habit without clearly understanding what he is doing, and therefore without premeditation. He only knows that he is suffering from severe pain or discomfort, and he calls loudly for relief. If he appreciated the danger he would be less ready to put himself within the grasp of so ruthless an enemy.

When the disease from which the patient is suffering is one which will require prolonged treatment by morphia, whether administered internally or subcutaneously, both he and his friends should be cautious how they expose themselves to such a risk: the doctor should be left to decide whether such treatment is essential, but he should not be driven to it, as he often is, by urgent demands for immediate relief.

When the disease is both painful and necessarily and quickly fatal this caution does not apply. Opiates may be freely given and unhesitatingly accepted.

It may be thought that after all, when pain has been relieved and the affection which gave rise to it cured, it requires the doctor's cooperation to procure morphia for his patient. Unfortunately this is not the case; the public are allowed to poison themselves without let or hindrance. Experience has taught us that opium and morphia can be freely procured either by means of old prescriptions, or in the absence of any prescription at all. So that people are at liberty to become morphinomaniacs if they please. Professor Regnard says:

But rest assured of this, gentlemen-it is the duty of the patient's family, it is the duty of all, to prevent the terrible mania of which we have been just speaking from developing itself. If they will succeed they must arrest their friends in their downward course, they must take from them the means of injuring themselves, they must be ever on the watch to snatch pitilessly from them the instruments of their madness.

It is perfectly true that prevention must be left largely to patients and their friends. Medical men too often first hear of the habit which has been contracted when called upon to aid in overcoming it. Ignorance seems to be responsible for many cases, and should this article be the means of pointing out the dangers of morphia to some who would otherwise have fallen victims to its habitual use, the object which the writer has in view will have been accomplished.

SEYMOUR J. SHARKEY.

RECENT CRITICISM ON RAPHAEL.

THE life and works of Raphael have been studied during the last few years with a zeal previously almost unknown. In France, England, Germany, and Italy, biographies have been compiled of him by the most distinguished writers on art. Among them that by the Alsatian Professor Eugène Müntz, being profusely illustrated, has become widely popular, Raphael, sa Vie, son Euvre, et son Temps. The recent works on Raphael by two of the most distinguished German art critics, Hermann Grimm and Anton Springer, are not less important as literary productions, though more remarkable perhaps as to manner than as to matter; while the English volumes by Messrs. J. A. Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle, Raphael, his Life and Works, are generally regarded as an almost exhaustive compilation from more or less authentic sources. Considerably more valuable as a literary effort, and, which seems to me the main point, far more trustworthy in its critical judgment, is the Life of Raphael published not long since by the well-known Italian statesman Marco Minghetti.

The 300th anniversary of Raphael's birthday was kept in Italy three years since, and the almost simultaneous appearance of these various works, quite independently of each other, may perhaps have had some connection with that event. At the same time, it seems only natural and obvious that such a comprehensive study of Raphael should be the outcome of the modern interest in pictorial art which is now so universal that it may almost be regarded as a matter of fashion.

It may seem a cause for surprise that in none of these works have any facts of importance been brought to light which were not known to Raphael's earlier biographers; nor can modern authors claim to have catalogued any greater number of works with Raphael's name than were known a century ago; indeed, a modern history of Raphael based on scientific study could not be expected to attempt any such enterprise. It is, of course, quite true that we know very few facts, and those merely superficial, of Raphael's private life; the autograph records of Raphael are no less scanty, while of his two great contemporaries, Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo, a great number

of autograph remains have come down to us. But what gives value to a really scientific biography of an artist is the amount of critical method the writer brings to bear, in the first place, in discriminating the genuine from the false; and his being in a position to give an account of the development of the master's art, or, in other words, his style.

The circumstances of his life, however, and his personal relations, the private life in short, of any artist as a rule contributes but little to our comprehension of the works he has bequeathed to us; and it must be admitted that we might be intimately informed as to such extraneous matters without being competent to form an opinion as to the works of the master in question, or having any clear views as to his characteristics as an artist revealed in those works. Nothing can be easier than to know and remember the few authentic facts of Raphael's private history; but to enable us to recognise and discriminate Raphael's work demands a competent judgment in the eye which can only be acquired by special training, and not even by that unless the critic himself has a true artistic instinct. Since now-a-days the criticism of works of art lays claim to the dignity of a science, it is bound to adduce proofs of its assertions. The layman has a right to demand of the scientific art critic who discourses to him of Raphael that he should bring evidence when he classes the works attributed to the master as genuine, doubtful, or spurious. He will ask, too, for proof of the grounds on which they are ascribed to an early or a late period of the artist's career. Certainly, if we measure the earlier writers on art by this standard of modern criticism, they will yield no answers to such questions, or at best very unsatisfactory ones; and indeed, we can hardly regard the most recent writings as anything more than attempts and vague efforts to establish a true critical method.

