A portion of the pile is devoted to more worthy purposes; for the Academy of Raphael here holds its sittings, and preserves a collection of curiosities and books illustrative of the great painter’s life and works.  They have recently placed in a tiny oratory, scooped by Guidobaldo II. from the thickness of the wall, a cast of Raphael’s skull, which will be studied with interest and veneration.  It has the fineness of modelling combined with shapeliness of form and smallness of scale which is said to have characterised Mozart and Shelley.

The impression left upon the mind after traversing this palace in its length and breadth is one of weariness and disappointment.  How shall we reconstruct the long-past life which filled its rooms with sound, the splendour of its pageants, the thrill of tragedies enacted here?  It is not difficult to crowd its doors and vacant spaces with liveried servants, slim pages in tight hose, whose well-combed hair escapes from tiny caps upon their silken shoulders.  We may even replace the tapestries of Troy which hung one hall, and build again the sideboards with their embossed gilded plate.  But are these chambers really those where Emilia Pia held debate on love with Bembo and Castiglione; where Bibbiena’s witticisms and Fra Serafino’s pranks raised smiles on courtly lips; where Bernardo Accolti, ‘the Unique,’ declaimed his verses to applauding crowds?  Is it possible that into yonder hall, where now the lion of S. Mark looks down alone on staring desolation, strode the Borgia in all his panoply of war, a gilded glittering dragon, and from the dais tore the Montefeltri’s throne, and from the arras stripped their ensigns, replacing these with his own Bull and Valentinus Dux?  Here Tasso tuned his lyre for Francesco Maria’s wedding-feast, and read ‘Aminta’ to Lucrezia d’Este.  Here Guidobaldo listened to the jests and whispered scandals of the Aretine.  Here Titian set his easel up to paint; here the boy Raphael, cap in hand, took signed and sealed credentials from his Duchess to the Gonfalonier of Florence.  Somewhere in these huge chambers, the courtiers sat before a torch-lit stage, when Bibbiena’s ‘Calandria’ and Caetiglione’s ‘Tirsi,’ with their miracles of masques and mummers, whiled the night away.  Somewhere, we know not where, Giuliano de’ Medici made love in these bare rooms to that mysterious mother of ill-fated Cardinal Ippolito; somewhere, in some darker nook, the bastard Alessandro sprang to his strange-fortuned life of tyranny and license, which Brutus-Lorenzino cut short with a traitor’s poignard-thrust in Via Larga.  How many men, illustrious for arts and letters, memorable by their virtues or their crimes, have trod these silent corridors, from the great Pope Julius down to James III., self-titled King of England, who tarried here with Clementina Sobieski through some twelve months of his ex-royal exile!  The memories of all this folk, flown guests and masters of the still-abiding palace-chambers, haunt us as we hurry through.  They are but filmy shadows.  We cannot grasp them, localise them, people surrounding emptiness with more than withering cobweb forms.