It is the immediate and absolute solution of the problem,
and so small a thing as the scarf of the back-turned Muse plays its
necessary part in it, balancing, as it does, the arm of the Muse who
stands highest on the left and establishing one of a number of
subsidiary garlands that play through and bind together the wonderful
design.
[Illustration: Plate 15.--Raphael. "Parnassus."
In the Vatican.]
The window in the opposite wall is to one side of the middle, and here
Raphael meets the new problem with a new solution. He places a separate
picture in each of the unequal rectangles, carries a simulated cornice
across at the level of the window head, and paints, in the segmental
lunette thus left, the so-called "Jurisprudence" (Pl. 16), which
seems to many decorators the most perfect piece of decorative design
that even Raphael ever created--the most perfect piece of design,
therefore, in the world. Its subtlety of spacing, its exquisiteness of
line, its monumental simplicity, rippled through with a melody of
falling curves from end to end, are beyond description--the reader must
study them for himself in the illustration. One thing he might miss were
not his attention called to it--the ingenious way in which the whole
composition is adjusted to a diagonal axis that the asymmetry of the
wall may be minimized.
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