Raphael's "Secrets" Revealed

This painting, like many of Rembrandt's, for example, is a Socratic dialogue. While Aristotelians and Romantics profess that music derives from titillation of the senses, Raphael like the Augustinans in the orbit of Nicholas of Cusa rightly understood that truly human music is the essence of an unheard dialogue of ongoing and continuous loving composition of unfolding potential harmonic Creation. So, like Poe's purloined letter, the secret of this drama is hidden in plain sight, but too many have eyes but cannot see.