line of Sappho's
body, which echoes that of the bearded poet immediately to the right of
the window and gives a sweep to the left to the whole lower part of the
composition. It is the immediate and absolute solution of the problem,
and so small a thing as the scarf of the back-turned Muse plays its
necessary part in it, balancing, as it does, the arm of the Muse who
stands highest on the left and establishing one of a number of
subsidiary garlands that play through and bind together the wonderful
design.

[Illustration: Plate 15.--Raphael. "Parnassus."
In the Vatican.]

The window in the opposite wall is to one side of the middle, and here
Raphael meets the new problem with a new solution. He places a separate
picture in each of the unequal rectangles, carries a simulated cornice
across at the level of the window head, and paints, in the segmental
lunette thus left, the so-called "Jurisprudence" (Pl. 16), which
seems to many decorators the most perfect piece of decorative design
that even Raphael ever created--the most perfect piece of design,
therefore, in the world. Its subtlety of spacing, its exquisiteness of
line, its monumental simplicity, rippled through with a melody of
falling curves from end to end, are beyond description--the reader must
study them for himself in the illustration. One thing he might miss were
not his attention called to it--the ingenious way in which the whole
composition is adjusted to a diagonal axis that the asymmetry of the
wall may be minimized. Draw an imaginary straight line from the boss in
the soffit of the arch through the middle of the Janus-head of Prudence.
It will accurately bisect the central group, composed of this figure and
her two attendant genii, will pass through her elevated left knee, the
centre of a system of curves, and the other end of it will strike the
top of the post or mullion that divides the window opening into two
parts.

[Illustration: Plate 16.--Raphael. "Jurisprudence."
In the Vatican.]

This single room, the Camera della Segnatura, marks the brief blossoming
time of Raphael's art, an art consummate in science yet full of a
freshness and spontaneity--the dew still upon it--as wonderful as its
learning. The master himself could not duplicate it. He tried for
Venetian warmth of color in the "Mass of Bolsena" (Pl. 17) and
experimented with tricks of illumination in the "Deliverance of Peter"
(Pl. 18), and in these two compositions, struck out new and ad