ther score of years, the history of painting in Italy
might have been different. In Rome and Florence no successor attempted
to improve upon his work. His pupils and assistants were more numerous
than those of any other painter, but when they had obtained some of
his facility of drawing and painting they were contented. None of them
had Raphael's genius, yet all wished to paint like him; so that for
the following fifty years Rome and Florence and Southern Italy were
flooded with inferior Raphaelesque paintings, which tended to become
more slip-shod in execution as time went on, and more devoid of any
personal note. It was just as though his imitators had learnt to write
beautifully and then had had little to say.

Leonardo da Vinci died a few months before Raphael. Several of his
pupils were artists of ability, and lived to carry on his traditions
of painting in the north of Italy. Leonardo himself had been so erratic,
produced so little, and so few of his pictures survive, that many know
him best in his pupils' work, or through copies and engravings of his
great 'Last Supper'--a picture that became an almost total wreck upon
the walls of the Refectory in Milan, for which it was painted. His
influence upon his contemporaries at Milan was very great, so that
during some years hardly a picture was painted there which did not
show a likeness to the work of Leonardo. He had created a type of female
beauty all his own. The face will impress itself upon your memory the
first time you see it, whether in a picture by Leonardo or in one by
a pupil. You can see it in the National Gallery in the great 'Madonna
of the Rocks,' and in the magnificent drawing at Burlington House.
It is not a very beautiful face, but it haunts the memory, and the
Milanese artists of Leonardo's day never threw off their recollection
of it.

With far less power than Leonardo, one of his imitators, Bernardino
Luini, painted pictures of such charm and simplicity that almost
everyone finds them delightful. If you could see his picture of the
angels bearing St. Catherine, robed in red, through the air to her
last resting-place upon the hill, you would feel the beauty and peace
of his gentle nature revealed in his art. But the spell of Leonardo
vanished with the death of those who had known him in life. The last
of his pupils died in 1550, and with him the Leonardo school of painting
came to an end.

There is one more painter belonging to the full Renaissa