The grouping of
the figures themselves, the way they are played about into clumps or
separated to give greater importance, by isolation, to a particular
head, is even more beyond praise than in the "Disputa." The whole design
has but one fault, and that is an afterthought. In the cartoon the
disproportioned bulk of Heraclitus, thrust into the foreground and
writing in an impossible attitude on a desk in impossible perspective,
is not to be found. It is such a blot upon the picture that one cannot
believe that Raphael added it of his own motion; rather it must have
been placed there at the dictation of some meddling cardinal or learned
humanist who, knowing nothing of art, could not see why any vacant space
should not be filled with any figure whose presence seemed to him
historically desirable. One is tempted to suspect even, so clumsy is the
figure and so out of scale with its neighbors, that the master refused
to disfigure his work himself and left the task to one of his
apprentices. If it had been done by one of them, say Giulio Romano,
after the picture was entirely completed and at the time of the
"Incendio del' Borgo," it could not be more out of keeping.
[Illustration: Plate 14.--Raphael. "The School of Athens."
In the Vatican.]
Each of these walls has a doorway at one end, and the way in which these
openings are dissimulated and utilized is most ingenious, particularly
in the "Disputa," where the bits of parapet which play an important part
at either side of the composition, one pierced, the other solid, were
suggested solely by the presence of this door.
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