The latter is rather the Platonic
Demiurgus than the Mosaic God. By every line and feature of his face
and flowing hair, by each movement of his limbs, whether he ride on
clouds between the waters and the firmament, or stand alone creating
by a glance and by a motion of his hand Eve, the full-formed and
conscious woman, he is proclaimed the Maker who from all eternity
has held the thought of the material universe within his mind.
Raphael does not depart from this conception. The profound
abstraction of Michel Angelo ruled his intellect, and received from
his genius a form of perhaps greater grace. A similar growth from
the germinal designs of the Pisani may be traced in many groups.

But we must not linger at the gate. Let us enter the cathedral and
see some of the wonders it contains. Statues of gigantic size adorn
the nave. Of these, the most beautiful 151 are the work of Ippolito
Scalza, an artist whom Orvieto claims with pride as one of her own
sons. The long line of saints and apostles whom they represent
conduct us to the high altar, surrounded by its shadowy frescoes,
and gleaming with the work of carvers in marble and bronze and
precious metals. But our steps are drawn toward the chapel of the
south transept, where now a golden light from the autumnal sunset
falls across a crowd of worshippers. From far and near the poor
people are gathered. Most of them are women. They kneel upon the
pavement and the benches, sunburnt faces from the vineyards and the
canebrakes of the valley. The old look prematurely aged and
withered--their wrinkled cheeks bound up in scarlet and
orange-coloured kerchiefs, their skinny fingers fumbling on the
rosary, and their mute lips moving in prayer. The younger women have
great listless eyes and large limbs used to labor. Some of them
carry babies trussed up in tight swaddling-clothes. One kneels
beside a dark-browed shepherd, on whose shoulder falls his shaggy
hair; and little children play about, half hushed, half heedless of
the place, among old men whose life has dwindled down into a
ceaseless round of prayers. We wonder why this chapel, alone in the
empty cathedral, is so crowded with worshippers. They surely are not
turned towards that splendid Pieta of Scalza--a work in which the
marble seems to live a cold, dead, shivering life. They do not heed
Angelico's and Signorelli's frescoes on the roof and walls. The
interchange of light and gloom upon the stalls and carved work of
the c