Among his mental faculties the power of assimilation seems to have been developed to an extraordinary degree. He learned the rudiments of his art in the house of his father Santi at Urbino, where a Madonna is still shown--the portrait of his mother, with a child, perhaps the infant Raphael, upon her lap. Starting, soon after his father's death, as a pupil of Perugino, he speedily acquired that master's manner so perfectly that his earliest works are only to be distinguished from Perugino's by their greater delicacy, spontaneity, and inventiveness. Though he absorbed all that was excellent in the Peruginesque style, he avoided its affectations, and seemed to take departure for a higher flight from the most exquisite among his teacher's early paintings. Later on, while still a lad, he escaped from Umbrian conventionality by learning all that was valuable in the art of Masaccio and Fra Bartolommeo. To the latter master, himself educated by the influence of Lionardo, Raphael owed more, perhaps, than to any other of his teachers. The method of combining figures in masses, needful to the general composition, while they preserve a subordinate completeness of their own, had been applied with almost mathematical precision by the Frate in his fresco at S. Maria Nuova.[256] It reappears in all Raphael's work subsequent to his first visit to Florence[257] (1504-1506). So great, indeed, is the resemblance of treatment between the two painters that we know not well which owed the other most. Many groups of women and children in the Stanze, for example--especially in the "Miracle of Bolsena" and the "Heliodorus"--seem almost identical with Fra Bartolommeo's "Madonna della Misericordia" at Lucca. Finally, when Raphael settled in Rome, he laid himself open to the influence of Michael Angelo, and drank in the classic spirit from the newly discovered antiques. Here at last it seemed as though his native genius might suffer from contact with the potent style of his great rival; and there are many students of art who feel that Raphael's later manner was a declension from the divine purity of his early pictures. There is, in fact, a something savouring of overbloom in the Farnesina frescoes, as though the painter's faculty had been strained beyond its natural force. Muscles are exaggerated to give the appearance of strength, and open mouths are multiplied to indicate astonishment and action. These faults may be found even in the Cartoons. Yet who shall say that Raphael's power was on the decline, or that his noble style was passing into mannerism, after studying both the picture of the "Transfiguration" and the careful drawings from the nude prepared for this last work?