DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61022#0039
PERUGIA
that there was never danger that he would rest in contentment
with the merely provisional, and, in general, man learns, not by
the constant unrealised effort for perfection, but by repeated
expressions of the imperfect. But as far as it was a tendency to
meet an uncritical demand by the production of imperfect work,
its effect was wholly bad, and when it resulted, as it did later in
Raphael’s life, in the repetition in his studio of the activity which
he had seen in Perugino’s, and in the manufacture, by hundreds, of
works painted and almost wholly invented by pupils, it has done
in the end incalculable damage to Raphael’s reputation. But,
since it must be accepted as a feature in his life, it is as well
to recognise that the vice is but the accompaniment of a virtue,
and that when it appears most strongly in the days of his maturity
this characteristic is no new growth nor sign of decay, either in
the life of Raphael or yet in the history of Italian art, but a
constant feature in the development of his life and a characteristic
which he accepted without question from the example and the
tradition handed down by all but the greatest of his predecessors.
R.—2
17
that there was never danger that he would rest in contentment
with the merely provisional, and, in general, man learns, not by
the constant unrealised effort for perfection, but by repeated
expressions of the imperfect. But as far as it was a tendency to
meet an uncritical demand by the production of imperfect work,
its effect was wholly bad, and when it resulted, as it did later in
Raphael’s life, in the repetition in his studio of the activity which
he had seen in Perugino’s, and in the manufacture, by hundreds, of
works painted and almost wholly invented by pupils, it has done
in the end incalculable damage to Raphael’s reputation. But,
since it must be accepted as a feature in his life, it is as well
to recognise that the vice is but the accompaniment of a virtue,
and that when it appears most strongly in the days of his maturity
this characteristic is no new growth nor sign of decay, either in
the life of Raphael or yet in the history of Italian art, but a
constant feature in the development of his life and a characteristic
which he accepted without question from the example and the
tradition handed down by all but the greatest of his predecessors.
R.—2
17