J66 The Picture Gallery of the Vatican. 



arid perhaps to Pinturicchio, on account of the lights having- been 

 executed upon elevated aud gilded grounds, according to his style. 

 The subject is the Assumption of the Virgin in Heaven, and her Co- 

 ronation by the Saviour; the lower part of the picture contains St. 

 Francis kneeling, with the Apostles, two Bishops, and various Saints. 



No. 14. Roman School. The Resurrection of our Lord, by Pie- 

 tro Vannucci, commonly called Perugino. He died in 1524, four 

 years after his pupil Raffaelle. 



Beneath the meagreness of style which was common to tfoe 

 painters of that epoch, it is easy to observe in this as well as in other 

 works of the same master, the great and compensating merit which 

 he had in the grace of his heads, the elegance of motion and the 

 smoothness of colouring. This picture is still more valuable and in- 

 teresting because Raffaelle himself has painted in it the t portrait of his 

 master Perugino, in the character of a soldier seized with fear ; and 

 Perugino has introduced his pupil Raffaelle as a soldier sleeping with 

 his head resting on his knee. In many pictures painters have intro- 

 duced their own portraits, but in this two friends have mutually 

 painted each other. It originally belonged to the church of St. Fran- 

 cis at Peruvia. In 1797 it was sent to Paris. 



No. 15. Roman School. The Transfiguration, by Raffaelle : the 

 finest picture in the world, if artfsts and profe?sed connoisseurs know 

 any thing about the matter. They say that this grand painting on 

 wood is the most valuable, because the last and most admirable oil 

 painting by the " divine " RafFaelle. Although unfinished, it was the 

 only one which obtained the honour of being carried publicly through 

 the streets of Rome, close to his funeral bier. But however we may 

 be dazzled by its reputation and the praises bestowed upon it by ad- 

 mirers, it still exhibits peculiarities which we may humbly be per- 

 mitted to call great faults, even though they are protected by num- 

 berless modern examples and ancient authorities. From its title, 

 "The Transfiguration," one would suppose that it contained but one 

 subject ; whereas it contains two, namely, The Transfiguration, and 

 the attempt of the Disciples of our Lord to cast out an unclean spirit 

 from a possessed child, two events which certainly took place at a 

 considerable distance from each other, and which need not have hap- 

 pened on the same day. (See St. Luke's Gospel, Chap, ix.) How- 

 ever, many of the old masters are fond of representing in the same 

 picture two or even three synchronous events, or of crowding together 

 two or three actions which took place separately, or of repeating the 

 same personages in the same picture engaged in two or three dif- 

 ferent ways. For instance, in Cardinal Fesche's collection in the Fal- 

 conieri palace, there is a picture of St. John in the wilderness : in 

 the foreground he is baptizing a number of converts, and in the back- 

 ground, like a ghost of himself, he is preaching to a numerous group. 

 The sculptures on the ancient Roman sarcophagi, or urne sepolcrale,* 

 as the Italian antiquaries call them, exhibit the same jumble of time 

 and action, and may have suggested the idea to those artists who had 

 the opportunity of studying them. The bas reliefs which ornament 



* In the Catalogue of the Museum of the Capitol, t/rnais always used to express 

 tbe stone or marble coffin which we call a sarcophagus. In English, urn and vase are 

 nearly synonymous. In Latin urna means both a vase and a stone coffin. 



