It may be that Raffaele was timeously taken from the evil to come; since death exempted him from witnessing like Michael Angelo, a deluge of mediocrity he would have been powerless to withstand. But the blow was deadened by no such calculation, and seldom have obsequies so pompous been accompanied by grief as universal. By the bier, around which his funeral rites were celebrated, there was hung his great picture of the Transfiguration: the inspired beauty of its upper portion, and the unfinished state of the remainder, most touchingly testified his almost superhuman powers, and their untimely extinction. The place of his sepulture was behind an altar in the Pantheon Church, for the erection and endowment of which he provided by testamentary bequest, and where his bones have of late been reverently but unwarrantably disturbed. This selection appears to have been dictated by the recent interment near the spot of Maria Bibbiena, the grand-niece of his friend the Cardinal, to whom he had been betrothed, and who had lately predeceased him. The little that we know of this engagement is from the painter's own letter to his uncle in 1514; and it would seem to have been sought by the Cardinal rather than by the bridegroom, who appears to have abandoned his matrimonial arrangements to friendly match-makers with more than Italian indifference. The idle tale of his looking to a Cardinal's hat is now set at rest, as well as nearly all the gossip that had long circulated as to his supposed dissolute habits, and his liason with that Roman matron whose ample contours and rich flesh-tints have come down to us on his canvasses, and who, whether his mistress or not (examples of such licence being then almost universal), seems to have been a favourite model in his school.[189] [Footnote 189: Passavant treats the usual legends regarding the Fornarina as after inventions, and ascribes the earliest notice of her to PUCCINI'S _Real Galleria di Firenze_, I., p. 6.] The same pure taste and feeling for beauty, which characterise the frescoes and pictures of Sanzio, would have raised him to equal excellence in other branches of art. They are visible in his architectural compositions, and in his numerous drawings. The statue of Jonah in the Sta. Maria del Popolo, supposed to have been modelled, if not wrought, by his hand, proves what he might have attained in sculpture. He had no time for literary undertakings, but some sonnets, casually preserved on the back of his sketches, exhibit him as a cultivator of letters. An interesting result of his official charge of the antique monuments remains in an eloquent report to the Pope, in which, "Rome's ancient genius, o'er its ruins spread, Shakes off the dust, and rears its reverend head." Its authorship has given rise to some controversy, and it seems not unlikely that the materials supplied by Raffaele were thrown into shape by his friend Castiglione.