Page:St. Nicholas (serial) (IA stnicholasserial321dodg).pdf/204

130 angelo, and Titian had reached their prime, and during the long lives of these older men blossomed Raphael’s brief life of thirty-seven years.

Again we are to bring into comparison the Italian and the German art of that time. One might almost say that the difference is as wide and high as the Alps, which separate the two countries themselves, Look at the engraving pages and, and see how Woblgemuth’s picture differs from Raphael's.



The house in Urbino in which Raphael was born in 1483 still stands. His father, (or Sanzio in the Italian form), was a painter of considerable merit; so Raphael’s art education began in early childhood, and was continued through the thirty years of his life, for to the very end he was learning, He was only eight years old when his mother, Magia, died; but the father’s second wife, Bernardina, cared for him as if he had been her own son. In 1494 his father also died, leaving the boy, then eleven years old, to the care of an uncle, who, it is supposed, arranged for him to continue his studies under the painter, who was then living in Urbino, At about the age of sixteen he was sent to Perugia and entered the studio of the painter called.

The Madonna by Raphael here copied is called “degli Ansidei,” because it was painted for the rich Ansidei family, as an altar-piece to adorn the chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas of Bari, in a church at Perugia. This picture was painted when the artist was only twenty-two years old, But already the pupil had outstripped his master. The figure of St, Nicholas is nobler than anything that Perugino painted, and more full of character.

And in still another respect he had already outstripped his master—namely, in the noble serenity of the “composition,” of the grouping