When, furthermore, we take into account the variety of Raphael’s work, we arrive at a new point of wonder.  The drawing of “Alexander’s Marriage with Roxana,” the “Temptation of Adam by Eve,” and the “Massacre of the Innocents,” engraved by Marc Antonio, are unsurpassed not only as compositions, but also as studies of the nude in chosen attitudes, powerfully felt and nobly executed.  In these designs, which he never used for painting, the same high style is successively applied to a pageant, an idyll, and a drama.[259] The rapture of Greek art in its most youthful moment has never been recaptured by a modern painter with more force and fire of fancy than in the “Galatea.”  The tenderness of Christian feeling has found no more exalted expression than in the multitudes of the Madonnas, one more lovely than another, like roses on a tree in June, from the maidenly “Madonna del Gran’ Duca” to the celestial vision of the San Sisto, that sublimest lyric of the art of Catholicity.[260] It is only by hurrying through a list like this that we can appreciate the many-sided perfection of Raphael’s accomplishment.  How, lastly, was it possible that this young painter should have found the time to superintend the building of S. Peter’s, and to form a plan for excavating Rome in its twelve ancient regions?[261]

When Lomazzo assigned emblems to the chief painters of the Renaissance, he gave to Michael Angelo the dragon of contemplation, and to Mantegna the serpent of sagacity.  For Raphael, by a happier instinct, he reserved man, the microcosm, the symbol of powerful grace, incarnate intellect.  This quaint fancy of the Milanese critic touches the truth.  What distinguishes the whole work of Raphael, is its humanity in the double sense of the humane and human.  Phoebus, as imagined by the Greeks, was not more radiant, more victorious by the marvel of his smile, more intolerant of things obscene or ugly.  Like Apollo chasing the Eumenides from his Delphian shrine, Raphael will not suffer his eyes to fall on what is loathsome or horrific.  Even sadness and sorrow, tragedy and death, take loveliness from him.  And here it must be mentioned that he shunned stern and painful subjects.  He painted no martyrdom, no “Last Judgment,” and no “Crucifixion,” if we except the little early picture belonging to Lord Dudley.[262] His men and women are either glorious with youth or dignified in hale old age.  Touched by his innocent and earnest genius, mankind is once more gifted with the harmony of intellect and flesh and feeling, that belonged to Hellas.  Instead of asceticism, Hellenic temperance is the virtue prized by Raphael.  Over his niche in the Temple of Fame might be written:  “I have said ye are gods;”—­for the children of men in his ideal world are divinized.  The godlike spirit of man is all in all.  Happy indeed was the art that by its limitations and selections could thus early express the good news of the Renaissance; while in the spheres of politics and ethics, science and religion, we are still far from having learned its lesson.