But it may be said, that though the perfection of portrait or landscape may be derived from the immediate study of nature, yet higher subjects are not to be found in it; that there we must raise our imaginations by referring to artificial models; and that Raphael was compelled to go to Michael Angelo and the antique. Not to insist that Michael Angelo himself, according to Sir Joshua’s account, formed an exception to this rule, it has been well observed on this statement, that what Raphael borrowed was to conceal or supply his natural deficiencies: what he excelled in was his own. Raphael never had the grandeur of form of Michael Angelo, nor the correctness of form of the antique. His expression was perfectly different from both, and perhaps better than either, certainly better than what we have seen of Michael Angelo in the prints from him compared with those from Raphael in the Vatican. In Raphael’s faces, particularly his women, the expression is superior to the form; in the antique statues, the form is evidently the principal thing. The interest which they excite is in a manner external, it depends on a certain grace and lightness of appearance, joined with exquisite symmetry and refined susceptibility to voluptuous emotions, but there is no pathos; or if there is, it is the pathos of present and physical distress, rather than of sentiment. There is not that deep internal interest which there is in Raphael; which broods over the suggestions of the heart with love and fear till the tears seem ready to gush out, but that they are checked by the deeper sentiments of hope and faith. What has been remarked of Leonardo da Vinci, is still more true of Raphael, that there is an angelic sweetness and tenderness in his faces peculiarly adapted to his subjects, in which natural frailty and passion are purified by the sanctity of religion. They answer exactly to Milton’s description of the ‘human face divine.’ The ancient statues are finer objects for the eye to contemplate: they represent a more perfect race of physical beings, but we have no sympathy with them. In Raphael, all our natural sensibilities are raised and refined by pointing mysteriously to the interests of another world. The same intensity of passion appears also to distinguish Raphael from Michael Angelo. Michael Angelo’s forms are grander, but they are not so full of expression. Raphael’s, however ordinary in themselves, are full of expression even to o’erflowing: every nerve and muscle is impregnated with feeling, or bursting with meaning. In Michael Angelo, on the contrary, the powers of body and mind appear superior to any events that can happen to them, the capacity of thought and feeling is never full, never tasked or strained to the utmost that it will bear. All is in a lofty repose and solitary grandeur which no human interests can shake or disturb. It has been said that Michael Angelo painted _man_, and Raphael _men_; that the one was an epic, the other a dramatic painter.