THE SCHOLARS OF RAPHAEL.

WE have already had occasion to observe the great number of scholars, some of them older than himself, who had assembled round Raphael, and the unusual harmony in which they lived together: Vasari relates that, when he went to court, a train of fifty painters attended on him from his own house to the Vatican. They came from every part of Italy; from Florence, Milan, Venice, Bologna, Ferrara, Naples, and even from beyond the Alps, to study under the great Roman master. Many of them assisted, with more or less skill, in the execution of his great works in fresco; some imitated him in one thing, some in another; but the unrivalled charm of Raphael's productions lies in the impress of the mind which produced them: this he could not impart to others. Those who followed servilely a particular manner of conception and drawing, which they called "Raphael's style," degenerated into insipidity and littleness. Those who had original power deviated into exaggerations and perversities. Not one among them approached him. Some caught a faint reflection of his grace, some of his power; but they turned it to other purposes;

they worked in a different spirit; they followed the fashion of the hour. While he lived, his noble aims elevated them, but when he died they fell away one after another. The lavish and magnificent Pope Leo X. was succeeded in 1521 by Adrian VI., a man conscientious even to severity, sparing even to asceticism, and without any sympathies either for art or artists; during his short pontificate of two years all the works in the Vatican and St. Peter's were suspended; the poor painters were starving; and the dreadful pestilence which raged in 1523 drove many from the city. Under Clement VII., one of the Medici, and nephew of Leo X., the arts for a time revived; but the sack of Rome by the barbarous soldiery of Bourbon in 1527 completed the dispersion of the artists who had flocked to the capital: each returning to his native country or city, became also a teacher; and thus what was called "Raphael's School," or the "Roman School," was spread from one end of Italy to the other.

Raphael had left by his will his two favourite scholars, Gian Francesco Penni and Giulio Romano, as executors, and to them he bequeathed the task of completing his unfinished works.

GIAN FRANCESCO PENNI, called Il Fattore, was his beloved and confidential pupil, and had assisted him much, particularly in preparing his cartoons ; but everything he executed from his own mind and

after Raphael's death has, with much tenderness and Raffaelesque grace, a sort of feebleness more of mind than hand: his pictures are very rare. He died in 1528.

His brother LUCA PENNI was in England for some years in the service of Henry VIII., and employed by Wolsey in decorating his palace at Hampton Court; some remains of his performances there were still to be seen in the middle of the last century; but Horace Walpole's notion that Luca Penni executed those three singular pictures, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the Battle of the Spurs, and the Embarkation of Henry VIII., appears to be quite unfounded.

Giulio Pippi, surnamed from the place of his birth Il Romano, and generally styled GIULIO ROMANO, was also much beloved by Raphael, and of all his scholars the most distinguished for original power. While under the influence of Raphael's mind, he imitated his manner and copied his pictures so successfully, that it is sometimes difficult for the best judges to distinguish the difference of hand. The Julius II. in our National Gallery is an instance. After Raphael's death he abandoned himself to his own luxuriant genius. He lost the simplicity, the grace, the chaste and elevated feeling which had characterised his master. He became strongly embued with the then reigning taste for classical and mythological subjects,

which he treated not exactly in a classical spirit, but with great boldness and fire, both in conception and execution. He did not excel in religious subjects if he had to paint the Virgin, he gave her the air and form of a commanding Juno; if a Saviour, he was like a Roman emperor; the apostles in his pictures are like heathen philosophers; but when he had to deal with gods and Titans he was in his element.

For four years after the death of Raphael he was chiefly occupied in completing his master's unfinished works; at the end of that time he went to Mantua and entered, the service of the Duke Gonzaga, as painter and architect. He designed for him a splendid palace called the Palazzo del Te, which he decorated with frescoes in a grand but coarse style. In one saloon he represented Jupiter vanquishing the giants; in another, the history of Psyche everywhere we see great luxuriance of fancy, wonderful power of drawing, and a bold large style of treatment; but great coarseness of imagination, red heavy colouring, and a pagan rather than a classical taste.

In character, Giulio Romano was a man of generous mind; princely in his style of living; an accomplished courtier, yet commanding respect by a lofty sense of his own dignity as an artist. He amassed great riches in the service of the Duke Gonzaga, and spent his life at Mantua: his most