Passing from Lionardo to Raphael, we find exactly the reverse of what has hitherto been noticed.  Raphael worked out the mine of his own thought so thoroughly—­so completely exhausted the motives of his invention, and carried his style to such perfection—­that he left nothing unused for his followers.  We have seen that he formed a school of subordinates in Rome who executed his later frescoes after his designs.  Some of these men have names that can be mentioned—­Giulio Romano, of whom more hereafter; Perino del Vaga, the decorator of Genoese palaces in a style of overblown but gorgeous Raphaelism; Andrea Sabbatini, who carried the Roman tradition down to Naples; Francesco Penni, Giovanni da Udine, and Polidoro da Caravaggio.  Their work, even while superintended by Raphael himself, began to show the signs of decadence.  In his Roman manner the dramatic element was conspicuous; and to carry dramatic painting beyond the limits of good style in art is unfortunately easy.  The Hall of Constantine, left unfinished at his death, still further proved how little his pupils could do without him.[398] When Raphael died, the breath whose might sustained and made them potent, ceased.  For all the higher purposes of genuine art, inspiration passed from them as colour fades from eastern clouds at sunset, suddenly.

It has been customary to account for this rapid decline of the Roman school by referring to the sack of Rome in 1527.  No doubt the artists suffered at that moment at least as severely as the scholars; their dispersion broke up a band of eminent painters, who might in combination and competition have still achieved great things.  Yet the secret of their subsequent failure lay far deeper; partly in the full development of their master’s style, already described; and partly in the social conditions of Rome itself.  Patrons, stimulated by the example of the Popes, desired vast decorative works; but they expected these to be performed rapidly and at a cheap rate.  Painters, familiarised with the execution of such undertakings, forgot that hitherto the conception had been not theirs but Raphael’s.  Mistaking hand-work for brain-work, they audaciously accepted commissions that would have taxed the powers of the master himself.  Meanwhile moral earnestness and technical conscientiousness were both extinct.  The patrons required show and sensual magnificence far more than thought and substance.  They were not, therefore, deterred by the vacuity and poor conceptive faculty of the artists from employing them.  What the age demanded was a sumptuous parade of superficial ornament, and this the pupils of Raphael felt competent to supply without much effort.  The result was that painters who under favourable circumstances might have done some meritorious work, became mere journeymen contented with the soulless insincerity of cheap effects.  Giulio Romano alone, by dint of robust energy and lurid fire of fancy flickering amid the smoke of his coarser nature, achieved a triumph in this line of labour.  His Palazzo del Te will always remain the monument of a specific moment in Renaissance history, since it is adequate to the intellectual conditions of a race demoralised but living still with largeness and a sense of grandeur.