ramping limits of
ecclesiastical tradition are transcended. The synod of the antique sages
finds a place beside the synod of the Fathers and the company of Saints.
Parnassus and the allegory of the virtues front each other. The legend of
Marsyas and the mythus of the Fall are companion pictures. A new
catholicity, a new orthodoxy of the beautiful, appears. The Renaissance in
all its breadth and liberality of judgment takes ideal form. Nor is there
any sense of discord; for the genius of Raphael views both revelations,
Christian and pagan, from a point of view of art above them. To his pure
and unimpeded faculty the task of translating motives so diverse into
mutually concordant shapes was easy. On the domed ceilings of the Loggie
he painted sacred history in a series of exquisitely simple compositions,
known as Raphael's Bible. The walls and pilasters were adorned with
arabesques that anticipated the discovery of Pompeii, and surpassed the
best of Roman frescoes in variety and freedom. With his own hands he
coloured the incomparable "Triumph of Galatea" in Agostino Chigi's villa
on the Tiber, while his pupils traced the legend of Cupid and Psyche from
his drawings on the roof of the great banquet hall. Remaining within the
circuit of Rome, we may turn from the sibyls of S. Maria della Pace to the
genii of the planets in S. Maria del Popolo, from the "Violin-player" of
the Sciarra palace to the "Transfiguration" in the Vatican: wherever we
go, we find the masterpieces of this youth, so various in conception, so
equal in performance. And then, to think that the palaces and
picture-galleries of Europe are crowded with his easel-pictures, that his
original drawings display a boundless store of prodigal inventive
creativeness, that the Cartoons, of which England is proud, are alone
enough to found a mighty master's fame!

The vast mass of Raphael's works is by itself astounding. The accuracy of
their design and the perfection of their execution are literally
overwhelming to the imagination, that attempts to realise the conditions
of his short life. There is nothing, or but very little, of rhetoric in
all this world of pictures. The brain has guided the hand throughout, and
the result is sterling poetry. The knowledge, again, expressed in many of
his frescoes is so thorough that we wonder whether in his body lived again
the soul of some accomplished sage. How, for example, did he appropriate
the history of philosophy, set fort