with their art.  Michelangelo, a giant in intellect, painter, sculptor, architect, and poet, studied the human body as it had not been studied since the days of ancient Greece.  His sculptured figures on the tombs of the Medici in Florence rank second only to those of the greatest Greek sculptors, and his ceiling in the Sistine Chapel is composed of a series of masterpieces of figure-painting.  He devoted himself largely in his sculpture and his painting to the representation of the naked human body, and made it futile in his successors to plead ignorance as an excuse for bad drawing.  As a colourist he was not pre-eminent, and his few panel pictures are for the most part unfinished.

Leonardo da Vinci, the older contemporary of Raphael, first in Florence and afterwards in the north of Italy, left a colossal reputation and but few pictures, for in his search after perfection he became dissatisfied with what he had done and is said to have destroyed one masterpiece after another.  For him the great interest in the aspect of man and woman was not so much the form of the body as the expression of the face.  What was fantastic and weird fascinated him.  At Windsor are designs he made for the construction of an imaginary beast with gigantic claws.  He once owned a lizard, and made wings for it with quicksilver inside them, so that they quivered when the lizard crawled.  He put a dragon’s mask over its head, and the result was ghastly.  The tale gives us a side light on this extraordinary personage.  When you are led to read more about him you will feel the fascination of his strong, yet perplexing personality.  The faces in his pictures are wonderful faces, with a fugitive mocking smile and a seeming burden of strange thought.  By mastery of the most subtle gradations of light, his heads have an appearance of solidity new in painting, till Raphael and some of his contemporaries learnt the secret from Leonardo.  Heretofore, Italian painters had been contented to bathe their pictures in a flood of diffused light, but he experimented also with effects of strong light and shade on the face.  His landscape backgrounds are an almost unearthly cold grey, and include the strangest forms of rock and mountain.  His investigations into several of the scientific problems connected with art led to results which affected in an important degree the work of many later artists.

If Raphael had less originality than Michelangelo or Leonardo, if Leonardo was the first artist to obtain complete mastery over the expression of the face and Michelangelo over the drawing of the figure, Raphael was able to profit at once by whatever they accomplished.  Yet never was he a mere imitator, for all that he absorbed became tinged with a magical charm in his fertile brain, a charm so personal that his work can hardly be mistaken for that of any other artist.

Our picture of a ‘Knight’s Dream’ was probably painted while Raphael was under the influence of a master named Timoteo Viti, whose works you are not likely to know, or much care about when you see them.  It was just after he had painted it that he came into Perugino’s hands.