Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 3.djvu/10

2 ing them by so much diffidence, grace, application to study, and excellence of life, that these alone would have sufficed to veil or neutralize every fault, however important, and to efface all defects however glaring they might have been. Truly may we affirm that those who are the possessors of endowments so rich and varied as were assembled in the person of Raphael, are scarcely to be called simple men only, they are rather, if it be permitted so to speak, entitled to the appellation of mortal gods; and further are we authorized to declare, that he who by means of his works has left an honoured name in the records of fame here below, may also hope to enjoy such rewards in heaven as are commensurate to and worthy of their labours and merits.

Raphael was born at Urbino, a most renowned city of Italy, on Good Friday of the year 1483, at three o'clock of the night. His father was a certain Giovanni de’ Santi, a painter of no great eminence in his art, but a man of sufficient intelligence nevertheless, and perfectly competent to direct his children into that good way which had not for his misfortune been laid open to himself in his younger days. And first, as he knew how important it is that a child should be nourished by the milk of its own mother, and not by that of the hired nurse, so he determined when his son Raphael (to whom he gave that name at his baptism, as being one of good augury) was born to him, that the mother of the child, he