so marked by the very lines that
enrich and relieve it. It is as if the design had determined the space
rather than the space the design. If you had a tracing of the figures in
the midst of an immensity of white paper you could not bound them by any
other line than that of the actual frame. One of the most remarkable
things about it is the way in which the angles, which artists usually
avoid and disguise, are here sharply accented. A great part of the
dignity and importance given to the king is due to the fact that his
head fills one of these angles, and the opposite one contains the hand
of the executioner and the foot by which the living child is held aloft,
and to this point the longest lines of the picture lead. The dead
child and the indifferent mother fill the lower corners. In the middle,
herself only half seen and occupying little space, is the true mother,
and it seems that her explosive energy, as she rushes to the rescue of
her child, has forced all these other figures back to the confines of
the picture. Compare this restless yet subtly balanced composition, full
of oblique lines and violent movement, with the gracious, placid
formality of the "Adam and Eve," and you will have some notion of the
meaning of this gift of design.

[Illustration: Plate 12.--Raphael. "The Judgment of Solomon."
In the Vatican.]

But it is the frescoes on the four walls of this room which are
Raphael's greatest triumphs--the most perfect pieces of monumental
decoration in the world. On the two longer walls, nearly unbroken
lunettes of something over a semicircle, he painted the two great
compositions of Theology and Philosophy known as the "Disputa" and the
"School of Athens." The "Disputa" (Pl. 13), the earlier of the two, has
the more connection with the art of the past. The use of gilded relief
in the upper part recalls the methods of Pintoricchio, and the hint of
the whole arrangement was doubtless taken from those semidomes which
existed in many churches. But what an original idea it was to transform
the flat wall of a room into the apse of a cathedral, and what a
solemnity it imparts to the discussion that is going on! The upper part
is formal in the extreme, as it need be for the treatment of such a
theme, but even here there is variety as well as stateliness in the
attitudes and the spacing. In the lower part the variety becomes almost
infinite, yet there is never a jar--not a line or a fold of drapery that
mars the supre