The grace and freshness of these boy-angels form a striking contrast to the stiff figures on the walls, and both here and in the decorations of the ceiling our painter, released from the obligations of portraiture, allowed his fancy free play. Medallions of the Cæsars wreathed in laurel, grisaille scenes from the myths of Hercules and Antæus, Orpheus, Apollo, and the Tritons, occupy the vaulting of the ceiling; while in the centre a circular opening is painted to represent a blue sky, across which white clouds are floating by, as we see in actual reality in the Pantheon of Rome. Round this open space runs a balustrade, upon which a peacock is perched and a basket of fruit rests. Two women, a girl with a jewelled head-dress and a negress, look down from above with laughing faces, while a band of winged boys play on the edge of the stone-work. These are the famous figures, _che scortano di sotto in sù_, which Vasari says excited general admiration when Mantegna first painted them in the Castle of Mantua. Instead of treating the ceiling in the usual fashion, as another flat surface on a level with the spectator’s eye, he endeavoured to represent the figures he painted there as seen from below, and in reality looking down over the balustrade. The optical illusion is effected in a masterly way, and the playful boys, who push their heads through the open stone-work of the parapet or balance themselves on its edge, are admirably foreshortened. Curiously enough, this new principle of ceiling decoration, which in Corregio’s days was to become universal, and which Mantegna here attempted for the first time, was employed at almost the same moment by another painter, Melozzo da Forli, in his fresco of the “Glory of Heaven” in the tribune of the Church of the SS. Apostoli at Rome. Whether the two masters had ever been brought into personal contact we do not learn, but we know that Giovanni Santi, the father of Raphael, in his rhyming chronicle, gives Mantegna’s perspective the highest praise, and we may infer from this that the great Lombard’s influence had penetrated far enough south to reach the Umbrian artists. The frescoes of the Camera degli Sposi were finished in 1474, and ten years later it is recorded that Mantegna painted in another part of the palace, known as the Scalcheria; but a ruined ceiling, with the same circular opening and sportive Loves, is all that is left of his work there. Traces of his hand are also visible in another hall in some of the groups of a large, much-injured fresco, where the first Gonzaga is represented taking the oath as _Capitano del popolo_, and more especially in the children holding a tablet which once bore a now-effaced inscription.