mirable
ways of filling pierced lunettes. The balancing, in the one, of the
solitary figure of the pope against the compact group of seven
figures--a group that has to be carried up above the curved screen in
order to counteract the importance given to Julius by his isolation and
by the greater mass of his supporting group below--is a triumph of
arrangement; and here, again, it is notable that the bleeding wafer, the
necessary centre of interest, is situated on a straight line drawn
diagonally from the keystone of the arch to the centre of the window
head, and almost exactly half-way between these two points, while the
great curve of the screen leads to it from either side. In the
symmetrically pierced lunette opposite, the distribution of the space
into three distinct but united pictures, the central one seen through
the grating of the prison, is a highly ingenious and, on the whole, an
acceptable variant on previous inventions. But these two are the last of
the Vatican frescoes that show Raphael's infallible instinct as a
composer. He grows tired, exaggerates his mannerisms, gives a greater
and greater share of the work to his pupils. The later Stanze are either
pompous or confused, or both, until we reach the higgledy-piggledy of
the "Burning of the Borgo" or that inextricable tangle, suggestive of
nothing so much as of a dish of macaroni, the "Battle of Constantine," a
picture painted after the master's death, but for which he probably left
something in the way of sketches.

[Illustration: Plate 17.--Raphael. "The Mass of Bolsena."
In the Vatican.]

Yet even in what seems this decadence of his talent Raphael only needed
a new problem to revive his admirable powers in their full splendor. In
1514 he painted the "Sibyls" (Pl. 19) of Santa Maria della Pace, in a
frieze-shaped panel cut by a semicircular arch, and the new shape given
him to fill inspired a composition as perfect in itself and as
indisputably the only right one for the place as anything he ever did.
Among his latest works were the pendentives of the Farnesina, with the
story of Cupid and Psyche--works painted and even drawn by his pupils,
coarse in types and heavy in color but altogether astonishing in freedom
and variety of design. The earlier painters covered their vaulting
with ornamental patterns in which spaces were reserved for independent
pictures, like the rectangles of the Stanza della Segnatura. It was a
bold innovation when Michelangelo disc