those diverse outways of his so versatile intelligence, at
the close of which we behold his unfinished picture of the
Transfiguration, what has been called Raphael's Bible finds its
place--that series of biblical scenes in the Loggie of the Vatican.
And here, while he has shown that he could do something of
Michelangelo's work a little more soothingly than he, this graceful
Roman Catholic rivals also what is perhaps best in the work of the rude
German reformer--of Luther, who came to Rome about this very [56] time,
to find nothing admirable there. Place along with them the Cartoons,
and observe that in this phase of his artistic labour, as Luther
printed his vernacular German version of the Scriptures, so Raphael is
popularising them for an even larger world; he brings the simple, to
their great delight, face to face with the Bible as it is, in all its
variety of incident, after they had so long had to content themselves
with but fragments of it, as presented in the symbolism and in the
brief lections of the Liturgy:--Biblia Pauperum, in a hundred forms of
reproduction, though designed for popes and princes.

But then, for the wise, at the end of yet another of those divergent
ways, glows his painted philosophy in the Parnassus and the School of
Athens, with their numerous accessories. In the execution of those
works, of course, his antiquarian knowledge stood him in good stead;
and here, above all, is the pledge of his immense understanding, at
work on its own natural ground on a purely intellectual deposit, the
apprehension, the transmission to others of complex and difficult
ideas. We have here, in fact, the sort of intelligence to be found in
Lessing, in Herder, in Hegel, in those who, by the instrumentality of
an organised philosophic system, have comprehended in one view or
vision what poetry has been, or what Greek philosophy, as great complex
dynamic facts in the world. But then, with the artist of the sixteenth
century, [57] this synoptic intellectual power worked in perfect
identity with the pictorial imagination and a magic hand. By him large
theoretic conceptions are addressed, so to speak, to the intelligence
of the eye. There had been efforts at such abstract or theoretic
painting before, or say rather, leagues behind him. Modern efforts,
again, we know, and not in Germany alone, to do the like for that
larger survey of such matters which belongs to the philosophy of our
own century; but for one or m