ground we have for placing the
beginning of human intellectual strength at about the age of twelve
years.[36] Assume, therefore, this period for the beginning of Raphael's
strength. He died at thirty-seven. And in his twenty-fifth year, one
half-year only past the precise center of his available life, he was
sent for to Rome, to decorate the Vatican for Pope Julius II., and
having until that time worked exclusively in the ancient and stern
mediaeval manner, he, in the first chamber which he decorated in that
palace, wrote upon its walls the _Mene, Tekel, Upharsin_ of the Arts of
Christianity.

[Footnote 36: Luke ii. 42, 49.]

And he wrote it thus: On one wall of that chamber he placed a picture of
the World or Kingdom of _Theology_, presided over by _Christ_. And on
the side wall of that same chamber he placed the World or Kingdom of
_Poetry_, presided over by _Apollo_. And from that spot, and from that
hour, the intellect and the art of Italy date their degradation.

126. Observe, however, the significance of this fact is not in the mere
use of the figure of the heathen god to indicate the domain of poetry.
Such a symbolical use had been made of the figures of heathen deities in
the best times of Christian art. But it is in the fact, that being
called to Rome especially to adorn the palace of the so-called head of
the Church, and called as the chief representative of the Christian
artists of his time, Raphael had neither religion nor originality enough
to trace the spirit of poetry and the spirit of philosophy to the
inspiration of the true God, as well as that of theology; but that, on
the contrary, _he elevated the creations of fancy on the one wall, to
the same rank as the objects of faith upon the other_; that in
deliberate, balanced opposition to the Rock of the Mount Zion, he reared
the rock of Parnassus, and the rock of the Acropolis; that, among the
masters of poetry we find him enthroning Petrarch and Pindar, but not
Isaiah nor David, and for lords over the domain of philosophy we find
the masters of the school of Athens, but neither of those greater
masters by the last of whom that school was rebuked,--those who received
their wisdom from heaven itself, in the vision of Gibeon,[37] and the
lightning of Damascus.

[Footnote 37: 1 Kings iii. 5.]

127. The doom of the arts of Europe went forth from that chamber, and it
was brought about in great part by the very excellencies of the man who
had thus marked