Raphael (1483-152o) is the modern artist who most closely resembles Pheidias. The Greeks themselves said that the latter invented nothing, but that he carried every kind of art invented by his forerunners to such a pitch of perfection that he achieved pure and perfect harmony. Those words "pure and perfect har mony," express, in fact, better than any others that which Raphael brought to Italian art. From Perugino he gathered all the rather weak graces and the gentle limpidities of the Umbrian School, which died out with him, he acquired strength and certainty in Florence, and he created a style based on the fusion of Leonardo's and Michelangelo's lessons under the light of his own noble spirit.
His compositions on the traditional theme of the Virgin and Child seemed intensely novel to contemporaries, and only their time-honoured glory prevents us now from perceiving their origi nality. No one before him had treated this holy subject with the poetry of a familiar idyll, with such an air of eternal youth, a limpid gentleness which excludes neither amplitude nor majesty of conception. He has in our eyes a more magnificent claim to honour in the composition and realisation of those frescoes with which, from 1509, he adorned the Stanze and the Loggie of the Vatican. The sublime, to which Michelangelo attained by his ardour and passion, Raphael attained by the sovereign balance of intelligence and sensibility. His two masterpieces, the Disputa, or The Holy Sacrament and the School of Athens are self sufficing worlds created by genius : we never lose our admiration of the multiple detail, the portrait heads which are unsurpassed by the work of even the most famous professional portrait painters, suppleness of gesture, ease of composition, the life which circulates everywhere with the light ; and there still remains some thing which may be described by saying that everything is mag netized by the all-powerful attraction of thought.
Rome became for almost two centuries the artistic capital, not only of Italy, but of the entire world.
The Renaissance in the Northern Countries.—In France, the Italian influence, which had not withered the freshness of Jean Fouquet's inspiration, became towards the middle of the 16th century so all-pervading that true French painting was in danger of losing its originality and even its vitality. The Fontaine bleau school was a school of decorators comprising Italians sum moned north by the kings of France, Italianised Flemings and some Frenchmen who were no less enslaved by Italian fashions.
The national taste, however, showed itself in the fine psychology of the little portraits depicting in all their delicate elegance the men and women of the Valois court.
In Germany the fact that the greatest artist born beyond the Rhine absorbed Italianism did no more than stimulate his own imagination and perhaps widen its scope. Albrecht Diirer (1471– 1528) had a genius too powerful to be conquered. He remained as profoundly Germanic as, in his stormy dramaticism, was his contemporary Mathias Griinewald, a fantastic visionary and rebel against all Italian seductions. Diirer, in spite of all his tense energy, dominated the conflict of the passions by a sovereign and speculative intelligence almost comparable with that of Leonardo. He too was on the borders of two worlds, that of the Gothic age and that of the modern age, and on the borders of two arts, being an engraver and draughtsman rather than a painter.
Holbein (1497-1543) was a cosmopolitan : born in Augsburg, he lived successively at Basle and in England. The acute realism of a trenchant and precise draughtsmanship combined with a certain Italian elegance to make him an admirable portraitist.
In the Low Countries Italian influence spread almost as widely as in France. But not being, as in France, evoked, sustained and controlled by a monarchical power, it left great individual freedom to the artists. Quentin Matsys (1466-153o) was one of the first to look to Italy, very much as Fouquet the Frenchman had done before him. The founder of the Antwerp School carried through his conversion to humanism with grace and naturalness.
Further north still Bosch (145o?-1516) adopted from Italy merely a curious element of contrast in the complex train of his fantastic visions. In the following generation Pieter Bruegel (1525-1569) is yet another example of Gothic inspiration sur viving through Italian influences in paintings characterized by a vein of unbridled humour.
Surely there was at this period a current of bizarre imagina tion circulating from South to North whose principal exponents were Griinewald. Bosch and Bruegel. The differences between the first and the two others are great, but we note this charac teristic common to them all, the exaggeration and the oddness of the deliberate discord between the apparent subject and the pictorial methods. Nor let us forget the most popular manifesta tion of the same spirit, the theme of those Danses macabres which were to be met with everywhere.