the golden age, said to have been born at Bologna in 1488, had served his apprenticeship under Francesco Francia. Vasari says that while wandering one day in the Piazza di San Marco at Venice, where he had gone to perfect his

studies in 1508, he saw a Flemish merchant exhibit certain prints of Albrecht Dürer. The sight of these beautiful plates, sold at high prices, suggested to him the idea of imitating some of the most popular, forging the signature of the German master, in which scheme he succeeded so well that no one who was not an expert could tell which were the originals and which were Marcantonio's imitations. Hence a lawsuit brought by the wronged artist, which ended in a decree restraining the forger from making use of Dürer's signature. Vasari's story seems to have no Gruyer, Raphael et l'antiquité, ii, p. 99; Pulszky, Beitrage zu Raphaels Studium der Antike; Goeler v. Ravensburg, Rubens und die Antike, p. 142; Loewy, Di alcune composizioni di Raffaello ispirate a monumenti antichi, Rome, 1896.

foundation of truth, considering that the first meeting of the two masters had already taken place at Bologna in 1506.1

Having come to Rome in 1510, Marcantonio became at once the favorite pupil of Raphael and the engraver of his works, such as the Lucrezia Romana, the Slaughter of the Innocents, the Judgment of Paris, Venus emerging from the Bath, the Five Saints, and the Saint Cecilia. The fame of his success called to Rome several competitors, such as Marco Dente da Ravenna and Agostino Musi Veneziano, to whom also praise is due for popularizing the paintings and drawings of Raphael. I will not touch the question of the extreme licentiousness of some of these plates, nor of the greater or lesser share of responsibility which rests with the designer and with the engravers. The blame must be cast on Giulio Romano rather than on Raphael. I do not think the controversy mature yet for a solution.

After the master's death Marcantonio published some designs of Giulio, of Baccio Bandinelli, and of other artists, and he would have prospered in life but for the sack of 1527, which left him in penury and distress, so that he died soon after his escape to Bologna.

To come back, however, to the Judgment of Paris, there is no doubt that Raphael, in furnishing the drawing for this plate, had actually before his eyes the bas-reliefs of two sarcophagi, one of which is now preserved in the Villa Medici, the other in the Villa Pamphili. I do not know where Raphael may have sketched them; probably in the vestibule of a medieval church like the Aracoeli, or in the court of a patrician house like that of the Capranica della Valle, or in the show-room of a dealer like that of Giovanni Ciampolini in the Via di Balestrari. The fact is that while imparting to 1 Benjamin Delessert, Marcantonio Raimondi, Paris, 1862; Charles Ephrussi, Albert Dürer et ses dessins, Paris, 1862.

his composition the stamp of originality, he copied the models in their most minute details, such as the group of the aerial gods, that of the fluvial and sea gods, the landscape with the grazing cattle, the attitude of the three contending Beauties, the staff of Paris, and the helmet of Minerva.

The impression created among artists by Marcantonio's plate after Raphael's design was unprecedented, and has lasted to the present day. Reproductions of it, total or partial, are without number. It appears in a Limoges plaquette of enamelled grisaille, now in the Imperial Museum at Vienna; in three cameos of the same collection; in the reliefs of a silver ewer designed by Rubens for King Charles I; in

three works of Rubens himself described by Goeler von Ravensburg; in a majolica plate of the Art Museum at Milan; in the frontispiece of Rosini's "Antiquities," etc. Stranger even is the fact that Raphael himself and some of his pupils should have borrowed motives for other compositions from the same plate. Thus the figure of the river god at the right-hand corner appears again in the fresco of Heliodorus, and perhaps it is not by chance that the portrait of Marcantonio himself is seen in the opposite corner of that magnificent composition, among the bearers of the state chair upon which sits Pope Julius II.

The illustration on page 257 represents the recumbent figure of another river god in exactly the same attitude, modelled by Michelangelo, in a terra-cotta bas-relief formerly in the Gherardesca palace at Florence. The engraving from which the illustration is taken bears the following legend: "Cavato da un bassorilievo in terra-cotta appresso i signori conti della Gherardesca, opera di Michelagnolo Buonarroti."

Quite interesting is the way in which Raphael has interpreted the Jupiter group, on the right-hand corner of the Medici sarcophagus. The Greco-Roman artist who modelled it had made the feet of the Father of the Gods rest upon a piece of cloth, held at both ends by the figure of Cælus (Heaven). Raphael, seeing the cloth swollen in the manner of a sail inflated by the wind, thought the figure holding it to be Æolus, and in this guise he reproduced it in his own design, with open mouth and in a flying attitude, thus transforming the classic Jupiter, whose throne rests on the solid sphere of Heaven, into a Jehovah borne through the skies by wind and clouds. Vasari had already been struck by this new way of treating the figure of the Eternal Father, and called it accordingly "a God in the style of Jupiter."