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CARTOON I-Page 25.

THE MIRACULOUS DRAUGHT OF FISHES.

CARTOON II.-Page 47.

THE CHARGE TO PETER

CARTOON III.-Page 81.

PETER AND JOHN HEALING THE LAME MAN.

CARTOON IV.-Page 101.

THE DEATH OF ANANIAS.

CARTOON V.-Page 123.

ELYMAS THE SORCERER STRUCK BLIND.

CARTOON VI.-Page 141.

PAUL AND BARNABAS AT LYSTRA.

CARTOON VII.-Page 165.

PAUL PREACHING AT ATHENS.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

Wonderful, and almost miraculous, as were the energies which the human mind displayed in Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century, that prodigious development of moral and intellectual resources was not independent of discoverable causes, and successive stages of preparation. The traces of such preparatory steps we may find in the state of religion, of literature, of commerce, and all the active concerns of life; but in no field of mental exertion are they more manifest than in that which, at this period of universal renovation was, perhaps, more zealously and successfully cultivated than any other-the department of the Fine Arts, and, especially, Painting.

Several artists had already appeared, who not only obtained the admiration of their own and the immediately succeeding ages, but have left behind them

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names that will not cease to be mentioned with respect. The first Christian school of art arose in Florence. In that city, at the commencement of the fourteenth century, died Cimabue, the father of modern painting. He was succeeded by Giotto, whose improved style became the model of the times which ensued, till the appearance of Masaccio, who, a hundred years later, carried the art far beyond the point it had previously reached. Masaccio's reputation remained, in its turn, without a rival down to the period of Lionardo da Vinci, one of the most accomplished of painters; whose exquisite works ap

pear as the connecting link between the old and the new, or most perfect style, before the bondage of the dry, Gothic manner was wholly burst, and the free and vigorous spirit of the most generally fascinating of the imaginative arts "scaled the highest heaven of invention," in the person of Michelangiolo Buonaroti.

This was a period most fortunate for the art of painting, whether we regard the external advantages of the time, in the progress of discovery and accessory knowledge, and in the eager patronage of the powerful and enlightened; or its internal, in the accumulated experience of many generations, which had

left instructive traces of its progress, even as far as to the limits of the utmost attainable point-the combination of the greatest genius with the purest taste, and the connection of a thorough mastery over the resources of the art with a sobriety and temperance which forbade their abuse. And at this period it was that the illustrious individual appeared, to whom, as possessing, in the highest degree and in a most harmonious union, the qualities necessary to a great artist, the world has agreed to assign the first honours in this delightful province of the realms of intellect.

Raffaelle Sanzio was born in the city of Urbino, in Italy, in the year 1483. His earliest master, if we except his father, Giovanni Sanzio, or di Santi, was Pietro of Perugia, a painter of no inconsiderable ability, but in the hard dry manner which prevailed before the time of Lionardo and Michelangiolo. At the age of sixteen he left Pietro, and worked with Pinturrichio, an eminent artist in his day, at Siena. Attracted by the reputation of Lionardo and Michelangiolo, who presided over the flourishing school of Florence, he repaired to that city; and being, by the study of their sublime productions, in a short time emancipated from the restraints of his previous education, he quickly produced pictures

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