Sala del Cambio that
we gain a really new conception of his faculty. Upon the decoration
of that little hall he concentrated all his powers of invention. The
frescoes of the Transfiguration and the Nativity, which face the
great door, are the triumphs of his devotional manner. On other
panels of the chamber he has portrayed the philosophers of Greece
and Rome, the kings and generals of antiquity, the prophets and the
sibyls who announced Christ's advent. The roof is covered with
arabesques of delicate design and dainty execution--labyrinths of
fanciful improvisation, in which flowers and foliage and human forms
are woven into a harmonious framework for the medallions of the
seven planets. The woodwork with which the hall is lined below the
frescoes, shows to what a point of perfection the art of
intarsiatura had been carried in his school. All these decorative
masterpieces are the product of one ingenuous style. Uninfluenced by
the Roman frescoes imitated by Raphael in his Loggie of the Vatican,
they breathe the spirit of the earlier Renaissance, which created
for itself free forms of grace and loveliness without a pattern,
divining by its innate sense of beauty what the classic artists had
achieved. Take for an example the medallion of the planet Jupiter.
The king of gods and men, hoary-headed and mild-eyed, is seated in
his chariot drawn by eagles: before him kneels Ganymede, a
fair-haired, exquisite, slim page, with floating mantle and ribbands
fluttering round his tight hose and jerkin. Such were the
cup-bearers of Galeazzo Sforza and Gianpaolo Baglioni. Then compare
this fresco with the Jupiter in mosaic upon the cupola of the Chigi
chapel in S. Maria del Popolo at Rome. A new age of experience had
passed over Raphael between his execution of Perugino's design in
the one and his conception of the other. He had seen the marbles of
the Vatican, and had heard of Plato in the interval: the simple
graces of the earlier Renaissance were no longer enough for him; but
he must realise the thought of classic myths in his new manner. In
the same way we may compare this Transfiguration with Raphael's last
picture, these sibyls with those of S. Maria della Pace, these sages
with the School of Athens, these warriors with the Battle of
Maxentius. What is characteristic of the full-grown Raphael is his
universal comprehension, his royal faculty for representing past and
present, near and distant, things the most diverse, by forms