This magnificent design was engraved during Buonarroti’s lifetime, or shortly afterwards, by Niccolo Beatrizet.  Some follower of Raffaello used the print for a fresco in the Palazzo Borghese at Rome.  It forms one of the series in which Raffaello’s marriage of Alexander and Roxana is painted.  This has led some critics to ascribe the drawing itself to the Urbinate.  Indeed, at first sight, one might almost conjecture that the original chalk study was a genuine work of Raffaello, aiming at rivalry with Michelangelo’s manner.  The calm beauty of the statue’s classic profile, the refinement of all the faces, the exquisite delicacy of the adolescent forms, and the dominant veiling of strength with grace, are not precisely Michelangelesque.  The technical execution of the design, however, makes its attribution certain.  Well as Raffaello could draw, he could not draw like this.  He was incapable of rounding and modelling the nude with those soft stipplings and granulated shadings which bring the whole surface out like that of a bas-relief in polished marble.  His own drawing for Alexander and Roxana, in red chalk, and therefore an excellent subject for comparison with the Arcieri, is hatched all over in straight lines; a method adopted by Michelangelo when working with the pen, but, so far as I am aware, never, or very rarely, used when he was handling chalk.  The style of this design and its exquisite workmanship correspond exactly with the finish of the Cavalieri series at Windsor.  The paper, moreover, is indorsed in Michelangelo’s handwriting with a memorandum bearing the date April 12, 1530.  We have then in this masterpiece of draughtsmanship an example, not of Raffaello in a Michelangelising mood, but of Michelangelo for once condescending to surpass Raffaello on his own ground of loveliness and rhythmic grace.

CHAPTER VII

I

Julius died upon the 21st of February 1513.  “A prince,” says Guicciardini, “of inestimable courage and tenacity, but headlong, and so extravagant in the schemes he formed, that his own prudence and moderation had less to do with shielding him from ruin than the discord of sovereigns and the circumstances of the times in Europe:  worthy, in all truth, of the highest glory had he been a secular potentate, or if the pains and anxious thought he employed in augmenting the temporal greatness of the Church by war had been devoted to her spiritual welfare in the arts of peace.”

Italy rejoiced when Giovanni de’ Medici was selected to succeed him, with the title of Leo X.  “Venus ruled in Rome with Alexander, Mars with Julius, now Pallas enters on her reign with Leo.”  Such was the tenor of the epigrams which greeted Leo upon his triumphal progress to the Lateran.  It was felt that a Pope of the house of Medici would be a patron of arts and letters, and it was hoped that the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent might restore the