Note *191 — Chapter XXIX
Reading edition
Raphael seems to us to-day to have been a supreme portrait painter. His other easel pictures, splendid as they often are in "space composition," seem to lack sincerity. His frescoes have a perfect decorative value, but little force or real contact with life. If they sum up the Renaissance, they do so only in part, with much sacrifice of truth and of that virility and assured contact of life which were its most precious possessions.