The Roman School comprises, besides the natives of the metropolis, those
of the whole Ecclesiastic State, Bologna, Ferrara, and some part of
Romagna excepted.
The origin of this school recedes into the earlier periods of modern
art, if we consider Oderigi of Gubbio, a painter of miniature,
contemporary with Cimabue, as one of its founders. His death, which
preceded that of the Florentine at least one year, the branch of art he
exercised, missal-painting, and what we know of his situation, make it
extremely improbable that he owed the elements of design to that master,
with whom he seems to have had little in common but the honour of
rearing a pupil, who in the sequel eclipsed his name, and became the
founder of another school.
Perhaps he made some scholars too at home: in 1321 we find Cecco and
Puccio of Gubbio, engaged as painters to the Dome of Orvieto; and about
1324, Guido Palmerucci Eugubino, employed in the Town-hall of Gubbio; a
few half figures yet remaining of this evanescent work are in a style
not inferior to that of Giotto, at whose period we are now arrived.
Giotto, at Rome, gave instructions to Pietro Cavallini in painting and
mosaic, and with what success we may form some idea from the
wonder-working Christ in S. Paolo at Rome, the Salutation at S. Marco of
Florence, and a Crucifixion at Assisi; a crowded composition of
soldiers, mob, and horses, varied in dress and not ill discriminated by
expression, with groups of angels hovering over them in sable robes. In
vastness of conception and spirit it resembles Memmi, and in one of the
crucified men, foreshortening is not unsuccessfully attempted; the
colours have still a degree of freshness, especially the blue, which
here and in other places of the church forms, in the metaphor of Lanzi,
a ceiling of oriental sapphire.
After the demise of Cavallini, who, notwithstanding a life of
eighty-five years, appears to have left taste nearly in the state he
found it; a band of obscure and insignificant artists led the art in a
style neither Giottesque nor Greek to the verge of the fifteenth
century--that important period when the Popes, re-established at Rome,
searched for the best hands to decorate its Vatican and temples. The
first name that occurs, is that of Ottaviano Martis, whose Madonna in
Sta. Maria Nuova at Gubbio, bears the date of 1403; she has a choir
of stripling angels round her in attitudes not ungraceful, but with
faces as like to each other as if they had all been cast in one mould.
The name of Gentile da Fabriano is of more consequence; it is he whose
style Michael Angelo compared to his name (Gentile.) About 1417 we find
him at Orvieto among the painters of its Dome, registered with the title
of Magister Magistrorum. Under Martin V. he painted with Pisanello in
the Lateran at Rome: what he did there perished, and so did his works in
the public palace at Venice, where he resided, was pensioned, and raised
to the rank of Patrician. "In that city," says Vasari, "he was the
master and like a parent to Giacopo Bellini, the father of Giovanni and
Gentile Bellini, founders of the Venetian school and masters of
Giorgione and Tizian. Of his numerous works the remains are in the Marca
d'Ancona, the state of Urbino, at Gubbio and Perugia: Florence still
preserves two of his pictures, one in S. Nicolo with the image and
histories of that bishop, another in the sacristy of the Trinità, with
an Epiphany and the date of 1423. His style resembles that of Frà
Angelico da Fiesole, with the exception of forms less elegant, less
female grace, and more profusion of gold lace and brocade. _Antonio da
Fabriano_, with the date 1454, and _Bartholomæus Magistri Gentilis de
Urbino_, 1497 and 1508, are inscriptions on pictures at Matelica,
Pesaro, and Monte Cicardo, that have no other claim to attention than
the relation their names seem to indicate with Gentile.
Piero della Francesca, or Piero Borghese, an Umbrian, of Borgo S.
