It is not, however, our province to engage the reader in these disputations. It was greatly to the advantage of Michelangiolo's fame to have had two scholars, who, while he was yet living, and after the death of Raffaello, employed themselves in writing his life; and a great misfortune to Raffaello not to have been commemorated in the same manner. If he had survived to the time when Vasari and Condivi wrote, he would not have passed over their charges in silence. Raffaello would then have easily proved, that when Bonarruoti fled to Florence, in 1506, he himself was not in Rome, nor was called thither until two years afterwards; and that he could not, therefore, have obtained a furtive glance of the Sistine chapel. It would have been proved too, that from the year 1508, when Michelangiolo had, perhaps, not commenced his work, until 1511, in which year he exhibited the first half of it,[40] Raffaello had been endeavouring to enlarge his style; and as Michelangiolo had before studied the Torso of the Belvidere, so Raffaello also formed himself on this and other marbles,[41] a circumstance easily discoverable in his style. He might too have asked Vasari, in what he considered grandeur and majesty of style to consist; and from the example of the Greeks, and from reason herself, he might have informed him, that the grand does not consist in the enlargement of the muscles, or in an extravagance of attitude, but in adopting, as Mengs has observed, the noblest, and neglecting the inferior and meaner parts;[42] and exercising the higher powers of invention. Hence he would have proceeded to point out the grandeur of style in the School of Athens, in the majestic edifice, in the contour of the figures, in the folds of the drapery, in the expression of the countenances, and in the attitudes; and he would have easily traced the source of that sublimity in the relics of antiquity. And if he appeared still greater in his Isaiah, he might have refuted Vasari from his own account, who assigns this work to a period anterior to 1511, and therefore contemporary as it were with the School of Athens: adding, that he elevated his style by propriety of character, and by the study of Grecian art. The Greeks observed an essential difference between common men and heroes, and again between their heroes and their gods; and Raffaello, after having represented philosophers immersed in human doubts, might well elevate his style when he came to figure a prophet meditating the revelations of God.[43] All this might have been advanced by Raffaello, in order to relieve Bramante and himself from so ill supported an imputation. As to the rest, I believe he never would have denied, that the works of Michelangiolo had inspired him with a more daring spirit of design, and that in the exhibition of strong character, he had sometimes even imitated him. But how imitated him? In rendering, as Crespi himself observes, that very style more beautiful and more majestic, (p. 344). It