and his mother. The picture is faded and dim, like the history of
this sainted woman who gave to earth one of the gentlest, greatest
and best men that ever lived. Mystery enshrouds the early days of
Raphael. There is no record of his birth. His father we know was a
man of decided power, and might yet rank as a great artist, had he
not been so unfortunate as to have had a son that outclassed him.
But now Giovanni Sanzio's only claim to fame rests on his being the
father of his son. Of the boy's mother we have only obstructed
glances and glimpses through half-flung lattices in the gloaming.
Raphael was her only child. She was scarce twenty when she bore him.
In a sonnet written to her, on the back of a painting, Raphael's
father speaks of her wondrous eyes, slender neck, and the form too
frail for earth's rough buffets. Mention is also made of "this child
born in purest love, and sent by God to comfort and caress."

The mother grew aweary and passed away when her boy was scarce eight
years old, but his memories of her were deeply etched. She told him
of Cimabue, Giotto, Ghirlandajo, Leonardo and Perugino, and
especially of the last two, who were living and working only a few
miles away. It was this spiritual and loving mother who infused into
his soul the desire to do and to become. That hunger for harmony
which marked his life was the heritage of mother to child.

When an artist paints a portrait, he paints two--himself and the
sitter. Raphael gave himself; and as his father more than once said
the boy was the image of his mother, we have her picture, too.
Father and son painted the same woman. Their hearts went out to her
with a sort of idolatrous love. The sonnets indited to her by her
husband were written after her death, and after his second marriage.
Do then men love dead women better than they do the living? Perhaps.