Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 3.djvu/12

4 Francesco in that place. But when Pietro had returned to Perugia, Giovanni, who was a person of very good manners and pleasing deportment, soon formed an amicable acquaintanceship with him, and when the proper opportunity arrived, made known to him the desire he had conceived, in the most suitable maimer that he could devise. Thereupon Pietro, who was also exceedingly courteous, as well as a lover of fine genius, agreed to accept the care of Raphael; Giovanni then returned to Urbino; and having taken the boy, though not without many tears from his mother, who loved him tenderly, he conducted him to Perugia; when Pietro no sooner beheld his manner of drawing, and observed the pleasing deportment of the youth, than he conceived that opinion of him which was in due time so amply confirmed by the results produced in the after life of Raphael.

It is a well-known fact that while studying the manner of Pietro, Raphael imitated it so exactly at all points, that *his copies cannot be distinguished from the original works of the master, nor can the difference between the performances of Raphael and those of Pietro be discerned with any certainty. This is proved clearly by certain figures still to be seen in Perugia, and which the former executed in a picture painted in oil in the Church of San Francesco, for Madonna Maddalena degl’Oddi. The subject of this work is the Assumption of the Virgin, and the figures here alluded to are those of Our Lady and of the Saviour himself, who is in the act of crowning her; beneath them and around the tomb are the