pect
of man and woman was not so much the form of the body as the expression
of the face. What was fantastic and weird fascinated him. At Windsor
are designs he made for the construction of an imaginary beast with
gigantic claws. He once owned a lizard, and made wings for it with
quicksilver inside them, so that they quivered when the lizard crawled.
He put a dragon's mask over its head, and the result was ghastly. The
tale gives us a side light on this extraordinary personage. When you
are led to read more about him you will feel the fascination of his
strong, yet perplexing personality. The faces in his pictures are
wonderful faces, with a fugitive mocking smile and a seeming burden
of strange thought. By mastery of the most subtle gradations of light,
his heads have an appearance of solidity new in painting, till Raphael
and some of his contemporaries learnt the secret from Leonardo.
Heretofore, Italian painters had been contented to bathe their
pictures in a flood of diffused light, but he experimented also with
effects of strong light and shade on the face. His landscape
backgrounds are an almost unearthly cold grey, and include the
strangest forms of rock and mountain. His investigations into several
of the scientific problems connected with art led to results which
affected in an important degree the work of many later artists.

If Raphael had less originality than Michelangelo or Leonardo, if
Leonardo was the first artist to obtain complete mastery over the
expression of the face and Michelangelo over the drawing of the figure,
Raphael was able to profit at once by whatever they accomplished. Yet
never was he a mere imitator, for all that he absorbed became tinged
with a magical charm in his fertile brain, a charm so personal that
his work can hardly be mistaken for that of any other artist.

Our picture of a 'Knight's Dream' was probably painted while Raphael
was under the influence of a master named Timoteo Viti, whose works
you are not likely to know, or much care about when you see them. It
was just after he had painted it that he came into Perugino's hands.

Although the 'Knight's Dream' is so small, and Raphael was but a boy
when he painted it, the picture has the true romantic air,
characteristic of the joyful years of the early Renaissance. He does
not seem to have felt the conflict between the old religious ideal
and the new pursuit of worldly beauty as Botticelli felt it. Yet he
chose the competitio