It has been questioned whether Raphael’s art gained by what he learnt from Michelangelo, some critics affirming that his earlier style is his best. This, however, must be considered to be entirely a matter of taste. Most painters—unless, like Fra Angelico, so entirely absorbed in the mystical side of their art as never to change their style—as they gain in power of expression, lose something of their youthful emotional fervor; and it is possible to assert that in the magnificent design of the “Incendio del Borgo” the dramatic element is more in evidence than in the “Disputa.” But what is lost on the emotional and religious side is compensated for by the gain in power of representation; and it is difficult to stand before the cartoon of “The Miraculous Draught of Fishes,” and not to confess that Giotto himself could not have imparted a more implicit trustfulness and childlike belief in the power of the Redeemer to the look and gesture of St. Peter; and while the magnificent simplicity of the youths drawing the net is conceived in an equal spirit of truthfulness to nature, the grandeur of style and the knowledge displayed in the drawing is so much pure gain on his earlier manner. The Loggie, or open corridors of the Vatican, were also adorned by Raphael’s scholars with a series of fifty-two paintings of Biblical subjects from his designs; the whole series was known as “Raphael’s Bible.” In 1515 he was commissioned to design tapestries for the Sistine Chapel; of the ten cartoons (distemper paintings on paper) for these tapestries three have been lost; the other seven after many dangers and vicissitudes came into the possession of Charles I. of England. They are perhaps the most remarkable art treasures belonging to England, and are at present exhibited, by permission of Her Majesty, in the South Kensington Museum. Among the greatest oil pictures of Raphael’s third period may be enumerated the “Madonna di Foligno” in the Vatican; the “Madonna della Sedia” in the Pitti Palace at Florence; the “Saint Cecilia” at Bologna; the “Madonna of the Fish,” and the picture of “Christ Bearing His Cross,” known as the “Spasimo,” in the splendid collection at Madrid; the “Madonna di San Sisto” at Dresden, which obtained for the artist the name of “the Divine;” and finally the “Transfiguration” at the Vatican, the sublime picture on which his last working hours were spent, and which was carried at his funeral before its colors were dry. TIZIANO VECELLIO,