The fresco of Parnassus repeats approximately the grouping of the School
of Athens, but changes the mood to one of lyrism, and shifts the scene
to a hill top. About Apollo and the Muses wander the forms of the elder
and recent poets. Often the faces are a bit insipid, but no one thinks
of that, so easy are the postures, so gracious the whole effect, so
instinct with the quiet good breeding of an academic pastoral. All the
Umbrian reticence and discretion and humility of Raphael are in this
beautifully calculated work. It betrays, too, certain ominous symptoms
of display, in the way, for example, in which the figures at the window
protrude beyond the wall. Primarily this is only a way of softening two
ugly angles of the window opening, but it is also a concession to
Michelangelo’s dangerous habit of painting away the architecture. All
the forms have an amplitude and dignity akin to that of classical
sculpture. Hellas is for Raphael no longer a far-away, inaccessible
world, as it was, for example, to Botticelli. Raphael has effectively
reconstructed it, in part by a gracious act of intuition, in part by
study of the wall paintings and statues of old Rome.
[Illustration:
FIG. 189. Raphael. Prudence, Temperance, Force—generally called
Jurisprudence. Fresco.—_Vatican._
]
The decoration of the Camera della Segnatura was completed triumphantly
with the fresco symbolizing Jurisprudence, Figure 189, in which Raphael
invents a new and beautiful compositional formula. Having to deal with a
lunette awkwardly shortened by the window, he used three seated figures
signifying the judging, restraining and rewarding aspects of justice.
There is no strict centrality and no exact symmetry. The large curves of
the figures play off from each other in a continuous rhythm melting into
the bounding curve. One may conceive it in terms of the growth of
plants, as so many sprays meeting, diverging, opposing each other, and
all managing to conform to the line of an arch. It is a type of
composition that Raphael will develop with still greater subtlety in the
Sibyls of the Madonna della Pace.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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