was to leave little but portraits behind him, Hans Holbein.  Allowing for the necessary variation of type and costume in their models and for the difference between an Italian and a northern education, their methods are singularly alike.  Raphael has greater elegance and feeling for style, Holbein a richer color sense and, above all, a finer craftsmanship, an unapproachable material perfection.  They have the same quiet, intense observation, the same impeccable accuracy, the same preoccupation with the person before them and with nothing else—­an individuality to be presented with all it contains, neither more nor less—­to be rendered entirely, and without flattery as without caricature.  There have been portrait-painters who were greater painters, in the more limited sense of the word, than these two, and there has been at least one painter whose imaginative sympathy gave an inner life to his portraits absent from theirs, but in the essential qualities of portraiture, as distinguished from all other forms of art, perhaps no one else has quite equalled them.  One can give no greater praise to the “Castiglione” or the “Donna Velata” than to say that they are fit to hang beside the “Georg Gyze” or the “Christina of Milan”; and at least one portrait by Raphael, the “Tommaso Inghirami,” in the collection of Mrs. Gardner (Pl. 20)—­the original of which the picture in the Pitti Palace is a replica—­has a beauty of surface and of workmanship almost worthy of Holbein himself.

[Illustration:  Plate 19.—­Raphael.  “The Sibyls.”  Santa Maria della Pace, Rome.]

[Illustration:  Plate 20.—­Raphael.  “Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami.”  In the collection of Mrs. Gardner.]

Raphael’s portraits alone, had he done nothing else, would justify a great reputation, but they form so relatively small a part of his work that they may almost be neglected in examining his claims to the rank that used to be assigned him among the world’s greatest artists.  It is, after all, his unique mastery of composition that is his chief title to fame, and his glory must always be in proportion to the estimation in which that quality is held.  It was because composition was to him a comparatively unimportant part of painting that Velazquez thought little of Raphael.  It is because, for them, composition, as a distinct element of art, has almost ceased to exist that so many modern painters and critics decry Raphael altogether.  The decorators have always known that design is the essence of their art, and therefore they have always appreciated the greatest of designers.  That is why Paul Baudry, in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, idolized Raphael and based his own art upon that of the great Umbrian.  To-day, in our own country, mural decoration is again becoming a living art, and the desire for the appropriate decoration of important buildings with monumental works of painting is more wide-spread, perhaps, than it has been anywhere at any time since the Italian Renaissance.  So surely as the interest in decorative painting and the knowledge of its true principles become more widely spread, so surely will the name of Raphael begin to shine again with something of its ancient splendor.