out of which he emerges, we are
prepared now to understand and appreciate his individual
achievement. In approaching the study of his work we may ask,
What is in general his ideal, his dominant motive, and in what
manner and by what means has he realized his ideal?

How much was already prepared for him, what does he owe to the
age and the conditions in which he worked, and what to the common
store has he added that is peculiarly his own?

Whereas Giotto, the shepherd boy, was a pioneer, almost solitary, by
sheer force of mind and by his sincerity and intensity of feeling
breaking new paths to expression, for Raphael, on the contrary, the
son of a painter and poet, the fellow-worker an