Raphael Author:N. D'Anvers Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. RAPHAEL IN HOME. 1511 TO 1513. A GREAT stride, as we have seen, was made by Raphael during the first three years of his residence in Rome, and... more » the difference between his last work in Florence and his first in the capital is not so marked as that between the' Theology' and the' School of Athens.' For a short, a very short, time the influence of Michelangelo, strange to say, seemed likely to check at a critical moment the full development of Raphael's own peculiar style. He could not resist the temptation of trying to imitate the great elder master whose works were then exciting such intense enthusiasm. We note this, as it might have been, fatal mistake in Raphael's ' Prophet Isaiah,' a fresco on a pillar in the church of St. Augustine, one of the weakest of the great master's works, executed almost immediately after the completion of the ' School of Athens ;' but fortunately for him and for the world this attraction did not last long, and in each one of the portraits and Madonnas as well as in the frescos of the Stanza d' Eliodoro next produced, the student can recognize a step in advance. The first easel picture painted by Raphael after the completion of the frescos of the Stanza della Segnatura was the world-famous portrait of Julius II., now in the Pitti POPE JULIUS II. From the painting by Raphael, in the Pitli Palace, Florence. RAPHAEL IN HOME. 39 Palace, Florence, in which we have a true and life-likeness of the great Pontiff in one of his best moments. The portrait of the young Marchese Federico of Mantua, now in the possession of Mr. Lucy of Charlcote Park, is supposed to date from the same period. A more interesting work than either of these, however, is the portrait1 of Raphael himself, which gives ns an opportunity of noting the change i...« less