that the clothes of the Renaissance were hardly suitable for Noah and Abraham, so he invented a costume of his own, founded upon Roman dress, but different from oriental or contemporary clothes.  The Scripture illustrations of Raphael most familiar to you may probably be his cartoon designs for tapestry in the South Kensington Museum, which were bought by Charles I. In these you can see what is meant about the clothes, but you will not be surprised at them, because the same have been adopted by the majority of Bible illustrators ever since the days of Raphael.  His pictures became so popular that it was thought whatever he did must be right.  The dress was a mere detail in his work, but it was easy to copy and has been copied persistently from that day to this.  It is curious to think that the long white robes, which Christ wears in the illustrations of our present-day Sunday School books and other religious publications, are all due to imitation of Raphael’s designs.

The first room he finished for Julius II. was so rich in effect and beautiful in colour that the Pope could scarcely wait for more rooms as fine.  Raphael had to call in a large number of assistants to enable him to cover the walls fast enough to please the Pope, and the quality of the work began to deteriorate.  The uneven merit of his frescoes foretold the consequence of overwork despite his matchless facility and power.  But in his panel pictures, when he was not hurried, his work continued to improve until he reached his crowning achievement in the Sistine Madonna painted three years before his death.

Raphael was thirty-seven when he died in 1520, and very far from coming to the end of his powers of learning.  Each picture that he painted revealed to him new difficulties to conquer, and new experiments to try, in his art.  We seem compelled to think that had he lived and laboured for another score of years, the history of painting in Italy might have been different.  In Rome and Florence no successor attempted to improve upon his work.  His pupils and assistants were more numerous than those of any other painter, but when they had obtained some of his facility of drawing and painting they were contented.  None of them had Raphael’s genius, yet all wished to paint like him; so that for the following fifty years Rome and Florence and Southern Italy were flooded with inferior Raphaelesque paintings, which tended to become more slip-shod in execution as time went on, and more devoid of any personal note.  It was just as though his imitators had learnt to write beautifully and then had had little to say.