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If this is perhaps saying too much, I wish also to hedge from the wholesale censure of my fellow-sight-seers which I may have seemed to imply. They did not prevail so clutteringly in the sculpture galleries as in the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze.
It was thus partly by his facility and energy, partly by the use he made of other men, that Raphael was able to achieve so much. In the Vatican he covered the walls and ceilings of the Stanze with historical and symbolical frescoes that embrace the whole of human knowledge. The cramping limits of ecclesiastical tradition are transcended.
But when the authority of Poliziano was thrown upon the side of Italian and when he made such a triumphant demonstration of its beauties in his "Stanze" and his "Orfeo," he carried conviction to all the writers of his country.
The splendour of the stanze of the Vatican, the dreadful majesty of the Sistine ceiling, revealed to Odo the beauty of that unmatched moment before grandeur broke into bombast.
"You are perhaps aware," he resumed, "that his Holiness is brought down on a low chair which is small enough to pass through every doorway. It's quite a journey, more than a mile, through the /loggie/, the /stanze/ of Raffaelle, the painting and sculpture galleries, not to mention the numerous staircases, before he reaches the gardens, where a pair-horse carriage awaits him.
Thus you probably have a distinct idea those of you at least who are interested in architecture of the shape of the windows in Westminster Abbey, in the Cathedral of Chartres, or in the Duomo of Milan. Can any of you, I should like to know, make a guess at the shape of the windows in the Sistine Chapel, the Stanze of the Vatican, the Scuola di San Rocco, or the lower church of Assisi?
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. Raphael. "The Mass of Bolsena."
While Michael Angelo was so framed that he could learn from no man, Raphael gladly learned of Michael Angelo; and after the uncovering of the Sistine frescoes, his manner showed evident signs of alteration. Julius, who had given Michael Angelo the Sistine, set Raphael to work upon the Stanze.
The flashing vision of the great Venetian which goes straight to the heart of life, and with its lightning cleaves the hovering mists that veil it, the masterful might of these Latin minds that cannot only conquer, but also conquer themselves, and in victory impose upon themselves the straitest discipline, and, on the field of battle, have the art exactly to choose their rightful booty from among the spoils of the enemy overthrown the Olympian portraits and the stanze of Raphael filled Christophe's heart with music richer than Wagner's, the music of serene lives, noble architecture, harmonious grouping, the music which shines forth from the perfect beauty of face, hands, feet, draperies, and gestures.
It was the custom of industrious lads to make transcripts from those broad designs, some of which Raphael deigned in his latest years to repeat, with altered manner, for the Stanze of the Vatican and the Cartoons. Michelangelo went one day into the Carmine with Piero Torrigiano and other comrades.
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