A work of high interest has been on exhibition this
week at the Poly- technic Institution,—being a copy made for the University of Virginia by M. Paul Bake, a French artist long resident at Rome, of Itaffaelle's world-renowned School of Athens. In dimensions, as in all other re- spects, the work is a fac-simile, and attested as a most faithful and com- plete one on high artistic authority ; being, however, an oil copy of a fresco original. The School of Athens, one of the four great pictures which Raffaelle was commissioned by Julius II. to execute for the Ca- mera della Segnatura, is noted as marking, in distinct characters, what some hold to be the master's enfranchisement, others his declension, from his Florentine manner. We shall not here enter upon the extensive bearings of this argument ; but the work is, on its own standing, a grand masterpiece ; and the opportunity of studying it in a form so closely ap-
proximating to its very self is one which no lover of art will be content to have missed.
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