390 Painting in Italy. Florence, and found all that he required in the cartoons of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, which excited his enthusiastic admiration. Peculiarly susceptible to the influences alike of the old and new Florentine schools, Raphael's transcendent genius manifested itself perhaps in nothing so much as in his marvellous power of assimilating and fusing, so to speak, with his own peculiar gifts all that was best and highest in the works of others, building up therefrom a lofty and independent style essentially his own. Of the works of the first period of Raphael's life, a Madonna with SS. Jerome and Francis, in the Berlin Museum, and the Marriage of the Virgin (known as the Sposalizio), in the Brera, Milan, are among the most esteemed. In the last-named (Fig. 137) we see the Virgin attended by five maidens and S. Joseph by five youths, Mary's former suitors, whose disappointment is symbolized by the flowerless reeds they hold. Of the paintings executed at Florence, in the master's second manner, we must name, as especially celebrated, the Madonna del CardeUino (with the Goldfinch), in the Uffizi, Florence ; the Madonna of the Tempi Family, in the Pinakothek, Munich ; the famous Madonna in the Louvre, known as La Belle Jardiniere (Fig. 139) ; Lord Cowper's Madonna — known as The Little Pan- shanger Raphael (of about the year 1505), to distinguish it from the more famous painting by that artist in the same collection — at Panshanger; 8. Catherine, in the National Gallery; the Entombment, an altar-piece, now in the Borghese Palace, Rome ; and the Madonna del Baldacchino (of the Canopy), in the Pitti Palace, Florence, which belongs to the close of the second period. Here we must mention the other and more famous