Sepolcro, is a superior name. He must have been born about 1398, as,
according to Vasari, his works were about 1458; he grew blind at sixty,
and died eighty-five years old. He was instructed in painting at the age
of fifteen, after having laid a foundation in mathematics, and
distinguished himself in both. His beginnings were minute; his master
has escaped search. The first scene of his talent was the Court of
Guidobaldo Feltro the old, Duke of Urbino, where the perspective of a
vase drawn by him, provokes the astonishment of his biographer; but
besides perspective, Painting owes to him her first notions of the
effects of light, of muscular precision, and the method of preparing
clay models for the study of drapery.[89]
He painted much at Rome, and in the Floreria of the Vatican there still
exists a large fresco reputed his, representing Niccolo V. with some
cardinals and prelates, whose faces interest by a character of truth. At
Arezzo, he seems to have improved even upon Giotto and his school, by
the novelty of his foreshortenings, vigour of tone, and powers which
attended by equal grace, would have set him on a level with Masaccio.
Nicolo Alunno of Foligno, advanced the art still farther; this is
evident on comparing a picture of his painted 1480, with another at S.
Nicolo of Foligno, dated 1492. The tone of his colour, even in
distemper, has novelty and vigour; his heads have vivacity, though with
trivial and sometimes caricatured characters: and in gilding he is
moderate. Vasari, who places him in the time of Pinturicchio, praises
above all a Pietà in a chapel of the Domo, in which, he says, "there are
two angels who weep with such expression of grief, that, in my opinion,
no other painter, however excellent, could have done much more."
Nor was Urbino without painters at this period: Fiorillo names Lorenzo
da San Severino. At Urbino some pictures still remain of Giovanni
Sanzio, the father of Raphael, who by the Duchess Giovanna della Rovere
is called a very ingenious artist: a foreshortened figure of St.
Sebastian, painted by him for the church of that saint, has been
imitated by Raphael in an early picture of Our Lady's Wedding, at Città
di Castello. He subscribed himself Io. Sanctis Urbi.; viz. Urbinas. Such
at least is the inscription on his Annunciation at Sinigaglia, a work of
high finish, but unequal in its parts, and in the best, though less
genial, approaching the style of Pietro Perugino, with whom he had for
some time co-operated. But the most distinguished Urbinese artist was
Bartolommeo Corradini, a Dominican, commonly called Frà Carnevale: at
the Osservanza there is a picture of his, defective in perspective, with
draperies frittered into the usual tatters of the time, but with faces
that breathe and speak, and airs of dignity and ease: he was one of the
first who introduced portrait into historic composition, a method
adopted and often practised by Raphael, who at Urbino had studied his
works.
Perugia laid an early claim to Art, at least as a craft. Mariotti tells
of one Tullio a Perugine painter about 1219, and in a long file of
quattrocentists, allots the most conspicuous places to Lorenzo di
Lorenzo, Bartolommeo Caporali, whose works are dated about 1487, but
above all to Benedetto Bonfigli. Yet with this abundance of home-bred
artists, Perugia employed in its public works the hands of strangers,
and chiefly Tuscans; it was to Florence, States and Princes looked for
that master-style which could give splendour to a great commission. When
Sisto IV. planned the decorations of the Sistina, the greater number of
conscripts for the work were Tuscans, and Pietro Perugino the only
artist drawn from his subjects among them.
Pietro Vannucci, of Città della Pieve, as he subscribed some pictures,
or of Perugia, as he did others, being a citizen of that place, studied,
if we believe Vasari, under a master of little eminence; but according
to the more authentic researches of Mariotti,[90] was a pupil, and
sufficiently advanced himself by the instructions of Bonfigli and Piero
della Francesca, to finish his style on the works of Giotto and Masaccio
at Florence, without entering the school of Verrocchio.
Those who have contemplated the works of Pietro will without much
difficulty discover two styles of composition, form, colour, and
execution: the first was the result of the instructions he received in
the Roman, the second, that of the impression made on his mind and hand
by the Tuscan School: what he painted in oil and of small dimensions,
generally belongs to the first; what he executed in fresco to the second
period. There we find the hardness, the haggard forms, the miserly
scantiness of drapery, the Gothic apposition and anxious finish with
which he is charged, relieved by azure blues, emerald greens, violet and
crimson hues, the legacies of missal-painting, and a certain air of
juvenile and female grace, with suavity of countenance and colour:
beauties which not only followed him in his second style, but were
rendered more impressive by rudiments of that breadth which seems to be
the privilege of fresco, by keeping, mellowness, tone, and approaches to
composition, as in the altar-piece of the Kindred of the Saviour and the
fresco in the Hall of the Change, at Perugia.
