e forest trees
From the fair flowers, all torn and broken is,
Though still the lily's scent is on the breeze,
And the rose clasps the broken images.

WILLIAM MORRIS.

Neglected but not ruinous, its marbles mossy, its once unrivalled garden
invaded by sweet wild-flower banditti which run riot among the gentle
roses, its fountains dry, their cracks and crannies the homes of basking
lizards, its charming loggia trodden only by enthusiasts for whom every
spot touched by the genius of Raphael is a shrine of pilgrimage--the
Villa Madama, though appealing in its desertion, is not a melancholy
solitude.

[Illustration: Detail of Vault in Villa Madama--Stucchi by Giovanni da
Udine]

The imagination is intoxicated as by some heady wine as one gazes
outward upon the dazzling panorama which originally determined the site
of the loggia; and when, fatigued by the flashing sunlight, our eyes
turn to the interior they are soothed by the subtler beauties of the
half-effaced frescoes, the floral arabesques which Giovanni da Udine
lavished upon the spandrils, the pouting _putti_ in Giulio Romano's
frieze of cherub faces, carrying out a scheme of decoration which could
have been designed by no other than Raphael. We are certain as we
recognise in a more delicate line, or exquisite touch recalling the
arabesques of the Vatican loggia, that just here the great impresario
must have caught palette and brushes from the hand of his pupil with,
"_Me perdone Giovanino mio_, let me frolic a while with these fairy
creatures and show them to you as I saw them in my childhood dancing in
the swaying vines that garlanded the pergolas of Urbino." And so they
revel here, myths of the childhood of the race, monstrous creatures,
half beast, half human; centaurs, fauns, tritons, mermaids, sphinxes,
lamias, their grotesquerie no longer repulsive, for it is a foil to the
utmost elegance and sumptuousness of Renaissance art, their multiplicity
never wearying, because they are marshalled by the greatest master in
decorative design that the world has known. They lurk in the
convolutions of exquisite _rinceaux_, uncoiling themselves from the
scrolls of acanthus foliage, where sport also more delicate hybrid
flowers;--women, whose beautiful bodies rise like anthers from the
calices of impossible blossoms, whose arms are coiling tendrils and
whose limbs melt into the curves of exuberant leafage unknown to the
botanist.

But the charm which