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.]

Each of these walls has a doorway at one end, and the way in which these
openings are dissimulated and utilized is most ingenious, particularly
in the "Disputa," where the bits of parapet which play an important part
at either side of the composition, one pierced, the other solid, were
suggested solely by the presence of this door. In the end walls the
openings, large windows much higher than the doors, become of such
importance that the whole nature of the problem is changed. It is the
pierced lunette that is to be dealt with, and Raphael has dealt with it
in two entirely different ways. One wall is symmetrical, the window in
the middle, and on that wall he painted the "Parnassus" (Pl. 15), Apollo
and the Muses in the centre with groups of poets a little lower on
either side and other groups filling the spaces to right and left of the
window head. At first sight the design seems less symmetrical and formal
than the others, with a lyrical freedom befitting the subject, but in
reality it is no less perfect in its ponderation. The group of trees
above Apollo and the reclining figures either side of him accent the
centrality of his position. From this point the line of heads rises in
either direction to the figures of Homer and of the Muse whose back is
turned to the spectator, and the perpendicularity of these two figures
carries upward into the arch the vertical lines of the window. From this
point the lateral masses of foliage take up the drooping curve and unite
it to the arch, and this curve is strongly reinforced by the building up
toward either side of the foreground groups and by the disposition of
the arms of Sappho and of the poets immediately behind her, while, to
disguise its formality, it is contradicted by the long