Raphael
has greater elegance and feeling for style, Holbein a richer color sense
and, above all, a finer craftsmanship, an unapproachable material
perfection. They have the same quiet, intense observation, the same
impeccable accuracy, the same preoccupation with the person before them
and with nothing else--an individuality to be presented with all it
contains, neither more nor less--to be rendered entirely, and without
flattery as without caricature. There have been portrait-painters who
were greater painters, in the more limited sense of the word, than these
two, and there has been at least one painter whose imaginative sympathy
gave an inner life to his portraits absent from theirs, but in the
essential qualities of portraiture, as distinguished from all other
forms of art, perhaps no one else has quite equalled them. One can give
no greater praise to the "Castiglione" or the "Donna Velata" than to say
that they are fit to hang beside the "Georg Gyze" or the "Christina of
Milan"; and at least one portrait by Raphael, the "Tommaso Inghirami,"
in the collection of Mrs. Gardner (Pl. 20)--the original of which the
picture in the Pitti Palace is a replica--has a beauty of surface and
of workmanship almost worthy of Holbein himself.
[Illustration: Plate 19.
Pages:
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99