Another allegation remains to be examined, more detrimental to the artist, though less so to the man. During his progress through various styles, and in the composition of many works, Raffaele is said to have freely appropriated the ideas of others. There can scarcely be a doubt that his Graces were suggested by the antique marble at Siena; that several noble conceptions were transferred by him from the Carmine to the Vatican; that a group in the Incendio del Borgo was borrowed from Virgil's Trojan epic; that the arabesques of the Loggie were partly taken from the thermal corridors of Titus; and that other still more curious resemblances have been detected by an acute writer to whom we have already referred.[184] But such appropriations were established by authoritative precedents, from the conventionalities of Christian painting to the plagiarisms of Michael Angelo. The right to repeat themselves or others was recognised, though men of high genius rarely stooped to its absolute exercise. Raffaele,--"always imitating, always original," if we follow Sir Joshua's not unbiased strictures,--will accordingly be found, on closer examination, to have adapted rather than adopted the thoughts of others. Like the busy bee, culling sweets from every flower, he separated the honey from the wax, and reproduced, in new shapes and varied combinations, whatever of beauty he met with in nature or art. We may add another dictum of Sir Joshua,--"his known wealth was so great, that he might borrow where he pleased without loss of credit." These considerations seem fairly applicable to the influence exercised by Michael Angelo upon a few works of Sanzio. But if not the canon of criticism must be impartially administered. When the vigour of Buonarroti is adjudged to have been filched from Signorelli, his stalwart anatomy acknowledged as the legacy of Pollaiuolo; when Domenichino stands arraigned for transferring to his chef-d'oeuvre, the communion of St. Jerome, the exact motive and theme of his master, Ludovico Caracci's canvas in the Pinacoteca at Bologna, it will be time to admit Reynolds's proposition, that "it is to Michael Angelo we owe even the existence of Raffaele, and that to him Raffaele owes the grandeur of his style." Sanzio, in truth, shrank not from competing with whatever he deemed worthy of emulation. But his was a fair and friendly rivalry, however little its spirit was understood or reciprocated by the wayward and overbearing Florentine, whose charge against Raffaele and Bramante of undermining him with Julius II., adduced in an idle letter, is not only contradicted by the character of these great men, but it is palpably improbable. To their influence, Buonarroti ascribes the suspension of that Pontiff's tomb, regarding which we shall have much to say in our fifty-third chapter. But as neither of them were sculptors, and as the Florentine was not yet known to the Pope, either as an architect or a painter, such jealousy would have been