Such was the felicity and such the propriety of Raffaello when employed in the dramatic evolutions of character,--both suffered when he attempted to abstract the forms of sublimity or beauty. The painter of humanity not often wielded with success superhuman weapons. His Gods never rose above prophetic or patriarchial forms: if the finger of M. Agnolo impressed the divine countenance oftener with sternness than awe, the Gods of Raffaello are sometimes too affable and mild, like him who speaks to Jacob in the ceiling of the Vatican; sometimes too violent, like him who separates light from darkness in the Loggia: but though made chiefly to walk with dignity on earth, he soared above it in the mild effulgence and majestic rapture of Christ on Tabor, not indeed as we see his face now from the repairs of the manufacturers in the Louvre, and still more in the frown of the angelic countenance that withers all the strength of the warrior Heliodorus. Of ideal female beauty, though he himself, in his letter to Count Castiglione, tells us that from its scarcity in life he made attempts to reach it by an idea formed in his own mind, he certainly wanted that standard which guided him in character. His Goddesses and mythologic females are no more than aggravations of the generic forms of M. Agnolo. Roundness, mildness, sanctimony, and insipidity, compose the features and air of his Madonnas: transcripts of the nursery, or some favourite face. The Madonna del Impanato, the Madonna Bella, the Madonna della Sedia, and even the longer proportions and greater delicacy and dignity of the Madonna formerly in the collection of Versailles, share more or less of this insipidity: it chiefly arises from the high, smooth, roundish forehead, the shaven vacuity between the arched semicircular eye-brows, their elevation above the eyes, and the ungraceful division, growth and scantiness of hair. This indeed might be the result of his desire not to stain the virgin character of sanctity with the most distant hint of coquetry or meretricious charms; for in his Magdalens, he throws it with luxuriant profusion, and surrounds the breast and shoulders with undulating waves and plaits of gold. The character of Mary Magdalen met his,--it was the character of a passion. It is evident from every picture or design at every period of his art in which she had a part, that he supposed her enamoured when she follows the body of the Saviour to the tomb, or throws herself dishevelled over his feet, or addresses him when he bears his cross. The cast of her features, her forms, her action, are the character of love in agony. When character inspired Raffaello, his women became definitions of grace and pathos at once.