phael is the full-blown flower and final fruit, complete, mature.
The step beyond is decay.

By reference to Giotto and to Raphael I have tried to illustrate the
practical application of certain principles of art study. A work of art
is not absolute; both its content and its form are determined by the
conditions out of which it proceeds. All judgment, therefore, must
be comparative, and a work of art must be considered in its relation
to its background and its conventions. Art is an interpretation of
some aspect of life as the artist has felt it; and the artist is a child of
his time. It is not an accident that Raphael portrayed Madonnas,
serene and glorified, and Millet pictured rude peasants bent with toil.
Raphael's painting is the culmination of two centuries of eager
striving after the adequate expression of religious sentiment; in
Millet's work the realism of his age is transfigured. As showing
further how national ideals and interests may influence individual
production, we may note that the characteristic art of the Italian
Renaissance is painting; and Italian sculpture of the period is
pictorial rather than plastic in motive and handling. Ghiberti's doors
of the Florence Baptistery, in the grouping of figures and the three
and four planes in perspective of the backgrounds, are essentially
pictures in bronze. Conversely, in the North the characteristic art of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is carving and sculpture; and
"the early painters represented in their pictures what they were
familiar with in wood and stone; so that not only are the figures dry
and hard, but in the groups they are packed one behind another,
heads above heads, without really occupying space, in imitation of
the method adopted in the carved relief." Some knowledge of the
origin and development of a given form of technique, a knowledge
to be reached through historical study, enables us to measure the
degree of expressiveness of a given work. The ideas of a child may
be very well worth listening to, though his range of words is limited
and his sentences are crude and halting, A grown man, having
acquired the trick of language, may talk fluently and say nothing. In
our endeavor to understand a work of art, a poem by Chaucer or by
Tennyson, a picture by Greco or by Manet, a prelude by Bach or a
symphony by Brahms, we may ask, Of that which the artist wanted
to say, how much could he say with the means at his disposal? With
a sense of