In truth, when we examine the character and the times of those men who have left the stamp of their genius most deeply on the mind or destinies of mankind, we generally find a providential adaptation of the one to the other. So was it with the greatest masters of art. Had Michael Angelo appeared a century sooner, he would have found the public unprepared, by a gradual advance of naturalism, for the revolution which he was destined to bring about. They would have seen in him the terrible, without perceiving how much truth accompanied it. Deprived of the sympathy and encouragement which no wayward spirit ever more demanded, he would have failed to achieve the marvellous, and might have perhaps scarcely risen above the monstrous. Leonardo da Vinci could, in any epoch, have given sweet or intellectual qualities to beautifully moulded features, but instead of enlightening the world upon the theory and practice of his art, and developing the infant powers of mathematical engineering, he might in an earlier age have been an alchymist, in a later one the improver of spinning-jennies. Titian, who would have been cramped by the lessons of a Crivelli, grew to manhood ere the league of Cambray had curbed the golden coursers of St. Mark's; and thus he formed his beau-ideal of noble bearing ere the subjects for his pencil had ceased to be the arbiters of Italy, the merchant-princes of the world. A mind such as Raffaele's, would in all circumstances have found or created materials of beauty. He might have been the purest of devotional painters in the days of Giotto, a reformer of corrupted taste in those of Bernini; but, placed on the confines of the old manner and the new, it was his proud distinction to perfect them both. Our antecedent remarks on the Umbrian masters have afforded us data for ascertaining the state of painting in the duchy at the advent of Raffaele. There were, indeed, few pictures within its bounds upon which the youthful aspirant might form an exalted style, but in his father he possessed an instructor competent to point out all that was worthy of study among contemporary limners, as well as to initiate him in the mechanism of his profession.[169] Too early was he deprived of this advantage,[*170] but not before he had been the companion of his parent's labours. Whilst we refuse to even his precocious genius the credit of working upon the fresco at Cagli,[171] the introduction of his portrait into it proves that he witnessed its progress. It was perhaps on similar opportunities that he imbibed, before the beautiful Madonnas of Romita and Forano, those purely devotional inspirations which are believed to have influenced his earlier and happier creations.[172] [Footnote 169: See Appendix IV.] [Footnote *170: Giovanni died when Raphael was eleven, in 1494.] [Footnote 171: See above, p. 218.] [Footnote 172: See above, p. 195-6.]