Whilst the physiognomic monotony which had hitherto dulled the human
feature, began to give way to expression and character in the works of
this period, it is not easy to explain why its companion, that Gothic
symmetry in the arrangement of the whole, should not only have been
retained but aggravated into a studied parallelism; not that pathetic
repetition of attitude and gesture which forces the moment of the
subject more irresistibly on the mind than the most varied contrasts,
but a nearly rectilinear apposition, whose principal law was to place,
by a central figure, on each side of the picture, an equal number of
subordinate ones; a law that extended itself to the most minute detail,
and bade buildings, flowers, clouds and pebbles, re-echo each other; and
all this in the face of Giotto, whose Navicella, Death of Maria, and
other works, gave evidence that his composition had, a century before,
disdained to move in the trammels which were now suffered to check that
of Pietro Perugino, and for no inconsiderable time the composition of
Raphael himself.
Invention was not the element of Pietro. His crucifixions, depositions,
burials, ascensions, and assumptions, are the brothers and sisters of
one family. He was blamed for this sterility even in his own time, and
defended himself by saying that, if he possessed little, he owed
nothing, and that what had pleased in one place could not displease in
another. It does not indeed offend to find the scenery of his St. Peter
receiving the keys in the Sistina, repeated in the Wedding of our Lady
at Perugia, and to meet the beauties here concentrated which he had
singly scattered over various places.
Pietro had vigour of constitution and length of life, and if he profited
by the works of Raphael, whom he outlived, might have done so by those
of Lionardo and Buonarroti. In few men so many contradictory qualities
seem to have united: ridiculed for a degree of avarice, which, it was
said, made him withhold the necessary drapery from his figures, he is
yet allowed by Vasari to have been greedier to accumulate than sordid in
the use of wealth, and to have pleased himself by marrying "a beautiful
damsel, whom he so much delighted in seeing elegantly dressed both
abroad and at home, that he was often suspected of having dressed her
himself." By her he had children, but no records enable us to judge of
him as a parent. That he was a good and kind master, is proved by the
numerous scholars he reared, and still more by the pride which the most
eminent and best of them took, by introducing him more than once in his
works, to perpetuate with his own gratitude the memory of his master.
With this kindness for his pupils, Pietro connected intolerance of
rivals and a mordacity of language, which provoked Michael Agnolo to
call him publicly a dunce (_goffo_) in art. His life was spent in
receiving commissions from the clergy, in meditating and composing
subjects of devotion; and yet, if we believe his biographer, he carried
infidelity to a degree which resisted all arguments for the immortality
of the soul, and with words dictated by an obstinacy worthy of his
marble brains,[91] rejected all invitations to better information. Of
the numerous scholars whom he had reared, the greater part followed his
manner with servile attachment; hence many of their works have been
ascribed to him, by those who did not form their judgment at Perugia, or
at Florence in Sta. Chiara and the Ducal palace: thus he pays forfeit
for many a holy family of Guerino da Pistoia, Rocco Zoppo, or some other
of his Tuscan scholars. The best and least enthralled of his pupils
belong to the Roman school: Bernardino Pinturicchio, less praised by
Vasari than he deserves, without the correctness of his master, and with
more Gothic profusion of gold-lace and brocade, possesses magnificence
of plan, expression of countenance, and propriety of composition.
Familiar with Raphael, who was his assistant at Siena, he made attempts
to imitate his grace, and sometimes not without success: at Rome, the
Vatican and Araceli Temple possess some of his works; at Siena he
painted, in ten pictures, the history of Pio II. and added one of Pio
III. his employer, and these, with what he left in the Dome of Spello,
are the best of his labours.
Of at more independent and grander spirit was Andrea Luigi, of Assisi,
surnamed L'Ingegno, the Genius. He assisted Pietro in the Change-hall
at Perugia, and there and in his Prophets and Sibyls at Assisi,
aggrandized and mellowed the style of his master to a degree, which led
Sandrart, with others, to ascribe the latter work to Raphael; but
blindness checked his career in the bloom of life, and left the art to
Raphael without a rival.
