IV. PRE-RAPHAELITISM 149

126. Observe, however, the significance of this fact is not in the mere use of the figure of the heathen god to indicate the domain of poetry. Such a symbolical use had been made of the figures of heathen deities in the best times of Christian art. But it is in the fact, that being called to Rome especially to adorn the palace of the socalled head of the Church, and called as the chief representative of the Christian artists of his time, Raphael had neither religion nor originality enough to trace the spirit of poetry and the spirit of philosophy to the inspiration of the true God, as well as that of theology; but that, on the contrary, he elevated the creations of fancy on the one wall, to the same rank as the objects of faith upon the other; that in deliberate, balanced opposition to the Rock of the Mount Zion, he reared the rock of Parnassus, and the rock of the Acropolis; that, among the masters of poetry we find him enthroning Petrarch and Pindar, but not Isaiah nor David, and for lords over the domain of philosophy we find the masters of the school of Athens, but neither of those greater masters¹ by the last of whom that school was rebuked,-those who received their wisdom from heaven

so-called “Dispute on the Sacrament” (more correctly, “The Triumph of Faith”); on another, Mount Parnassus, with Apollo and the Muses; and on a third, representing Philosophy, “The School of Athens.” Ruskin refers again to these works, and in the same sense, in Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. ii. (“Roman Renaissance”) § 102 (Vol. XI. p. 130.) In later years, however, he presented the matter in a different light; “Raphael,” he says, “painting the Parnassus and the Theology on equal walls of the same chamber of the Vatican, so wrote, under the Throne of the Apostolic power, the harmony of the angelic teaching from the rocks of Sinai and Delphi” (Preface to The Economist of Xenophon, “Bibliotheca Pastorum,” Vol. I., 1876, p. xxiii.). In a note to the passage just quoted, Ruskin corrects his former teaching on this matter. “I imagined at that time,” he says, “it had been the honour given to classical tradition which had destroyed the schools of Italy. But it was, on the contrary, the disbelief of it. She fell, not by reverence for the Gods of the Heathen, but by infidelity alike to them, and to her own.”]

¹ [Namely, Solomon: “In Gibeon the Lord appeared to Solomon in a dream by night, and God said, Ask what shall I give thee. And Solomon said, ... Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart. ... And God said unto him, ... Behold I have given thee a wise and an understanding heart; so that there was none like thee before thee, neither after thee shall any arise like unto thee” (1 Kings iii. 5), and St. Paul, upon whom as he journeyed near Damascus, “suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven”; and who standing “in the midst of Mars’ Hill said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious” (Acts ix. 3, xvii. 15-23.]

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