of the biographer of Arezzo, whose great aim it was to prove that the excellences of Sanzio were all borrowed from his Florentine contemporaries. The parallel which suggests itself between these gifted competitors[*185] has been thus stated with equal eloquence and truth: "The genius of Michael Angelo differed from that of Raffaele even more in kind than in degree; limited in its object, but intense in its energy, it gloried in the exhibition of its own colossal strength, and looked with contempt on those gentler graces that waited unbidden on the pencil of their favourite worshipper. When the rivals approached, it was by no common movement; Michael Angelo stood aloof on the lofty eminence he had chosen; it was Raffaele alone who dared at times to traverse the wide space that divided them. So great were the difficulties, so bold the attempt, that all his success, rapid and wonderful as it was, would have seemed almost necessary to rescue a character less modest and unassuming than his, from the charge of hardihood and presumption. With a noble candour he could scarcely have learned from his haughty antagonist, Raffaele was among the first to see, the most prompt to acknowledge, the new grandeur he had given to art.... Even when he rises to the very confines of sublimity, it is still the sublimity of the beautiful; and when Michael Angelo stoops for a brief space to court the aid of beauty, it serves like a transparent veil to soften rather than conceal the native sublimity of his genius.... Michael Angelo, the painter of the old covenant, has embodied his genius in the stern and gigantic forms of Moses and the Prophets; but he failed where Raffaele has shown as signally his skill, in the gentle dignity of the Saviour and the heavenly purity of a mother's love.... In his paintings, as in his character, there appears an unconsciousness of excellence, a consummation of art carried up to the simplicity of nature, that anticipates criticism, and allows us to indulge undisturbed in a fulness of admiration, which grows on the reason long after it has satisfied the heart. In Michael Angelo's best works there is often, on the contrary, somewhat so strange and so studied in gesture and attitude, so evident a design upon our wonder, as almost to provoke us to resistance, and impair the pure magic of the effect by attracting our attention to the cause."[186] [Footnote *185: Far from the parallel "suggesting itself," only a disorderly mind would make it. No comparison is thinkable between work that is absolutely different. One might as well compare a valley with the sea.] [Footnote 186: _British and Foreign Quarterly_, vol. XIII.]