startling note of red in the hose of the executioner. It is, therefore,
with a certain amount of reluctance that he ventures to own that the
composition, notwithstanding its largeness and its tremendous swing,
notwithstanding the singular felicity with which it is framed in the
overpoweringly grand landscape, has always seemed to him strained and
unnatural in its most essential elements. What has been called its
Michelangelism has very ingeniously been attributed to the passing
influence of Buonarroti, who, fleeing from Florence, passed some months
at Venice in 1829, and to that of his adherent Sebastiano Luciani, who,
returning to his native city some time after the sack of Rome, had
remained there until March in the same year. All the same, is not the
exaggeration in the direction of academic loftiness and the rhetoric of
passion based rather on the Raphaelism of the later time as it
culminated in the _Transfiguration_? All through the wonderful career of
the Urbinate, beginning with the Borghese _Entombment_, and going on
through the _Spasimo di Sicilia_ to the end, there is this tendency to
consider the nobility, the academic perfection of a group, a figure, a
pose, a gesture in priority to its natural dramatic significance. Much
less evident is this tendency in Raphael's greatest works, the _Stanze_
and the _Cartoons_, in which true dramatic significance and the
sovereign beauties of exalted style generally go hand in hand. The
_Transfiguration_ itself is, however, the most crying example of the
reversal of the natural order in the inception of a great work. In it
are many sublime beauties, many figures of unsurpassable majesty if we
take them separately. Yet the whole is a failure, or rather two
failures, since there are two pictures instead of one in the same frame.
Nature, instead of being broadened and developed by art, is here
stifled. In the _St. Peter Martyr_ the tremendous figure of the
attendant friar fleeing in frenzied terror, with vast draperies all
fluttering in the storm-wind, is in attitude and gesture based on