The most unflecked quality[365] of perfection reached in this direction was, however, that first attained by Raphael. Herr von Rumohr assigns more particularly to the artists of the Umbrian School dating from the middle of the fifteenth century a mysterious fascination, which no sympathetic nature can resist, and endeavours to find the source of this attraction in the depth and tenderness of feeling no less than the marvellous unity into which these painters knew how to bring memories from the oldest essays of Christian art of a style only very partially understood by them[366] with the milder conceptions of a later time, and in this respect proved themselves superior to the Tuscan, Lombard, and Venetian fellow artists of that period[367]. It was just this expression of "flawless purity of soul and absolute surrender to the yearning and enthusiastic flow of tender feeling" to which Pietro Perugino, the master of Raphael, devoted his artistic efforts, and succeeded by doing so in fusing the objectivity and vitality of external forms, throughout all its actual realization and in every detail, an aim which had previously received the most marked attention in the elaborate work of the Florentines. Starting from the work of Perugino, to whose artistic taste and style he appears to have consistently adhered in his early work, Raphael proceeded yet further to realize to the most consummate degree the demand of the ideal above indicated. In other words we find united in him the highest ecclesiastical feeling for the themes of religious art and a complete knowledge and enthusiastic respect for natural phenomena in all the animation of their colour and shape together with an insight fully as great for the beauty of the antique. This great admiration for the idealistic beauty of the ancients did not bring him in any way to imitate and adapt to his work the forms which Greek sculpture had elaborated in their perfection. What he seized from it was simply the general principle of their free beauty which in his hands was throughout suffused with a more individual vitality more applicable to his art and with a type of expression more deeply informed with soul-life, and at the same time with an open, blithesome clarity and thoroughness, in all the detail of the presentment that up to his time was as yet unknown among Italian artists. In the elaboration and consistent fusion and coherence of this ideal atmosphere he reached the highest point of his attainment. On the other hand, in the magical charm of chiaroscuro, in the exquisite tenderness and grace of soul-expression, of forms, movements, and grouping, it is Correggio who most excels, while the incomparable greatness of Titian consists in the wealth of natural life that he displays, the illuminating bloom, fervency, warmth, and power of his colour. We know nothing more delightful than the _naïveté_ of Correggio's not so much natural as religious and spiritual grace, nothing more sweet than his smiling,