[Illustration:  Plate 11.—­Raphael.  “Poetry.”  In the Vatican.]

If the composition of the rectangles is less inevitable it is only because the variety of ways in which such simple rectangles may be filled is almost infinite.  Composition more masterly than that of the “Judgment of Solomon” (Pl. 12), for instance, you will find nowhere; so much is told in a restricted space, yet with no confusion, the space is so admirably filled and its shape so marked by the very lines that enrich and relieve it.  It is as if the design had determined the space rather than the space the design.  If you had a tracing of the figures in the midst of an immensity of white paper you could not bound them by any other line than that of the actual frame.  One of the most remarkable things about it is the way in which the angles, which artists usually avoid and disguise, are here sharply accented.  A great part of the dignity and importance given to the king is due to the fact that his head fills one of these angles, and the opposite one contains the hand of the executioner and the foot by which the living child is held aloft, and to this point the longest lines of the picture lead.  The dead child and the indifferent mother fill the lower corners.  In the middle, herself only half seen and occupying little space, is the true mother, and it seems that her explosive energy, as she rushes to the rescue of her child, has forced all these other figures back to the confines of the picture.  Compare this restless yet subtly balanced composition, full of oblique lines and violent movement, with the gracious, placid formality of the “Adam and Eve,” and you will have some notion of the meaning of this gift of design.

[Illustration:  Plate 12.—­Raphael.  “The Judgment of Solomon.”  In the Vatican.]

But it is the frescoes on the four walls of this room which are Raphael’s greatest triumphs—­the most perfect pieces of monumental decoration in the world.  On the two longer walls, nearly unbroken lunettes of something over a semicircle, he painted the two great compositions of Theology and Philosophy known as the “Disputa” and the “School of Athens.”  The “Disputa” (Pl. 13), the earlier of the two, has the more connection with the art of the past.  The use of gilded relief in the upper part recalls the methods of Pintoricchio, and the hint of the whole arrangement was doubtless taken from those semidomes which existed in many churches.  But what an original idea it was to transform the flat wall of a room into the apse of a cathedral, and what a solemnity it imparts to the discussion that is going on!  The upper part is formal in the extreme, as it need be for the treatment of such a theme, but even here there is variety as well as stateliness in the attitudes and the spacing.  In the lower part the variety becomes almost infinite, yet there is never a jar—­not a line or a fold of drapery that mars the supreme order of the whole.  Besides the uncounted cherubs which float among the rays of glory or support the cloudy thrones of the saints and prophets, there are between seventy and eighty figures in the picture; yet the hosts of heaven and the church on earth seem gathered about the altar with its sacred wafer—­the tiny circle which is the focus of the great composition and the inevitable goal of all regards, as it is the central mystery of Catholic dogma.