cilia" was offered to him for $18,000, but the price was thought too
high, and a copy by Denis Calvaert sufficed. This still hangs in the
Zwinger at Dresden, the home of the Sistine Madonna. According to
Vasari, the organ and other musical instruments in this picture were
painted by one of the master's pupils, Giovanni da Udine. Raphael
again designed a St. Cecilia in the now ruined fresco of her martyrdom,
which either the master or one of his pupils painted in the chapel of
the Pope's hunting castle of La Magliana, near Rome. Fortunately, Marc
Antonio's engraving has preserved for us the composition of this work.

Of the many tributes to this "St. Cecilia," we will select the one by
Shelley.

"We saw besides one picture of Raphael--St. Cecilia; this is in another
and higher style; you forget that it is a picture as you look at it;
and yet it is most unlike any of those things which we call reality.
It is of the inspired and ideal kind, and seems to have been conceived
and executed in a similar state of feeling to that which produced among
the ancients those perfect specimens of poetry and sculpture which are
the baffling models of succeeding generations. There is a unity and a
perfection in it of an incommunicable kind. The central figure, St.
Cecilia, seems rapt in such inspiration as produced her image in the
painter's mind; her deep, dark, eloquent eyes lifted up; her chestnut
hair flung back from her forehead--she holds an organ in her hands--her
countenance, as it were, calmed by the depth of its passion and
rapture, and penetrated throughout with the warm and radiant light of
life. She is listening to the music of heaven, and, as I imagine, has
just ceased to sing, for the four figures that surround her evidently
point, by their attitudes, toward her; particularly St. John, who, with
a tender yet impassioned gesture, bends his countenance toward her,
languid with the depth of his emotion. At her feet lie various
instruments of music, broken and unstrung. Of the colouring I do not
speak; it eclipses nature, yet has all her truth and softness."

Dryden's "Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687," set to music by Draghi, an
Italian composer, ends with this verse, apposite to our picture:

"Orpheus could lead the savage race,
And trees uprooted left their place,
Sequacious of the lyre:
But bright Cecilia raised the wonder higher;
When to her organ vocal breath was given,
An angel heard, and