Though Raffaello's talents had spread his name, and attracted the attention and the wishes of Giulio the Second to employ him in the decoration of the Vatican, it may be presumed that the persuasive influence of his relative, Bramante Lazzari, decided the Pontiff to distinguish him by that immediate and exclusive call to Rome, which raised him above all rival competition, and opened the most splendid period of his life, most probably 1507. Which was the picture he began with, would not have been contested by his biographers, encomiasts, and critics, from Vasari to Mengs, had they attended less to hearsay, for tradition it cannot be called, than to the evidence of the works themselves. To date the dispute on the Sacrament after the School of Athens, equally inverts the progressive powers of the artist in conception, taste, style, and execution. Everywhere that composition betrays a young performer, enviably successful in each individual part, but whom experience has not yet enabled to spread an harmonious whole. The connection of its upper with the lower scene, less divided than rent asunder, depends entirely on a mental effort in the spectator. The parallelism of the celestial synod, impresses more with formal monotony than awful energy, and the ostentatious abuse of gold impairs its dignity. In the lower part of the picture, less sublime than dramatic, the artist moves in his own element; its parallelism and its contrasts, no longer the result of ceremonious symmetry, but of the inspiring principle, warms contemplation to sympathy, and its characteristic correctness exhibits in Raffaello's own unassisted, or rather unalloyed hand, the style of the School of Athens, the Mass of Bolsena, the female part of the Heliodorus, and with a felicity unattained in the Parnassus and the Attila,--the more ample outlines and the increased volume of forms in the Angels, and the Heliodorus and his accomplices on the foreground. _A description of two Drawings by Raffaello, from an account of the Collection of Drawings and Prints in the Gallery of Duke Albrecht, of Sachsen Teschen, at Vienna_.[96] I. Two naked male figures, apparently studies from Nature, on one leaf, drawn in red chalk: one with nearly all his back turned to the eye, rests the left hand on his hip, and with the right points to something before him. Somewhat behind you see the other, sideways, in perfect repose, leaning with both hands on a long spear-like staff; the background has some rudiments of a sketched head. To the right of the spectator, at the side of the first figure, you read, "1515, Raffahell di Urbin der so hoch vom Pobst geacht ist gwest, hat diese nakte Bild gemacht, und hat sy dem Albrecht Dürer gen Nornberg geschikt, in sein hand zu weissen."[97]