his composition the stamp of originality, he copied the models in their most minute details, such as the group of the aerial gods, that of the fluvial and sea gods, the landscape with the grazing cattle, the attitude of the three contending Beauties, the staff of Paris, and the helmet of Minerva.

The impression created among artists by Marcantonio's plate after Raphael's design was unprecedented, and has lasted to the present day. Reproductions of it, total or partial, are without number. It appears in a Limoges plaquette of enamelled grisaille, now in the Imperial Museum at Vienna; in three cameos of the same collection; in the reliefs of a silver ewer designed by Rubens for King Charles I; in

three works of Rubens himself described by Goeler von Ravensburg; in a majolica plate of the Art Museum at Milan; in the frontispiece of Rosini's "Antiquities," etc. Stranger even is the fact that Raphael himself and some of his pupils should have borrowed motives for other compositions from the same plate. Thus the figure of the river god at the right-hand corner appears again in the fresco of Heliodorus, and perhaps it is not by chance that the portrait of Marcantonio himself is seen in the opposite corner of that magnificent composition, among the bearers of the state chair upon which sits Pope Julius II.

The illustration on page 257 represents the recumbent figure of another river god in exactly the same attitude, modelled by Michelangelo, in a terra-cotta bas-relief formerly in the Gherardesca palace at Florence. The engraving from which the illustration is taken bears the following legend: "Cavato da un bassorilievo in terra-cotta appresso i signori conti della Gherardesca, opera di Michelagnolo Buonarroti."

Quite interesting is the way in which Raphael has interpreted the Jupiter group, on the right-hand corner of the Medici sarcophagus. The Greco-Roman artist who modelled it had made the feet of the Father of the Gods rest upon a piece of cloth, held at both ends by the figure of Cælus (Heaven). Raphael, seeing the cloth swollen in the manner of a sail inflated by the wind, thought the figure holding it to be Æolus, and in this guise he reproduced it in his own design, with open mouth and in a flying attitude, thus transforming the classic Jupiter, whose throne rests on the solid sphere of Heaven, into a Jehovah borne through the skies by wind and clouds. Vasari had already been struck by this new way of treating the figure of the Eternal Father, and called it accordingly "a God in the style of Jupiter."

Its best expression is to be found in the Vision of Ezekiel of the Pitti gallery, which, if not the work of Raphael's own pencil, is certainly a contemporary copy of the lost original. At all events, the type of Jupiter, as expressed in the Medici sarcophagus, had made such a marked impression on Raphael's mind that we find it repeated once more in one of the spandrils of the "Loggia della Farnesina."

Raphael is known to have gone a step farther in this matter of imitating the antique; he took a cast of a Greek relief, and reproduced it bodily in one of his best and less known masterpieces, viz., in the bronze panel of the Woman of Samaria, in the Chigi chapel at Santa Maria del Popolo.

The fate of this gem of art and of the shrine in which it is set is worthy of being related. Agostino Chigi — the prince of finance of the first quarter of the sixteenth century, whose career will be described in my next and last chapter - had commissioned Raphael to design and erect his tomb in the above-mentioned family chapel; and by a will dated August 28, 1519, he had entrusted to Antonio da San Marino, the goldsmith, the care of superintending the finishing of the work. The master having died in the subsequent year, the work was taken up by Lorenzetto, who pledged himself to complete Agostino's mausoleum, as well as that of his brother Sigismondo, in the space of thirty months from the signing of the contract (February 10, 1821). Lorenzetto, driven away from Rome by the plague and by the ill-will of the uncouth Pope Adrian VI, left the work unfinished. At the time of his death, which took place in 1541, the statues of Jonah and Elias were still stored in his studio at the Macel de' Corsi, and the medallion of Agostino was in the hands of one of the testamentary executors.1

1 Compare Gnoli Domenico, "La sepoltura d' Agostino Chigi nella chiesa di S. Maria del Popolo," in Archivio storico dell' Arte, a. 1889, pp. 316–326.