Yet even in what seems this decadence of his talent Raphael only needed a new problem to revive his admirable powers in their full splendor.  In 1514 he painted the “Sibyls” (Pl. 19) of Santa Maria della Pace, in a frieze-shaped panel cut by a semicircular arch, and the new shape given him to fill inspired a composition as perfect in itself and as indisputably the only right one for the place as anything he ever did.  Among his latest works were the pendentives of the Farnesina, with the story of Cupid and Psyche—­works painted and even drawn by his pupils, coarse in types and heavy in color but altogether astonishing in freedom and variety of design.  The earlier painters covered their vaulting with ornamental patterns in which spaces were reserved for independent pictures, like the rectangles of the Stanza della Segnatura.  It was a bold innovation when Michelangelo discarded this system and placed in the pendentives of the Sistine his colossal figures of the Prophets and the Sibyls, each on its architectural throne.  It was reserved for Raphael to take a step that no earlier painter could have dreamed of and to fill these triangular spaces with free groups relieved against a clear sky which is the continuous background of the whole series.  One may easily think the earlier system more architecturally fitting, but the skill with which these groups are composed, their perfect naturalness, their exhaustless variety, the perfection with which they fill these awkward shapes, as it were inevitably and without effort, is nothing short of amazing.  It is decoration of a festal and informal order—­the decoration of a kind of summer house, fitted for pleasure, rather than of a stately chamber—­but it is decoration the most consummate, the fitting last word of the greatest master of decorative design that the world has seen.

[Illustration:  Plate 18.—­Raphael.  “The Deliverance of Peter.”  In the Vatican.]

It is this master designer that is the real Raphael, and, but for the element of design always present in the least of his works, the charming illustrator, the mere “painter of Madonnas,” might be allowed to sink comfortably into artistic oblivion without cause for protest.  But there is another Raphael we could spare less easily, Raphael the portrait-painter.  The great decorators have nearly always been great portrait-painters as well, although—­perhaps because—­there is little resemblance between the manner of feeling and working necessary for success in the two arts.  The decorator, constantly occupied with relations of line and space which have little to do with imitation, finds in the submissive attention to external fact necessary to success in portraiture a source of refreshment and of that renewed contact with nature which is constantly necessary to art if it is not to become too arid an abstraction.  Certainly it was so with Raphael, and the master of design has left us a series of portraits comparable only to those of that other great designer whose fate