monumental composition.  The “style” of his draperies, so much and so justly admired, is composition of draperies.  He was not a colorist as Titian was a colorist, or a painter as Velazquez was a painter—­he was just so much of a colorist and a painter as is compatible with being the greatest of decorative designers.  Everything in his finest works is entirely subordinated to the beauty and expressiveness of composition, and nothing is allowed to have too great an individual interest for its predestined part in the final result.  Probably he could not have drawn like Michelangelo or painted like Hals—­certainly, when he once understood himself, he would not have desired to do so.

Even in his early work he showed his gifts as a composer, and some of the small pictures of his Florentine period are quite perfect in design.  Nothing could be better composed within their restricted field than the “Madonna del Cardellino” or the “Belle Jardiniere.”  Nearly at the end of the period he made his greatest failure, the “Entombment” of the Borghese Gallery.  It was his most ambitious effort up to this time and he wanted to put everything that he had learned into it, to draw like Michelangelo and to express emotion like Mantegna.  He made a host of studies for it, tried it this way and that, lost all spontaneity and all grasp of the ensemble.  What he finally produced is a thing of fragments, falling far below his models in the qualities he was attempting to rival and redeemed by little or nothing of the quality proper to himself.  But, apparently, it answered its purpose.  It freed him from preoccupation with the work of others.  When his great opportunity came to him, in the commission to decorate the Camera della Segnatura, his painfully acquired knowledge was sufficiently at his command to give him no further trouble.  He could concentrate himself on the essential part of his problem, the creation of an entirely appropriate, dignified, and beautiful decorative design.  It was the work for which he was born, and he succeeded so immediately and so admirably in it that neither he nor any one else has ever been able to fill such spaces so perfectly again.

There are fourteen important compositions in the room.  The decoration of the ceiling had already been begun by Sodoma, and Sodoma’s decorative framework Raphael allowed to remain; partly, perhaps, from courtesy, more probably because its general disposition was admirable and not to be improved on.  If Sodoma had begun any of the larger paintings which were to fill his frames they were removed to make way for the new work.  There has always been a great deal of discussion as to whether Raphael himself invented the admirable scheme of subjects by which the room was made to illustrate the Renaissance ideal of culture with its division into the four great fields of learning:  divinity, philosophy (including science), poetry, and law.  In reality, the question is of little importance.  There seems to be at least one bit of internal evidence,