The death of Julius II. in 1513, eventually proved nowise detrimental to Raffaele's advancement; for the new Pope not only followed out those decorations which he found in progress at the Vatican, but soon made new calls upon their artist, whose labours during the remaining seven years of his short span appear almost beyond belief. Of the Stanze, ten new subjects were composed, and several of them in part executed by him in that time, besides the architecture and all the elaborate decoration of the Loggie, the finished cartoons for twelve or thirteen large tapestries, the decorations of the Farnesina, Bibbiena, Lante, Madama, and Magliana villas, the frescoes of Sta. Maria della Pace, the Chigi Chapel in Sta. Maria del Popolo, a variety of altar and cabinet pictures, including his Madonnas of San Sisto and del Pesce, the Sta. Cecilia, and, last but most glorious of all, the Transfiguration; besides numerous portraits, and many drawings for the burin of Marcantonio. Add to this a journey to Florence in 1514, his architectural designs for several palaces there and at Rome, a general superintendence of the antiquities in and around the Eternal City, and the principal charge of the building of St. Peter's, at a yearly salary of 300 scudi. The necessary results of thus over-taxing mind and body was prejudicial to the quality of the works, and to the constitution of their author. His paintings, left in a great measure to pupils, often showed a hurried and inferior execution, ill compensated by the broader treatment which he was forced to adopt. The metropolitan fabric, itself an ample occupation for the highest genius and constant industry of one man, languished under inadequate superintendence. The delicate frame of Raffaele, exhausted by mental fatigue, was incapable of resisting the first attack of disease. But brief and utterly imperfect as this sketch has hitherto been, we must now greatly curtail it, and pass by many of his most glorious undertakings, to touch upon one or two general views. [Illustration: _Alinari_ THE SPOSALIZIO _After the picture by Raphael, once in the Ducal Collection at Urbino, now in the Brera, Milan_] The devotional influences of the Umbrian school, from which Raffaele must have imbibed his youthful impressions, were reproduced in his juvenile works under forms of loveliness new to that mountain land. His visits to Florence offered fresh inspirations, and taught him to ingraft upon the conventionalities of Christian art, whatever his keen sense of beauty could cull from the creations of beneficent Nature. But he painted her and all her works, "Not as they are, but as they ought to be;"