The improprieties attendant on the neglect of this principle are, perhaps, in no work of eminence more offensively evident than in the celebrated Resuscitation of Lazarus by Sebastian del Piombo, whose composition, if composition it deserved to be called, seems to have been dictated by the back-ground. It usurps the first glance; it partly buries, everywhere throngs, and in the most important place squeezes the subject into a corner. The horizon is at the top, Jesus, Maria, and Lazarus at the bottom of the scene. Though its plan and groups recede in diminished forms, they advance in glaring opaque colour, nor can it avail in excuse of the artist, to say that the multitude of figures admitted are characters chosen to show in different modes of expression the effect of the miracle, whilst their number gives celebrity to it and discriminates it from the obscure trick of a juggler: all this, if it had been done, though perhaps it has not, for by far the greater part are not spectators, might have been done with subordination: the most authentic proof of the reality of the miracle ought to have beamed from the countenance of Him who performed it, and of the restored man's sister.--In every work something must be first, something last; that is essential, this optional; that is present by its own right, this by courtesy and convenience.[86] The rival picture of the resuscitation of Lazarus, the Transfiguration of Christ by Raffaello, avoids the inconvenience of indiscriminate crowding, and the impertinent _luxuriance_ of scenery which we have censured, by the artifice of escaping from what is strictly called back-ground, and excluding it altogether: the action on the fore-ground is the basis and Christ the apex of the cone, and what they might have suffered from diminution of size is compensated by elevation and splendour. In sacrificing to this principle the rules of a perspective which he was so well acquainted with, Raffaello succeeded to unite the beginning, the middle, and the end of the event which he represented in one moment; he escaped every atom of common-place or unnecessary embellishment with a simplicity and so artless an air, that few but the dull, the petulant, and the pedant, can refuse him their assent, admiration and sympathy; if he has not, strictly speaking, embodied possibility, he has perhaps done more, he has done what Homer did, by hiding the unmanageable but less essential part of his materials, he has transformed it to probability.