CHAPTER XVII.
TAPESTRY FROM THE CARTOONS.
“For, round about, the walls yclothed were
With goodly Arras of great majesty,
Woven with gold and silk so close and nere,
That the rich metal lurked privily,
As faining to be hidd from envious eye;
Yet here, and there, and every where unwares
It shew’d itselfe and shone unwillingly;
Like to a discolour’d Snake, whose hidden snares
Through the greene gras his long bright burnisht back declares.”
Faerie Queene.
Raphael, whose name is familiar to all “as a household word,” seems to have been equally celebrated for a handsome person, an engaging address, an amiable disposition, and high talents. Language exhausts itself in his eulogy.[118] But the extravagant encomiums of Lanzi and others must be taken in a very modified sense, ere we arrive at the rigid truth. The tone of morals in Italy “did not correspond with evangelical purity;” and Raphael’s follies were not merely permitted, but encouraged and fostered by those who sought eagerly for the creations of his pencil. His thousand engaging qualities were disfigured by a licentiousness which probably shortened his career, for he died at the early age of thirty-seven.
Great and sincere was the grief expressed at Rome for his untimely death, and no testimony of sorrow could be more affecting, more simple, or more highly honourable to its object than the placing his picture of the Transfiguration over his mortal remains in the chamber wherein he died.
It was probably within two years of the close of his short life when he was engaged by Pope Leo the Tenth to paint those cartoons which have more than all his works immortalised his name, and which render the brief hints we have given respecting him peculiarly appropriate to this work.
The cartoons were designs, from Scripture chiefly, from which were to be woven hangings to ornament the apartments of the Vatican; and their dimensions being of course proportioned to the spaces they were designed to fill, the tapestries, though equal in height, differed extremely in breadth.
The designs were,
1. The Nativity.
2. The Adoration of the Magi.