[Illustration:  Plate 13.—­Raphael.  The “Disputa.”  In the Vatican.]

Opposite, in the “School of Athens” (Pl. 14), the treatment is different but equally successful.  The hieratic majesty of the “Disputa” was here unnecessary, but a tranquil and spacious dignity was to be attained, and it is attained through the use of vertical and horizontal lines—­the lines of stability and repose, while the bounding curve is echoed again and again in the diminishing arches of the imagined vaulting.  The figures, fewer in number than in the “Disputa” and confined to the lower half of the composition, are ranged in two long lines across the picture; but the nearer line is broken in the centre and the two figures on the steps, serving as connecting-links between the two ranks, give to the whole something of that semicircular grouping so noticeable in the companion picture.  The bas-reliefs upon the architecture and the great statues of Apollo and Minerva above them draw the eye upward at the sides, and this movement is intensified by the arrangement of the lateral groups of figures.  By these means the counter curve to the arch above, the one fixed necessity, apparently, of the lunette, is established.  It is more evident in the perspective curve of the painted dome.  Cover this line with a bit of paper, or substitute for it a straight lintel like that seen beyond, and you will be surprised to find how much of the beauty of the picture has disappeared.  The grouping of the figures themselves, the way they are played about into clumps or separated to give greater importance, by isolation, to a particular head, is even more beyond praise than in the “Disputa.”  The whole design has but one fault, and that is an afterthought.  In the cartoon the disproportioned bulk of Heraclitus, thrust into the foreground and writing in an impossible attitude on a desk in impossible perspective, is not to be found.  It is such a blot upon the picture that one cannot believe that Raphael added it of his own motion; rather it must have been placed there at the dictation of some meddling cardinal or learned humanist who, knowing nothing of art, could not see why any vacant space should not be filled with any figure whose presence seemed to him historically desirable.  One is tempted to suspect even, so clumsy is the figure and so out of scale with its neighbors, that the master refused to disfigure his work himself and left the task to one of his apprentices.  If it had been done by one of them, say Giulio Romano, after the picture was entirely completed and at the time of the “Incendio del’ Borgo,” it could not be more out of keeping.

[Illustration:  Plate 14.—­Raphael.  “The School of Athens.”  In the Vatican.]