Raphael had a most impressionable mind. It was
part of his genius that, from every painter with whom he came in contact
he imbibed the best, almost without knowing it. The artists of his
day, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the other great men, were
each severally employed in working out once and for all some particular
problem in connection with their art. Michelangelo, a giant in
intellect, painter, sculptor, architect, and poet, studied the human
body as it had not been studied since the days of ancient Greece. His
sculptured figures on the tombs of the Medici in Florence rank second
only to those of the greatest Greek sculptors, and his ceiling in the
Sistine Chapel is composed of a series of masterpieces of
figure-painting. He devoted himself largely in his sculpture and his
painting to the representation of the naked human body, and made it
futile in his successors to plead ignorance as an excuse for bad drawing.
As a colourist he was not pre-eminent, and his few panel pictures are
for the most part unfinished.
Leonardo da Vinci, the older contemporary of Raphael, first in Florence
and afterwards in the north of Italy, left a colossal reputation and
but few pictures, for in his search after perfection he became
dissatisfied with what he had done and is said to have destroyed one
masterpiece after another.
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