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The life of Raphael as an artist extends through three well-defined periods, the Umbrian, the Florentine, and the Roman, each one of which contributed a distinctive influence upon his development and witnessed a special and characteristic achievement.

In the Umbrian pictures of the fifteenth century, the Infant often wears a coral necklace, then and now worn by children in that district, as a charm against the evil eye. In the Venetian pictures he has sometimes a coronal of pearls.

A bright, brilliant court at the close of the fifteenth century; and more stable than the only one which might have rivalled it, the Feltrian court of Urbino, too small and lost among the Umbrian bandits. John of Benvenuto Garofalo; jesters like Dosso's at Modena; brilliant captains like his St. George and St.

Dominic yielded to the fascination of the Umbrian enthusiast, and inculcated on his Order of Preachers a complete renunciation of worldly goods which made a society, originally little more than a new type of canons regular, a mendicant order like the Franciscans, bound to interpret the monastic vow of poverty with such literalness as to include corporate as well as individual renunciation of possessions, so that the order might not own lands or goods, and no member of it could live otherwise than by labour or by alms.

She did not shrink; but the compunctions she could not show she felt; and, through Sir James Chide, she had written a little letter which had done something to soften the blow, as it affected a dull yet not inequitable mind. "Does he forgive us?" she asked, in a low voice, turning her face toward the Umbrian plain, with its twinkling lights below, its stars above.

His Madonnas worshipping the infant Jesus in a tranquil Umbrian landscape, his angels ministrant, his pathetic martyrs with upturned holy faces, his sexless S. Sebastians and immaculate S. Michaels, display the perfection of art able by colour and by form to achieve within a narrow range what it desires.

The Sabellian and Umbrian worship, judging from the little we know of it, rested upon quite the same fundamental views as the Latin with local variations of colour and form.

Foligno forms a station of commanding interest between Rome and the Adriatic upon the great Flaminian Way. At Foligno the passes of the Apennines debouch into the Umbrian plain, which slopes gradually toward the valley of the Tiber, and from it the valley of the Nera is reached by an easy ascent beneath the walls of Spoleto.

When Curio with 1500 men approached Iguvium, where a couple of thousand Umbrian recruits had assembled under the praetor Quintus Minucius Thermus, general and soldiers took to flight at the bare tidings of his approach; and similar results on a small scale everywhere ensued. Rome Evacuated

Along the road journey Joseph and Mary and the infant Christ, so that you may call this little landscape a "Flight into Egypt," if you choose. Gentile, with all his Umbrian pietism, was a painter for whom the fair sights of the earth had exquisite value.