own hands he coloured the incomparable “Triumph of Galatea” in Agostino Chigi’s villa on the Tiber, while his pupils traced the legend of Cupid and Psyche from his drawings on the roof of the great banquet hall.  Remaining within the circuit of Rome, we may turn from the sibyls of S. Maria della Pace to the genii of the planets in S. Maria del Popolo, from the “Violin-player” of the Sciarra palace to the “Transfiguration” in the Vatican:  wherever we go, we find the masterpieces of this youth, so various in conception, so equal in performance.  And then, to think that the palaces and picture-galleries of Europe are crowded with his easel-pictures, that his original drawings display a boundless store of prodigal inventive creativeness, that the Cartoons, of which England is proud, are alone enough to found a mighty master’s fame!

The vast mass of Raphael’s works is by itself astounding.  The accuracy of their design and the perfection of their execution are literally overwhelming to the imagination, that attempts to realise the conditions of his short life.  There is nothing, or but very little, of rhetoric in all this world of pictures.  The brain has guided the hand throughout, and the result is sterling poetry.  The knowledge, again, expressed in many of his frescoes is so thorough that we wonder whether in his body lived again the soul of some accomplished sage.  How, for example, did he appropriate the history of philosophy, set forth so luminously in the “School of Athens,” that each head, each gesture, is the epitome of some system?  Fabio Calvi may, indeed, have supplied him with serviceable notes on Greek philosophy.  But to Raphael alone belongs the triumph of having personified the dry elements of learning in appropriate living forms.  The same is true of the “Parnassus,” and, in a less degree, of the “Disputa.”  To the physiognomist these frescoes will always be invaluable.  The “Heliodorus,” the “Miracle of Bolsena,” and the Cartoons, display a like faculty applied with more dramatic purpose.  Passion and action take the place of representative ideas; but the capacity for translating into perfect human form what has first been intellectually apprehended by the artist, is the same.

If, after estimating the range of thought revealed in this portion of Raphael’s work, we next consider the labour of the mind involved in the distribution of so many multitudes of beautiful and august human figures, in the modelling of their drapery, the study of their expression, and their grouping into balanced compositions, we may form some notion of the magnitude of Raphael’s performance.  It is, indeed, probable that all attempts at reflective analysis of this kind do injustice to the spontaneity of the painter’s method.  Yet, even supposing that the “Miraculous Draught of Fishes” or the “School of Athens” were seen by him as in a vision, this presumption will increase our wonder at the imagination which could hold so rich a store of details ready for immediate use.  That Raphael paid the most minute attention to the details of his work, is shown by the studies made for these two subjects, and by the drawings for the “Transfiguration.”  A young man bent on putting forth his power the first time in a single picture that should prove his mastery, could not have laboured with more diligence than Raphael at the height of his fame and in full possession of his matured faculty.