title="original text has carresses">caresses gently. The Madonna has the drooping eyes, the exquisitely rounded face that always charm us, and the boys are real live children ready for a frolic. Another, called “The Madonna of the Meadow,” represents the Virgin in the foreground of a gently broken landscape with the two children playing beside her. We must not forget, either, as belonging to this time, the very beautiful “La Belle Jardiniere,” or the “Madonna of the Garden ” which now hangs in the Louvre, the art gallery of Paris.

Like all his great Madonnas, the Virgin and Children are of surpassing loveliness. It is finished in such a soft, melting style that to see it in its exquisite coloring, one could easily imagine it vanishing imperceptibly into the blaze of some splendid sunset. While we are talking of Raphael’s color it may be interesting to call your attention to a very remarkable fact about his paintings. He lays the color on the canvas so thin that sometimes one can trace through it the lines of the drawing, and yet his color is so pure and beautiful that he is considered one of the greatest colorists of the world. The next time you see an oil painting, notice how thick or how thin the paint is laid on, and then think of what I have told you of Raphael’s method of using color.

LA BELLE JARDINIERE.
Raphael.

Now while Raphael was painting these drooping-eyed, mild-faced Madonnas and learning great lessons from the masters of Florence, a wonderful honor came to him. He was called to Rome by the Pope and given some of the apartments of the Vatican to decorate in any way he wished.

The Pope at this time was Julius II. and he was a very interesting man. He was a warrior and had spent many years fighting to gain lands and cities for the Church. When peace returned he was still anxious to do honor to the Church and so, wherever he heard of a great architect, painter, or sculptor, he at once invited him to Rome to do beautiful work for the Church. Already he had set Michael Angelo to work on a grand tomb for him. Bramante, a relative of Raphael’s, was working hard to make St. Peter’s the most wonderful Church in all the world. Now the young Raphael was to beautify still further the buildings belonging to the church.

Julius did not pretend to be an artist or a scholar, and yet by his patronage he greatly encouraged art and literature. The story is told that when Angelo was making a statue of the Pope for the town of Bologna, the artist asked Julius if he should place a book in the statue’s extended left hand, and the Pope retorted, almost in anger, “What book? Rather a sword—I am no reader!”

In earlier years Florence had been a glorious sight to our artist and now in 1508, standing in the “Eternal City,” he was more awed than when first he beheld the city of the Arno. Here the court of Julius, gorgeous and powerful, together with the works of art, like St. Peter’s, in process of construction, were but a part of the wonders to be seen. In addition, the remains of ancient Rome were scattered all about—here a row of columns, the only remains of a grand temple, there a broken statue of some god or goddess, long lost to sight, and all the earth about so filled with these treasures that one had only to dig to find some hidden work of art. The Roman people, too, were awake to the fact that they were not only living out a marvelous present, but that they were likewise, in their every day life, walking ever in the presence of a still more wonderful past. I wish, while you are thinking about this, that you would get a picture of the Roman Forum and notice its groups of columns, its triumphal arches, its ruined walls. You will then certainly appreciate more fully what Raphael felt as he went about this city of historic ruins.

MADONNA OF THE FISH.
Raphael.

The Pope received the young artist cordially and at once gave him the vast commission of painting in fresco three large rooms, or stanze, of the Vatican. In addition, he was to decorate the gallery, or corridor, called the loggia, leading to these apartments from the stairway. With the painting of these walls Raphael and his pupils were more or less busy during the remainder of the artist’s short life. A great many religious and historic subjects were used, besides some invented by Raphael himself, as when he represented Poetry by Mount Parnassus inhabited by all the great poets past and present. In these rooms some of his best work is done. Every year thousands of people go to see these pictures and come away more than ever enraptured with Raphael and his work.

In the loggia are the paintings known collectively as Raphael’s Bible. Of the fifty-two pictures in the thirteen arcades of this corridor all but four represent Old Testament scenes. The others are taken from the New Testament. Although Raphael’s pupils assisted largely in these frescoes they are very beautiful and will always rank high among the art works of the time.

Raphael’s works seem almost perfect even from the beginning, yet he was always studying to get the great points in the work of others and to perfect his own. Perhaps this is the best lesson we may learn from his intellectual life—the lesson of unending study and assimilation. He was greatly interested in the ruins of Rome and we know that he studied them deeply and carefully. This is very evident in the Madonnas of his Roman period. They have a strength and a power to make one think great thoughts that is not so marked in the pictures of his Florentine period.

THE ARCHANGEL.
Detail from Madonna of the Fish. Raphael.

The “Madonna of the Fish ” is one of the most beautiful of this time. It was painted originally for a chapel in Naples where the blind prayed for sight, and where, legend relates, they were often miraculously answered. The divine Mother, a little older than Raphael’s virgins of earlier years, is seated on a throne with the ever beautiful child in her arms. The babe gives his attention to the surpassingly lovely angel, Raphael, who brings the young Tobias with his fish into the presence of the Virgin, of whom he would beg the healing of his father who is blind. On the other side he points to a passage in the book held by the venerable St. Jerome. This is doubtless the book of Tobit wherein the story of Tobias is related, and which Tobias translated. Whatever the real purpose of the artist was in introducing St. Jerome, a very beautiful result was attained in contrasting youth and age. Like a human being of