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NDISPUTED prince of painters for more than three centuries, not another of the magnates in art of the Italian Renaissance has been in the last two generations so belittled and belauded, by turns and by sects, as Raphael. And not another shows so luminously the advantages and the dangers of the system of art education which made the Renaissance what it was. When he began to paint we do not know, nor is it certain under whom, but probably his father, Giovanni Santi, was his first master. Vasari's love of the marvelous always led him to an overcoloring of what he most admired or disliked, so that none of his statements can be accepted implicitly when his sympathies or antipathies are enlisted; and his admiration of Raphael was unbounded. It was in part the reflection of the tone of his time, in which the personal charm of the brilliant painter, who died when all the world of Rome considered him at the threshold of a greater destiny, still prejudiced all criticism. Late and scientific investigation has furnished some confirmation and some contradiction of Vasari, and for the last half-century Raphael has become the subject of antagonistic appreciations the logical consequence of unintelligent laudation.

He was born at Urbino,-so much seems certain, and in the year 1483; Vasari says on the 28th of March, a Good Friday, though Grimm and later researches make it April 6; but there is no record of the event by contemporary authority, nor do those who make pilgrimages to the house where he is supposed to have been born have any assurance of its being his birthplace. His name appears for the first time in his father's will, and all the details of Vasari concerning his infancy are questionable, or even disproved by positive evidence. Raphael's mother, Magia, died in 1491, and his father married again in the following year, and died in 1494, when the boy was eleven. Of what had been done before that by his father to educate him in the practice of art, or what was done immediately after, we know nothing; all the marvels of Vasari, Passavant, and Grimm are of the very lightest authority.

What we can, with some chance of probability, conclude under the circumstances which we know is that, as Raphael's father had taken up painting with a reverential feeling for the art which is betrayed in his poetry, he would hail the first signs of a devotion to it in his only son, and would give him full play for his early efforts, which, from the general evidence we possess of the precocity of the youth, we may conclude to have been of high promise. It would be quite beyond all human probability that under those circumstances the father should not have imparted such education as was in his power; and as the artistic training of that time was in its early stages a purely technical one, full of conventional rules and methods mainly calculated to develop facility of execution and produce a stereotyped result in which, with all the acumen of modern investigation of styles and methods of execution, it is often impossible to determine the authorship of a work, the requisite education must have been quite within the father's competence. Colors were combined according to formula for all objects; the shadows of flesh had certain pigments, and the lights certain others; the conception of an imitation of nature in the modern sense had not entered into art; and the early training of the apprentice was in grinding colors, preparing grounds, tracing the designs of the master on the panel, and, as power increased, in doing by rule more or less of the actual painting. These processes Giovanni Santi must have learned before he could be considered a painter, and these he must have been competent to teach his son; and as we know that in the case of some of the masters of the epoch the studio-training began at the age of eight, when the boys were sent away from home to the master's house, we need strain no probabilities in supposing that the young Raphael might have been indulging his precocity at seven, or even at six, in his home and under his father's eye, and that at the time of his reception in the studio of Perugino (which we have no data to place earlier than 1500, though it may have taken place in 1495 immediately after his father's death) he knew already the elements of the painter's art well enough to become a valuable assistant. The question where Raphael spent the years