In the ceiling, which, if not painted by himself, is undoubtedly from his design, he had perhaps a freer hand in the arrangement, and has created a very lovely piece of decoration. Here the deities of the old heathen world appear as imaged in that delicious sentiment of the earlier Renaissance. Venus is wafted through the sky, drawn by two doves; Luna, nude to the waist, sits in a chariot with her nymphs in harness; Mercury holds his _caduceus_, the serpent wand; Apollo drives his four-horsed chariot; and--loveliest group of all--Jupiter receives the cup of nectar from young Ganymede, "such a cup-bearer" (I wrote in my Perugian notes) "as the tyrants of the Visconti or the Baglioni may have had--a slim young page with long floating curls, his limbs clad in tight red hose, and long ribbons twining around him, as on bent knee he offers the cup to his master."
His fellow-citizens wished the master to include his own portrait in the frescoes of their Cambio, and here it is, for us, a square, solid-looking face of middle life, whose hair escapes from the tight red cap--a face not perhaps attractive, but of intellectuality and power, and with great determination in the lines of mouth and chin. The Latin lines of compliment beneath are probably due to the scholarly pen of Maturanzio, and on the other side the words _Anno Salut. MD_ give the date of the work's completion--the central date, as we may fairly take it, of Perugino's genius, and his life-work in art. It is the moment when he climbs the hill-top--this fateful year that divides the century--and stands upon the highest ground; henceforth for him too, as for his country, the slow years mark the footsteps of decline.
Rafaelle Sanzio of Urbino had lost his mother, Magia Ciarla, in 1491, and his father, Giovanni Santi, three years later. It was not long after this that he was placed by his relatives for instruction in Perugino's famous workshop at Perugia, and we may safely assume that he was there during part of the master's richly creative period which we have just traversed, and that his hand was busied, along with those of other pupils, in the paintings of the frescoes of the Sala del Cambio.
[Illustration: PLATE VII.--THE DEAD CHRIST
