In 1508 Raphael was called to Rome through the influence of a former Urbino friend, Bramante, now the architect of new St. Peter’s. The task set by Pope Julius II was the decoration of the four new antechambers called the _Stanze_. About the same time Michelangelo began on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Thus the two artists worked within two hundred feet of each other, but held apart partly by a natural rivalry, and even more by the irascible and suspicious nature of Michelangelo. And two masterpieces were produced as from two different worlds—Michelangelo’s all tragic and perturbed, Raphael’s all hopeful and serene. Between 1509 and 1511 Raphael frescoes the Camera della Segnatura, mostly with his own hand. The scheme comprised the finest leading ideals of contemporary humanism, and the little room is the most important of documents for the student of the Renaissance. Religious authority, legal justice, secular philosophy and science, the arts—such are the four great themes impersonated on the side walls, and echoed in symbol and human illustration on the beautiful ceiling; these are the props of a perfect society. Religious authority and theology are represented by the famous fresco called erroneously the Dispute concerning the Sacrament, Figure 187. Christ, as the fully revealed member of the Trinity, sits in a heaven rayed and studded with gold; beside him sit the prophets and apostles—the actual witnesses of his passion. The seated group sweeps grandly back describing a sort of semi-dome in space. Below and precisely in the centre, on an altar, glitters the wafer which in the recurrent miracle of the Mass becomes Christ’s body. To right and left of the altar are closely compacted and agitated groups insisting on the truth of the miracle of transubstantiation. These are the martyrs and church doctors, those who after the apostolic age either in experience or divine intuition certified to the central mystery of the Church. The upper group is composed after the fashion of Fra Bartolommeo and Perugino, is a mere expansion of Raphael’s fresco at San Severo; the lower group is held together after the fashion of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, the vehemence of the particular gestures being assimilated in a running balance of thrust against thrust, so that the whole effect is of a rich and energetic harmony. The figures themselves are established adequately, but in draughtsmanship are inferior either to Leonardo’s or Michelangelo’s. With the thriftiness of a born decorator, Raphael makes the figure count in its place and beyond that takes no unnecessary pains. It might indeed be argued that the decoration would be worse as a whole if the parts were more perfect. Finally, note how essentially classical, Roman, juridical the motive is; how concrete and material. Raphael seeks to express nothing more mystical than the obvious equation of Christ and the host, and he merely cites a multitude of witnesses to prove that the equation is true.