But, after we have prepared ourselves to understand and to take into our heads all that this wonderful picture can suggest, considered as an emanation of the mind, we find that it has other interests for us, considered merely as a work of Art.  It was the last picture which came from Raphael’s hand; he was painting on it when seized with his last illness.  He had completed all the upper part of the composition, all the ethereal vision, but the lower part of it was still unfinished, and in this state the picture was hung over his bier, when, after his death, he was laid out in his painting-room, and all his pupils and his friends, and the people of Rome, came to look upon him for the last time; and when those who stood round raised their eyes to the Transfiguration, and then bent them on the lifeless form extended beneath it, “every heart was like to burst with grief” (faceva scoppiare l’ anima di dolore a ognuno che quivi guardava), as, indeed, well it might.

Two-thirds of the price of the picture, 655 duccati di camera, had already been paid by the Cardinal de’ Medici; and, in the following year, that part of the picture which Raphael had left unfinished was completed by his pupil Giulio Romano, a powerful and gifted but not a refined or elevated genius.  He supplied what was wanting in the colour and chiaroscuro according to Raphael’s design, but not certainly as Raphael would himself have done it.  The sum which Giulio received he bestowed as a dowry on his sister, when he gave her in marriage to Lorenzetto the sculptor, who had also been a pupil and friend of Raphael.  The Cardinal did not send the picture to Narbonne, but, unwilling to deprive Rome of such a masterpiece, he presented it to the Church of San Pietro in Montorio, and sent in its stead the Raising of Lazarus, by Sebastian del Piombo, now in our National Gallery.  The French carried off the Transfiguration to Paris in 1797, and, when restored, it was placed in the Vatican, where it now is.  The Communion of St. Jerome, by Domenichino, is opposite to it, and it is a sort of fashion to compare them, and with some to give the preference to the admirable picture by Domenichino; but the two are so different in aim and conception, the merits of each are so different in kind, that I do not see how any comparison can exist between them.

    The History of Our Lord, as exemplified in Works of Art,
    continued and completed by Lady Eastlake (2nd ed., London, 1865).

THE BULL

(PAUL POTTER)

EUGENE FROMENTIN