In books on architecture we have long been accustomed to regard the different forms of various features as characteristics of certain styles; the reasons why a similar classification has not yet been adopted in painting are self-evident. An analysis of the architecture of the Gothic period, for instance, leads to the construction of certain comprehensive categories, of which individual buildings must first be studied as a distinct example. Thus a grammar of architecture has been constructed, and without a knowledge of its principles it is impossible to master the history of architecture. And, as it seems to me, it is equally impossible to judge of works of painting without thorough familiarity with the laws by which they must be classified. The exposition of these laws is, no doubt, a more difficult task than in the case of architecture; and for this reason above all others, that the works of the painters of any great art-epoch bear the distinct mark of the artist's individuality, and that this stamp of personal distinction is far more difficult to

1887

RECENT CRITICISM ON RAPHAEL.

345

identify and define than the less specific differences by which architectural works are classified. It requires great practice of eye, and besides that a peculiarly keen sight, to distinguish confidently and explain the difference between the work of Raphael's teachers and those which Raphael himself copied as a pupil from those of his masters, while it is comparatively easy to recognise a French Gothic from an English Gothic church. And with special reference to Raphael it must be stated that an accurate knowledge of the master's works is only possible, if based on a critical study of the types of form that characterise his individual style.

So long as the study of art made no pretensions to be esteemed a science, it mattered little that the better works of his pupils should be ascribed to Raphael, or even the works of well-known painters of quite other schools having no sort of connection with him. During more than two centuries Raphael was regarded as the idealist Italian painter; and on the basis of this vague æsthetic assumption writers on art have not hesitated to attribute to him a vast number of pictures and drawings without asking any further proof of their origin. These authorities were satisfied to appeal to the individual taste of the reader, or of the general public, forgetting that the æsthetic principles on which individual tastes are founded are no less liable to frequent change than the systems of philosophers. Of course I am far from asserting that the sense of beauty which is stamped on the works of Raphael has but a transient and limited. value; still, it is quite certain that the genetic development of Raphael's art is directly allied to that of his teachers, and that a clear apprehension of this relationship to his precursors is indispensable to an understanding of Raphael's work. We must, therefore, remember that an appeal to the æsthetic sense as a criterion in the study of art is not merely inadequate but actually misleading. It is also very intelligible that the commerce in works of art in the past must have profited largely by the extensive application of this æsthetic but ill-defined principle.

We know that even in Raphael's lifetime the craving to possess works by him far exceeded his power of supplying them. We are fond of picturing this prince of painters as making his way to the Vatican or to some Roman palace, followed by his famous pupils and by other painters, and there proceeding to paint with his own hand the wonders still admired as his work, to the amazement of these appreciative bystanders. But the facts were by no means as his romantic biographers would make us believe. It can be proved by documentary evidence that even princes were satisfied if they could obtain from the Pope's court painter the sketch for a composition from which one of his pupils-Giulio Romano, Pierin del Vaga, or whoever it might be-would execute a picture in oil. And when it was only to gratify the taste of a would-be

Mæcenas, such as Francis I. of France, we can hardly blame the overworked master for doing no more than outline the composition of the required subject in a sketch and leaving the execution of the painting to his best disciples. The two famous large pictures executed for the French Court which now hang in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, the St. Michael and the Large Holy Family, as it is called, are both signed' Raphael Vrbinas pinxit 1518.' I cannot think that Raphael is to be held guilty for having sent forth studio works like these under his name. It was at that time the universal practice, as can be proved in the case of many painters before Raphael: Pietro Perugino, Luca Signorelli, Giovanni Bellini, Cima da Conegliano, Bartolommeo Vivarini, and others. It is the pride and merit of the modern science of art criticism that it can discriminate between the studio works that have come down to us under the names of these masters and the work of their own hands, and this is no less possible in the case of Raphael. But, unfortunately, the neglect of this discrimination has led certain writers on the subject to decry Raphael as an apostate from his own standard, and to date the decline of art from Raphael himself. This verdict on the great master is, in my opinion, unquestionably a wrong one, though criticism has not yet rectified it and done him due justice. It will suffice in this place to point out that such a conception of Raphael's art is an error in obvious contradiction to historically authentic facts, and founded on an uncritical study of his works from the purely aesthetic point of view.

that

If, then, modern criticism cannot consent to recognise Raphael's hand in every picture which can be proved to have originated in his studio, or which during his life was accepted as his work, how much more is caution needed in pronouncing on works which have come forward and been fathered on him in the course of the long years have elapsed since his death! Suspicion here becomes a duty. The royal and other collectors of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and the directors of the various public galleries in the nineteenth, have striven to acquire works by Raphael, and private owners have in the same way felt a natural ambition to possess pictures by this great master. When once the æsthetic school of writers had pitched their estimate of Raphael so high that his genius was ranked as immeasurably far above that of any other painter of the Renaissance, it was but natural that every collector should try to purchase a 'Raphael.' If we glance, for instance, through the catalogues of the numerous private collections formed in England alone during the last century and the beginning of this, in almost all we find at least one picture attributed to Raphael. But if Raphael had painted only half the pictures which now exist under his name, he must have produced more during the thirty-seven years of his life than the most hasty and superficial decorator who ever lived to a ripe old age with paint and brush in hand.