to be mentioned presently, that even here the artist did not have a perfectly free hand, as we know he did not later.  Whoever thought of the subjects, it was Raphael who discovered how to treat them in such a way as to make of this room the most perfectly planned piece of decoration in the world.  Sodoma had left, on the vaulting, four circular medallions and four rectangular spaces which were to be filled with figure compositions.  In the circles, each directly above one of the great wall spaces, Raphael placed figures personifying Theology, Philosophy, Poetry and Justice; in the rectangles he illustrated these subjects with the stories of “The Fall of Man,” “Apollo and Marsyas,” and “The Judgment of Solomon,” and with that figure, leaning over a celestial globe, which must be meant for Science.  All of these panels are on curved surfaces, and Raphael’s decorative instinct led him, on this account and to preserve the supremacy of the great wall spaces below, to suppress all distance, placing his figures against a background of simulated gold mosaic and arranging them, virtually, upon one plane.  There is, therefore, no possible question of “space composition” here.  These panels depend for their effect entirely upon composition in two dimensions—­upon the perfect balancing of filled and empty spaces, the invention of interesting shapes, and the arrangement of beautiful lines.  It is the pattern that counts, and the pattern is perfect.

The “Poetry” (Pl. 11) is the most beautiful of the medallions, but they are all much alike:  a draped female figure in the middle, seated to give it scale, large enough to fill the height of the circle amply but without crowding, and winged putti, bearing inscribed tablets, on either side.  There are other ways of filling a circle acceptably, as Botticelli had shown and as Raphael was to show again in more than one tondo, but for their situation, marking the principal axes of the room, there is no way so adequate as this.  As Mr. Blashfield has said, speaking from experience:  “When a modern painter has a medallion to fill and has tried one arrangement after another, he inevitably realizes that it is Raphael who has found the best ordering that could be found; and the modern painter builds upon his lines, laid down so distinctly that the greater the practice of the artist the more complete becomes his realization of Raphael’s comprehension of essentials in composition.”  Not only so, but the modern painter finds as inevitably that, accepting this ordering as the best, even then he cannot add another figure to these four.  He may, perhaps, draw it better in detail or give more character to the head, but he cannot capture that felicity of spacing, that absoluteness of balance, that variety and vivacity combined with monumental repose.  The more his nature and training have made him a designer the more certainly he feels, before that single medallion of Poetry, that he is in the presence of the inimitable master of design.