A prophet is never without honour in his own country after his fame has been recognised by the world; indeed, his own country will cling piously to him after the tide of his larger reputation has receded, being as slow to unlearn as to learn. Particularly is this true of painters. And when the artist has achieved the feat of substituting himself for a town in the popular imagination, like Bassano, Garofalo, Luini, Sassoferrato, Correggio, the town thus snubbed is usually prudent enough to identify itself with his glory. But it must be humiliating for a town like Correggio, once the capital of a principality, to owe its only hold upon the present to a painter who did not live there, and of whom it does not possess a single picture. Let arrogant cities take warning: the time may come when their only niche in history will be provided by some obscure citizen now neglected, if not ill-treated or repudiated.

Once arrived, then, the Old Masters are not to be shaken off, even after they have departed again. Their birthplace or their working centre makes a cult of them, and it is touching to see them at home, each presiding over a sala at least of his works, and though depreciated abroad, yet still at an exorbitant premium in his local shrine, like some obscure paterfamilias basking and burgeoning at the family hearth. Guercino is still a god at Cento, his statue in the piazza, his pictures in the gallery. Possagno has a shrine with casts of all Canova. With what a gusto did the cicerones of Mantua talk of Giulio Romano! How the name rolled from the tongue, how it brightened a dingy fresco and glorified a dubious canvas. Si! Si! Tutto di Giulio Romano! Poor Giulio Romano! Not that those giants of yours tumbling on their heads in the Palazzo Te are as detestable as Dickens said. Those of David and Goliath in the great courtyard are even charming. And more fortunate than poor Guido, who must share his Bologna with Francia, you have a town to yourself. Even in his own sala poor Guido is put in the shade by the poetry of NiccolÒ da Foligno.

Moretto is properly the hero of Brescia, though not born there, and he dominates the Palazzo Martinengo with his charming St. Nicholas presenting the School Children to the Virgin, and a dozen other pictures, as he dominates the bishop’s palace and the churches. It is rare that so large a proportion of a painter’s work should remain at home, even when the painter himself is as homekeeping as was Moretto.

Very proud are they in Forli of Melozzo, exhibiting engravings of all his works, and even a rescued shop sign of his representing a pepper-brayer banging with his pestle. Marco Palmezzani, too, is high in honour in Forli. Correggio, who made his home in Parma, has been adopted by that city, and it is one of the few things to the credit of Marie Louise that she inspired this sacrosanct treatment of his work, in rich pilastered frames, under sculptured and vaulted ceilings, with two pictures to a room, or in the case of the Madonna della Scodella a room to itself. Poor Parmigiano, the real native of Parma, is thrown into the shade, though there is a Parmigiano room in the Pinacoteca and a Parmigiano statue in the Piazza della Steccata.

Urbino, a city as dead as Correggio, except for the fame of its ancient majolica, resembles it further in not possessing a single example of the work of its greatest son, so that Raphael’s father, who had the talent which so often sires a genius, pathetically holds the place of honour with his Santa Chiara and other more or less mediocre pictures. And yet there were five years at least in which Guidobaldo Montefeltro might have summoned Raphael to that famous Court which Castiglione depicted as a model. To-day, of course, the steep cobbled old city is all Raphael, with the exception of Polidoro Virgili, “the most learned man of letters of the fifteenth century,” and Gianleone Semproni, “Epic Poet”(!). A Contrada Raffaello, and a bronze bust, and a monument 36 ft. high, all attest his glory. But it would have been far wiser to have perpetuated his exclusion from the Montefeltro Palace than to represent him by a hideous complete set of cheap tiny photographs of his works, all set side by side in a large frame which stands in the chapel, together with his skull in a glass case! At least, it is not really his skull—it has not even that excuse—it is merely a cast in clay, though the clay was taken from his skeleton, from the cavity where once the heart that loved all beauty had pulsed. And here, looking upon the scenes his youthful eye had dwelt on; here, where one would wish to surrender oneself to memories of his magical creations, this skull with its perfect teeth is set to grin its mockery of art and life.

An anthropologist, we are told by an eminent historian of art, supposed this cast to be that of a woman, and we are invited to see in it the explanation of Raphael’s suavity. But I had been satisfactorily explaining this suavity myself by the amenities of the tame landscape—olives, poplars, hawthorn, a half-dried river, pairs of white oxen—as I trudged the forty kilometres from Pesaro to Urbino, till to my chagrin the character of the country changed and grew wilder and wilder as I approached his birthplace.

At dusk I was climbing up to an Urbino towering romantically above me with its few twinkling lights and wafting down the music of its vesper bells. My persuasion that I had explained Raphael dwindled with every painful step up the “Contrada Raffaello,” probably the steepest and worst-paved street in the world, and vanished altogether by the time I had climbed one of the gigantic stone staircases of the rock-hewn fortress city. And next morning I looked from the loggia of the great hook-nosed Duke upon wonderful rolling mountains, range upon range, snow-capped at the last, and winding paths twisting among them in a great poetry of space. Ha! Poetry of space! Was not that now set down as Raphael’s one real claim to greatness? And it was here no doubt he had found it, just as Piero dei Franceschi had found it, when here at the Duke’s invitation. But a hundred thousand other people—I suddenly remembered—have been born or have lived at Urbino, and why—I asked myself—were they not inspired to paint like Raphael? And a hundred thousand other men have had feminine skulls (not to mention women), and why have they not produced Transfigurations and Schools of Athens? Alas! I fear the Taine method has its limitations. Rousselot in his “Histoire de l’Évangile Éternel” talks as if Calabria with its solitary mountains and valleys could not help producing Joachim of Flora, nor Assisi St. Francis. But why do these places not go on producing saints and mystics?