Domenico di Paris Alfani added, likewise, some improvements to the style
of Pietro. His name was nearly sunk in that of his son or brother
Orazio, and time and dates alone have re-asserted its right to some
excellent works long adjudged to the other; and which, were it not for
an insipid sweetness of tone bordering on that of Baroccio, seem to have
been inspired by the principles of Raphael.
Of Pietro's many ultramontane pupils, Giovanni Spagnuolo, a Spaniard,
called Lo Spagna, who settled at Spoleto, is considered by Vasari as the
most eminent. But all these names united confer less celebrity on
Pietro, than the felicity of having reared the powers of Raffaello
Sanzio, if not the founder, the great establisher of the Roman School.
Raffaello Sanzio, born at Urbino on Holy Friday, April 1483, was the son
of Giovanni Sanzio, named among the contemporaries and occasional
helpers of Pietro, in whose school, after having imparted the first
rudiments of Art to his son, conscious of his own inferiority, he had
the modesty to place him. Here his progress was so rapid that he soon
rendered himself completely master of Vannucci's style, soon became his
favourite pupil, soon his co-adjutor, and in a short period more than
his competitor: for though the pictures which he painted at Cività di
Castello and Perugia, and are so amorously dwelt on by Lanzi, still
betray in composition, design, and colour, the principles of the master,
they exhibit symptoms of that expression, that beauty, those simple
graces, that refinement and precision of finish, which not only had
remained unknown to Pietro, but in their purity were never attained by
any subsequent artist.--Some of these are perceivable already, if
scantily, in the Procession to Golgotha, preceded by horsemen and
attended by the Madonna and her female train; and still less perceptibly
in one of its predelle which exhibits the Saviour held extended by his
Mother, Magdalen and John: they cannot be mistaken in the predelle
which represents him among the sleeping disciples praying in the
garden,--performances of his puerility, and most probably before he left
the school of Pietro.
After an enumeration of Raffaello's juvenile works at Cività di Castello
and at Perugia, we are told that he who ascribed Sanzio's art to length
of study and not to nature, was not acquainted with the powers of his
mind.[92]
That such was the verdict of Michael Agnolo, is recorded by Condivi; and
from aught that appears, it does not seem either invidious or
incompetent. If Art be a complete system of invariable rules, he only is
a master of Art who substantiates its precepts by equal uniformity of
execution and taste; and till he arrives at that point, he can only be
said to have seized more or less of its parts in making approaches to
the whole, and to be indebted to "study" and not to "nature," if he put
himself at last in possession of it.
Such was the progress of Raffaello; he arrived by degrees at style in
design, by degrees at style in composition, by degrees at invention,
expression, and at what appeared to him colour. His genius emancipated
him from the shackles of prescription and fashion, rapidly, if we
compare his progress with the shortness of his life or the progress of
the rest of his contemporaries, but slowly, if we compare him with
Michael Angelo, whose system of Art seems to have been born with him,
whose infancy, virility, age, exhibit one uniform principle. Every
element of the system displayed in the Capella Sistina and on the tombs
in S. Lorenzo, may be traced in his essays at the garden of the Medici
and in the Holy Family painted for Angelo Doni: but what eye will
discover the future painter of the Heliodorus, or the composer of the
Cartoons in the bridal arrangements of our Lady's Wedding at Cività di
Castello, or even in the Cartoons for the sacristy of the Duomo at
Sienna?
Though the commission of painting in that place a series of the most
memorable events in the life of Pope Pio II. (a Siennese celebrated by
the name of Enea Silvio,) had been given to Pinturicchio, who had
sufficient modesty and taste to avail himself of the superior and
growing powers of his friend,--it has been asked what enterprise of
equal magnitude had in that infant state of Art ever been consigned to
a single hand, without considering that the co-operation of Raffaello
was adventitious, and less owing to the opinion which he had established
of himself in the public mind than to the modesty of Pinturicchio. And
had not Luca Signorelli singly been entrusted with a work at Orvieto,
whose tremendous and universally interesting subjects beyond comparison
excelled whatever the embassies, the poetic and papal honours, the
canonization of a nun, the ceremonies of a council, the death of the
hero himself, and the transportation of his corpse from Ancona to Rome,
however varied by character, impressed by the sensibility of the artist,
or raised above the heraldry of the times, could pretend to achieve
beyond the precincts of Sienna?
