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.
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 admirable ways of filling pierced lunettes. The balancing, in the one, of the solitary figure of the pope against the compact group of seven figures—a group that has to be carried up above the curved screen in order to counteract the importance given to Julius by his isolation and by the greater mass of his supporting group below—is a triumph of arrangement; and here, again, it is notable that the bleeding wafer, the necessary centre of interest, is situated on a straight line drawn diagonally from the keystone of the arch to the centre of the window head, and almost exactly half-way between these two points, while the great curve of the screen leads to it from either side. In the symmetrically pierced lunette opposite, the distribution of the space into three distinct but united pictures, the central one seen through the grating of the prison, is a highly ingenious and, on the whole, an acceptable variant on previous inventions. But these two are the last of the Vatican frescoes that show Raphael's infallible instinct as a composer. He grows tired, exaggerates his mannerisms, gives a greater and greater share of the work to his pupils. The later Stanze are either pompous or confused, or both, until we reach the higgledy-piggledy of the "Burning of the Borgo" or that inextricable tangle, suggestive of nothing so much as of a dish of macaroni, the "Battle of Constantine," a picture painted after the master's death, but for which he probably left something in the way of sketches.
Yet even in what seems this decadence of his talent Raphael only needed a new problem to revive his admirable powers in their full splendor. In 1514 he painted the "Sibyls" (Pl. 19) of Santa Maria della Pace, in a frieze-shaped panel cut by a semicircular arch, and the new shape given him to fill inspired a composition as perfect in itself and as indisputably the only right one for the place as anything he ever did. Among his latest works were the pendentives of the Farnesina, with the story of Cupid and Psyche—works painted and even drawn by his pupils, coarse in types and heavy in color but altogether astonishing in freedom and variety of design. The earlier painters covered their vaulting with ornamental patterns in which spaces were reserved for independent pictures, like the rectangles of the Stanza della Segnatura. It was a bold innovation when Michelangelo discarded this system and placed in the pendentives of the Sistine his colossal figures of the Prophets and the Sibyls, each on its architectural throne. It was reserved for Raphael to take a step that no earlier painter could have dreamed of and to fill these triangular spaces with free groups relieved against a clear sky which is the continuous background of the whole series. One may easily think the earlier system more architecturally fitting, but the skill with which these groups are composed, their perfect naturalness, their exhaustless variety, the perfection with which they fill these awkward shapes, as it were inevitably and without effort, is nothing short of amazing. It is decoration of a festal and informal order—the decoration of a kind of summer house, fitted for pleasure, rather than of a stately chamber—but it is decoration the most consummate, the fitting last word of the greatest master of decorative design that the world has seen.
It is this master designer that is the real Raphael, and, but for the element of design always present in the least of his works, the charming illustrator, the mere "painter of Madonnas," might be allowed to sink comfortably into artistic oblivion without cause for protest. But there is another Raphael we could spare less easily, Raphael the portrait-painter. The great decorators have nearly always been great portrait-painters as well, although—perhaps because—there is little resemblance between the manner of feeling and working necessary for success in the two arts. The decorator, constantly occupied with relations of line and space which have little to do with imitation, finds in the submissive attention to external fact necessary to success in portraiture a source of refreshment and of that renewed contact with nature which is constantly necessary to art if it is not to become too arid an abstraction. Certainly it was so with Raphael, and the master of design has left us a series of portraits comparable only to those of that other great designer whose fate was to leave little but portraits behind him, Hans Holbein. Allowing for the necessary variation of type and costume in their models and for the difference between an Italian and a northern education, their methods are singularly alike. Raphael has greater elegance and feeling for style, Holbein a richer color sense and, above all, a finer craftsmanship, an unapproachable material perfection. They have the same quiet, intense observation, the same impeccable accuracy, the same preoccupation with the person before them and with nothing else—an individuality to be presented with all it contains, neither more nor less—to be rendered entirely, and without flattery as without caricature. There have been portrait-painters who were greater painters, in the more limited sense of the word, than these two, and there has been at least one painter whose imaginative sympathy gave an inner life to his portraits absent from theirs, but in the essential qualities of portraiture, as distinguished from all other forms of art, perhaps no one else has quite equalled them. One can give no greater praise to the "Castiglione" or the "Donna Velata" than to say that they are fit to hang beside the "Georg Gyze" or the "Christina of Milan"; and at least one portrait by Raphael, the "Tommaso Inghirami," in the collection of Mrs. Gardner (Pl. 20)—the original of which the picture in the Pitti Palace is a replica—has a beauty of surface and of workmanship almost worthy of Holbein himself.