any reasons they have seemed only to prove
the incapacity of philosophy to be expressed in terms of art. They have
seemed, in short, so far, not fit to be seen literally--those ideas of
culture, religion, and the like. Yet Plato, as you know, supposed a
kind of visible loveliness about ideas. Well! in Raphael, painted
ideas, painted and visible philosophy, are for once as beautiful as
Plato thought they must be, if one truly apprehended them. For note,
above all, that with all his wealth of antiquarian knowledge in detail,
and with a perfect technique, it is after all the beauty, the grace of
poetry, of pagan philosophy, of religious faith that he thus records.

Of religious faith also. The Disputa, in which, under the form of a
council representative of all ages, he embodies the idea of theology,
divinarum rerum notitia, as constantly resident in the Catholic Church,
ranks with the "Parnassus" and the "School of Athens," if it does not
rather [58] close another of his long lines of intellectual travail--a
series of compositions, partly symbolic, partly historical, in which
the "Deliverance of St. Peter from Prison," the "Expulsion of the
Huns," and the "Coronation of Charlemagne," find their places; and by
which, painting in the great official chambers of the Vatican, Raphael
asserts, interprets the power and charm of the Catholic ideal as
realised in history. A scholar, a student of the visible world, of the
natural man, yet even more ardently of the books, the art, the life of
the old pagan world, the age of the Renaissance, through all its varied
activity, had, in spite of the weakened hold of Catholicism on the
critical intellect, been still under its influence, the glow of it, as
a religious ideal, and in the presence of Raphael you cannot think it a
mere after-glow. Independently, that is, of less or more evidence for
it, the whole creed of the Middle Age, as a scheme of the world as it
should be, as we should be glad to find it, was still welcome to the
heart, the imagination. Now, in Raphael, all the various conditions of
that age discover themselves as characteristics of a vivid personal
genius, which may be said therefore to be conterminous with the genius
of the Renaissance itself. For him, then, in the breadth of his
immense cosmopolitan intelligence, for Raphael, who had done in part
the work of Luther also, the Catholic Church--through all its phases,
as reflected in its visible local centre, [59] t