and—­to coin a word—­Sixtinish.  All these, I may say, are questioned by experts; but some very fine hand is to be seen in them any way.  Over the “Ezekiel” is still another, No. 165, the “Madonna detta del Baldacchino,” which is so much better in the photographs.  Next this group—­No. 164—­we find Raphael’s friend Perugino with an Entombment, but it lacks his divine glow; and above it a soft and mellow and easy Andrea del Sarto, No. 163, which ought to be in a church rather than here.  A better Perugino is No. 42, which has all his sweetness, but to call it the Magdalen is surely wrong; and close by it a rather formal Fra Bartolommeo, No. 159, “Gesu Resuscitato,” from the church of SS.  Annunziata, in which once again the babies who hold the circular landscape are the best part.  After another doubtful Raphael—­the sly Cardinal Divizio da Bibbiena, No. 158—­let us look at an unquestioned one, No. 151, the most popular picture in Florence, if not the whole world, Raphael’s “Madonna della Sedia,” that beautiful rich scene of maternal tenderness and infantine peace.  Personally I do not find myself often under Raphael’s spell; but here he conquers.  The Madonna again is without enough expression, but her arms are right, and the Child is right, and the colour is so rich, almost Venetian in that odd way in which Raphael now and then could suggest Venice.

It is interesting to compare Raphael’s two famous Madonnas in this room:  this one belonging to his Roman period and the other, opposite it, to Florence, with the differences so marked.  For by the time he painted this he knew more of life and human affection.  This picture, I suppose, might be called the consummation of Renaissance painting in fullest bloom:  the latest triumph of that impulse.  I do not say it is the best; but it may be called a crown on the whole movement both in subject and treatment.  Think of the gulf between the Cimabue Madonna and the Giotto Madonna, side by side, which we saw in the Accademia, and this.  With so many vivid sympathies Giotto must have wanted with all his soul to make the mother motherly and the child childlike; but the time was not yet; his hand was neither free nor fit.  Between Giotto and Raphael had to come many things before such treatment as this was possible; most of all, I think, Luca della Robbia had to come between, for he was the most valuable reconciler of God and man of them all.  He was the first to bring a tender humanity into the Church, the first to know that a mother’s fingers, holding a baby, sink into its soft little body.  Without Luca I doubt if the “Madonna della Sedia” could be the idyll of protective solicitude and loving pride that it is.