d well-beloved friend
of many of the most powerful artistic personalities of his own or any
age, the way was already prepared along which he moved in
triumphant progress. The life of Raphael as an artist extends through
three well-defined periods, the Umbrian, the Florentine, and the
Roman, each one of which contributed a distinctive influence upon
his development and witnessed a special and characteristic
achievement.

To his father, who died when the boy was eleven years old, Raphael
owed his poetic nature, scholarly tastes, and love of beauty, though
he probably received from him no training as a painter. His first
master was Timoteo Viti of Urbino, a pupil of Francia; from him he
learned drawing and acquired a "certain predilection for round and
opulent forms which is in itself the negation of the ascetic ideal." At
the age of seventeen he went from Urbino to Perugia; there he
entered the workshop of Perugino as an assistant. The ideal of the
Umbrian school was tenderness and sweetness, the outward and
visible rapture of pietistic feeling; something of these qualities
Raphael expressed in his Madonnas throughout his career. Under the
teaching of Perugino he laid hold on the principles of "space
composition" which he was afterwards to carry to supreme
perfection.

From Perugia the young Raphael made his way to Florence, and
here he underwent many influences. At that moment Florence was
the capital city of Italian culture. It was here that the new humanism
had come to finest flower. Scholarship was the fashion; art was the
chief interest of this beauty-loving people. It was the Florentines
who had carried the scientific principles of painting to their highest
point of development, particularly in their application to the
rendering of the human figure. In Florence were collected the art
treasures of the splendid century; here Michelangelo and Leonardo
were at work; here were gathered companies of lesser men. By the
study of Masaccio Raphael was led out to a fresh contact with nature.
Fra Bartolomeo revealed to him further possibilities of composition
and taught him some of the secrets of color. In Florence, too, he
acknowledged the spell of Michelangelo and Leonardo. But though
he learned from many teachers, Raphael was never merely an
imitator. His scholarship and his skill he turned to his own uses; and
when we have traced the sources of his motives and the influences
in the moulding of his manner, there emerges