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famous, the practice of drawing in black and red chalk, often with white highlights, on various shades of paper. Thousands of artists made use of it after him, often with spectacular results. Leonardo’s influence was progressive and cumulative, as prints that he inspired were published, his drawings circulated and the texts of his writings gradually became available. It is hard to think of any artist of stature who has been impervious to his work. Hence, despite the unsatisfactory state of his output at his death, he has been regarded as the founder of the period known as the High Renaissance, in the years around the turn of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, when the progress of the movement to restore and excel antiquity came to a climax at the highest level of achievement and with the greatest impact on the future.

If Leonardo encompassed the Renaissance intellectually, Raphael or Raffaello Sanzio (1483–1520) epitomized its quest for beauty and its success in finding it. For if his life was short (he died when only thirty-seven) his output was large, continuous, invariably of the highest possible quality and finished. Patrons found him the perfect painter: affable, reliable, always doing what he said he would do and delivering on time. He ran what became a large studio efficiently, using his assistants intelligently and in ways that were fair both to them and to his patrons. He was born in that leading center of culture Urbino, but trained in Perugia, under Pietro Vannucci or Perugino, as he was known (c. 1446–1523). Perugino was a product of the Verrocchio shop and of the college of painters Sixtus IV set up to do the lower walls of his Sistine Chapel. He had a sentimental eye and a lush contour, but he could paint a lovable Madonna and an elevating saint as well as anyone else of his generation, and he also taught the young Raphael most of what he knew. It says a lot for Raphael’s aesthetic and emotional integrity and cool, calm taste that he avoided all Perugino’s faults while absorbing his undoubted strengths and building on them.

Raphael’s work falls into two main categories: the large-scale frescoes and decorative work that he did for the Vatican Palace at the direction of Pope Julius II, and his devotional easel works and altarpieces mainly of the Virgin and Child, sometimes with minor figures. He did a few portraits too, especially a masterly presentation of Castiglione, which has taught generations of portraits how to set about it. His range, then, was selective, though it should be added that he succeeded Bramante as architect of St. Peter’s, was a decorator of genius and was also branching out into new directions in painting at the time of his sudden death.

With Raphael, what you see is what you get. His paintings in the Vatican, such as The School of Athens, are intelligent, large-scale organizations of superbly painted figures, which have guided “history painters,” as they call themselves, throughout Europe from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. There are no obscurities or mysteries, no hidden meanings, no ambiguities, no shocks, no nastiness, no horror, no thrills. There is not much to be said about them except that they are extremely good of their kind. His Madonnas are rather different. They too contain no hidden agendas or arrières-pensées, no adumbrations of Freudianism, nothing indeed for modern academics to get their suspicious teeth into. On the other hand, they are a wonderfully inventive set of variations on a theme that is absolutely central to Western religious art. They do exactly what they set out to do: inspire devotion in the religious-minded and rapture in the aesthete. These Madonnas are real, living women who are also queens of heaven, painted with astonishing skill, never repetitious, without the smallest hint of vulgarity, always serene and tender, devoted and reverent. Julius II summoned Raphael to Rome to do God’s work in paint, and that is just what he did, supplying through copies and prints the devotional decoration for the walls of countless convents, seminaries,