All through the wonderful career of the Urbinate, beginning with the Borghese Entombment, and going on through the Spasimo di Sicilia to the end, there is this tendency to consider the nobility, the academic perfection of a group, a figure, a pose, a gesture in priority to its natural dramatic significance.  Much less evident is this tendency in Raphael’s greatest works, the Stanze and the Cartoons, in which true dramatic significance and the sovereign beauties of exalted style generally go hand in hand.  The Transfiguration itself is, however, the most crying example of the reversal of the natural order in the inception of a great work.  In it are many sublime beauties, many figures of unsurpassable majesty if we take them separately.  Yet the whole is a failure, or rather two failures, since there are two pictures instead of one in the same frame.  Nature, instead of being broadened and developed by art, is here stifled.  In the St. Peter Martyr the tremendous figure of the attendant friar fleeing in frenzied terror, with vast draperies all fluttering in the storm-wind, is in attitude and gesture based on nothing in nature.  It is a stage-dramatic effect, a carefully studied attitude that we have here, though of the most imposing kind.  In the same way the relation of the executioner to the martyred saint, who in the moment of supreme agony appeals to Heaven, is an academic and conventional rather than a true one based on natural truth.  Allowing for the point of view exceptionally adopted here by Titian, there is, all the same, extraordinary intensity of a kind in the dramatis personae of the gruesome scene—­extraordinary facial expressiveness.  An immense effect is undoubtedly made, but not one of the highest sublimity that can come only from truth, which, raising its crest to the heavens, must ever have its feet firmly planted on earth.  Still, could one come face to face with this academic marvel as one can still with the St. Sebastian of Brescia, criticism would no doubt be silent, and the magic of the painter par excellence would assert itself.  Very curiously it is not any more less contemporary copy—­least of all that by Ludovico Cardi da Cigoli now, as a miserable substitute for the original, at SS.  Giovanni e Paolo—­that gives this impression that Titian in the original would have prevailed over the recalcitrant critic of his great work.  The best notion of the St. Peter Martyr is, so far as the writer is aware, to be derived from an apparently faithful modern copy by Appert, which hangs in the great hall of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.  Even through this recent repetition the beholder divines beauties, especially in the landscape, which bring him to silence, and lead him, without further carping, to accept Titian as he is.  A little more and, criticism notwithstanding, one would find oneself agreeing with Vasari, who, perceiving in the great work a more strict adherence to those narrower rules of art which he had learnt to reverence, than can, as a rule, be discovered in Venetian painting, described it as la piu compiuta, la piu celebrata, e la maggiore e meglio intesa e condotta che altra, la quale in tutta la sua vita Tiziano abbia fatto (sic) ancor mai.