of open-hearted sweetness.  To this physical beauty, rather delicate than strong, he united spiritual graces of the most amiable nature.  He was gentle, docile, modest, ready to oblige, free from jealousy, binding all men to him by his cheerful courtesy.[255] In morals he was pure.  Indeed, judged by the lax standard of those times, he might be called almost immaculate.  His intellectual capacity, in all that concerned the art of painting, was unbounded; but we cannot place him among the many-sided heroes of the Renaissance.  What he attempted in sculpture, though elegant, is comparatively insignificant; and the same may be said about his buildings.  As a painter he was capable of comprehending and expressing all things without excess or sense of labour.  Of no other artist do we feel that he was so instinctively, unerringly right in what he thought and did.

Among his mental faculties the power of assimilation seems to have been developed to an extraordinary degree.  He learned the rudiments of his art in the house of his father Santi at Urbino, where a Madonna is still shown—­the portrait of his mother, with a child, perhaps the infant Raphael, upon her lap.  Starting, soon after his father’s death, as a pupil of Perugino, he speedily acquired that master’s manner so perfectly that his earliest works are only to be distinguished from Perugino’s by their greater delicacy, spontaneity, and inventiveness.  Though he absorbed all that was excellent in the Peruginesque style, he avoided its affectations, and seemed to take departure for a higher flight from the most exquisite among his teacher’s early paintings.  Later on, while still a lad, he escaped from Umbrian conventionality by learning all that was valuable in the art of Masaccio and Fra Bartolommeo.  To the latter master, himself educated by the influence of Lionardo, Raphael owed more, perhaps, than to any other of his teachers.  The method of combining figures in masses, needful to the general composition, while they preserve a subordinate completeness of their own, had been applied with almost mathematical precision by the Frate in his fresco at S. Maria Nuova.[256] It reappears in all Raphael’s work subsequent to his first visit to Florence[257] (1504-1506).  So great, indeed, is the resemblance of treatment between the two painters that we know not well which owed the other most.  Many groups of women and children in the Stanze, for example—­especially in the “Miracle of Bolsena” and the “Heliodorus”—­seem almost identical with Fra Bartolommeo’s “Madonna della Misericordia” at Lucca.  Finally, when Raphael settled in Rome, he laid himself open to the influence of Michael Angelo, and drank in the classic spirit from the newly discovered antiques.  Here at last it seemed as though his native genius might suffer from contact with the potent style of his great rival; and there are many students of art who feel that Raphael’s later manner was a declension from the divine purity of his early pictures.