A man who can perform such miracles for the rich and powerful can command his own price, and is master of everything except his own passions. Raphael’s old uncle wrote, begging him to return to his home town and take himself a respectable wife. The young painter’s reply has come down to us. “If I had done as you wished,” he says, “I should not be where I am now.” And he goes on to tell where he is-- At the present time I have property in Rome worth three thousand gold ducats, and an income of fifty gold crowns, as his Holiness gives me a salary of three hundred gold ducats for superintending the fabric of St. Peter, which will continue as long as I live; and I am sure to earn more from other sources and am paid whatever I choose to ask for my work. And I have begun to paint another room for his Holiness which will bring me one thousand two hundred gold ducats, so that you see, my dearest uncle, that I do honor to you and to all my family and to my country.... What city in the world can compare with Rome, what enterprise is more worthy than this of Peter, which is the first temple in the world? And these are the grandest works which have ever been seen, and will cost more than a million in gold, and the Pope has decided to spend sixty thousand ducats a year on the fabric and can think of nothing else. While Raphael was thus flourishing and proud of his world, a German monk by the name of Martin Luther was nailing his condemnation of the papacy upon the door of the church at Wittenberg. But our painter-prince was so busy, he had so many commissions to portray new popes and cardinals, new annunciations and transfigurations and illuminations and immaculate conceptions, that he probably never even heard of the barbarian rebel in the far North. He remained to the end the perfect exemplar of leisure-class art, and is today the darling of pious peasant-wives, and sentimental school-marms doing culture-pilgrimages: in short, of all who wish to develop their emotions at the expense of their brains, and to shut their eyes to the grim realities of life, out of which alone true and vital beauty can grow. CHAPTER XXXI THE PAPAL PAYMASTERS Among its numerous artists of beauty Renaissance Italy produced one man who did not find life a garden of pleasure; one man who, when he sinned, did not do it with easy grace and cheerful heart; a man who faced the mysteries of life, and took seriously the terrors which the medieval mind has conjured for itself. This man was a rebel against the wanton and cruel spirit of his age; a rebel also against nature, those cruelties which time and death inflict upon our race. He was a lonely man, pursued by the jealousies and greeds of his rivals, tortured by his own sensuality and by fears of eternal torment. He lived a life of futile and agonized revolt, and produced some magnificent and terrible art.