Raphael appears to have quitted

After this, Raphael appears to have quitted the school of Perugino, and to have commenced an independent career: he executed at this time some pictures in the neighbouring town of Città di Castello. With all the features of the Umbrian School, they already show the freer impulse of his own mind,—a decided effort to individualize. The most excellent of these,oil paintings for sale, and the most interesting example of this first period of Raphael's development, is the Marriage of the Virgin (Lo Sposalizio), inscribed with his name and the date 1504, now in the Brera at Milan. With much of the stiffness and constraint of the old school, the figures are noble and dignified; the countenances, of the sweetest style of beauty, are expressive of a tender, enthusiastic melancholy, which lends a peculiar charm to this subject. oil painting reproductions
In 1504 Raphael painted the two little pictures in the Louvre, S. George and S. Michael (Nos. 1501-2) for the Duke of Urbino. The Knight Dreaming, a small picture, now in the National Gallery (No. 213), is supposed to have been painted a year earlier.
In the autumn of 1504 Raphael went to Florence. Tuscan art had now attained its highest perfection, and the most celebrated artists were there contending for the palm. From this period begins his emancipation modern art oil paintings

PLATE VI.—PIETRO PERUGINO
CENTRAL PORTION OF ALTAR-PIECE
National Gallery, London

from the confined manner of Perugino's school; the youth ripens into manhood and acquires the free mastery of form.

To this time belong the celebrated Madonna del Granduca, now in the Pitti Gallery, and another formerly belonging to the Duke of Terra Nuova, and now at Berlin (No. 247a). In the next year we find him employed on several large works in Perugia; these show for the first time the influence of Florentine art in the purity, fullness, and intelligent treatment of form; at the same time many of the motives of the Peruginesque school are still apparent. The famous Cowper Madonna, recently sold to an American for £140,000,oil paintings for sale online, also belongs to the year 1505, when the blending of the two influences resulted in a picture which has been extolled by the sanest of critics as "the loveliest of Raphael's Virgins." An altar-piece, executed for the church of the Serviti at Perugia, inscribed with the date 1506, is the famous Madonna dei Ansidei, purchased for the National Gallery from the Duke of Marlborough. Besides the dreamy religious feeling of the School of Perugia, we perceive here the aim at a greater freedom, founded on deeper study. oil paintings wholesale