Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/422

392 Patnting Panshanger Raphael, the Madonna della Casa Niccolini, which bears the date 1508. Both Panshanger pictures were exhibited at the " Old Masters " in 1881 ; as they were hung in close proximity, their differences could readily be noticed. In the middle of the year 1508 Raphael was called to Rome by Pope Julius II. to aid in the adornment of the magnificent suite of apartments in the Vatican, which were to commemorate the temporal and spiritual power of the Papacy. The walls of three stanze (i. e. rooms), and of the gallery or corridor leading to them from the stair- case, and consisting of thirteen compartments, or loggie, with small cupolas, were covered with frescoes by the great master himself, and by his pupils after his designs. In the first room, the Stanza della Segnatura, Raphael represented in symbolic scenes on the walls the four great intellectual pursuits — Theology (1509), Poetry, Philosophy, and Jurisprudence, — and adorned the ceiling with four allegorical figures of the same, with appropriate symbols. The fresco of Theology (also called the Dispute of the Holy Sacrament) is divided into two portions ; the upper con- taining the Holy Trinity with the heavenly host, and the lower the Eucharist on an altar surrounded by forty-three figures, many of them portraits : the fresco of Poetry represents Parnassus, with Apollo attended by the Muses and the chief of the poets : that of Philosophy (or the School of Athens), in which Plato and Aristotle occupy the centre, with Zeno, Diogenes, Aristippus, Epicurius, and other well-known Greeks, with their pupils, amongst whom many portraits are introduced : and that of Juris- prudence, Gregory IX. giving out the Decretals ; Justinian giving the famous Pandects (*. e. the Roman Laws, made