The uneven merit of his frescoes
foretold the consequence of overwork despite his matchless facility
and power. But in his panel pictures, when he was not hurried, his
work continued to improve until he reached his crowning achievement
in the Sistine Madonna painted three years before his death.
Raphael was thirty-seven when he died in 1520, and very far from coming
to the end of his powers of learning. Each picture that he painted
revealed to him new difficulties to conquer, and new experiments to
try, in his art. We seem compelled to think that had he lived and
laboured for another score of years, the history of painting in Italy
might have been different. In Rome and Florence no successor attempted
to improve upon his work. His pupils and assistants were more numerous
than those of any other painter, but when they had obtained some of
his facility of drawing and painting they were contented. None of them
had Raphael's genius, yet all wished to paint like him; so that for
the following fifty years Rome and Florence and Southern Italy were
flooded with inferior Raphaelesque paintings, which tended to become
more slip-shod in execution as time went on, and more devoid of any
personal note.
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