associated, as is the case with Raphael's conceptions. Such a close affinity must not, however, assert itself merely as formal beauty, but must be spiritually made vital through the most intimate expression of soul-life, and thereby transfigured; and this spiritual penetration must make itself felt as the real object and content. The conception, too, of beauty, has its real opportunity in the stories of Christ's childhood and those of John the Baptist. In the case of the other historical persons, whether apostles, saints, disciples, or wise men of antiquity, this expression of an emphasized intensity of soul-life is rather simply an affair of particular critical situations, apart from which they are mainly placed before us as independent characters of the actual world of experience, endowed with force and endurance of courage, faith and action, so that what most determines the gist of their characters in all its variety is an earnest and worthy manliness. They are not ideals of gods, but entirely individualized human ideals; not simply men, as they ought to be, but human ideals[321], as they actually are in a certain place, to which neither particular definition of character is wanting, nor yet a real association between such particularity and the universal type which completes them. Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, in his famous Last Supper, have supplied examples of this type, in the composition of which we find an entirely different quality of worth, majesty and nobility present than in those presented by other painters[322]. This is precisely the point at which painting meets on the same ground with the ancients, without, however, sacrificing the character of its own province.