Whether Raffaello furnished the whole of the Cartoons for that work, or
only part, cannot be ascertained from the contradictory account of
Vasari,[93] who in the life of Pinturicchio asserts the first, and in
that of Raffaello, the second. As he, however, did not leave Sienna for
Florence till 1504, it is probable that he continued to assist his
friend in completing the whole historic series: the work itself is in
perfect preservation, and though better informed eyes than those of
Bottari[94] might not be competent to discriminate the parts which
exclusively belong to Raffaello, it is certain that in the progress of
the pictures there is an evident progress toward style.
Aggrandisement of style might reasonably be supposed to have been the
motive that drew Raffaello to Florence. The David of M. Angiolo was
placed; he had begun his cartoon, which from its very inaccessibility,
and the high character of the artist whom it opposed, must have been an
object of eager curiosity to the public, and of tremulous expectation to
the student. Florence was, no doubt, at that period divided into two
technic factions, Vinciists and Bonarotists; it does not, however,
appear that Raffaello adhered to either of the two leaders; neither the
learning and energy of Bonaroti, nor the magic chiaroscuro of Lionardo,
could divert the future painter of the passions from his course; he
therefore attached himself to the study of Masaccio, as a more direct
guide to the drama. The implicit application of that master's
conceptions in the same or similar subjects, when he was in the vigour
of his powers, if it be the most celebrated proof of this, is a less
convincing one than the similarity of taste and vein of thought which
pervades their works, and might, to men of bolder conjecture than I
pretend to, prove that Masaccio might have been what Raffaello was, had
time and means conspired.
According to the account of Vasari,[95] Raffaello went three times to
Florence: the first time when, according to the biographer, roused by
the fame of Lionardo and M. Angiolo, he left the partnership of
Pinturicchio, 1504--the date of the recommendatory letter with the
affixed name of Joanna Feltria, Duchess of Urbino, addressed to the
Gonfaloniere Pietro Soderini, and said to be still preserved at Florence
among the papers of the Gaddi family. Supposing the date of the letter
(1st October, 1504) to be correct, and the writer of it to have been
acquainted with the person she recommends, its genuineness, as Fiorillo
observes, is liable to strong suspicion. Its expressions might fit a lad
of ten or twelve years, but certainly not a young man of one-and-twenty,
the age of Raffaello, who had painted many pictures, was at that very
time employed in a great public work, and only three years after was
called to Rome by Giulio the Second.
Though Raffaello's talents had spread his name, and attracted the
attention and the wishes of Giulio the Second to employ him in the
decoration of the Vatican, it may be presumed that the persuasive
influence of his relative, Bramante Lazzari, decided the Pontiff to
distinguish him by that immediate and exclusive call to Rome, which
raised him above all rival competition, and opened the most splendid
period of his life, most probably 1507. Which was the picture he began
with, would not have been contested by his biographers, encomiasts, and
critics, from Vasari to Mengs, had they attended less to hearsay, for
tradition it cannot be called, than to the evidence of the works
themselves. To date the dispute on the Sacrament after the School of
Athens, equally inverts the progressive powers of the artist in
conception, taste, style, and execution. Everywhere that composition
betrays a young performer, enviably successful in each individual part,
but whom experience has not yet enabled to spread an harmonious whole.
The connection of its upper with the lower scene, less divided than rent
asunder, depends entirely on a mental effort in the spectator. The
parallelism of the celestial synod, impresses more with formal monotony
than awful energy, and the ostentatious abuse of gold impairs its
dignity. In the lower part of the picture, less sublime than dramatic,
the artist moves in his own element; its parallelism and its contrasts,
no longer the result of ceremonious symmetry, but of the inspiring
principle, warms contemplation to sympathy, and its characteristic
correctness exhibits in Raffaello's own unassisted, or rather unalloyed
hand, the style of the School of Athens, the Mass of Bolsena, the
female part of the Heliodorus, and with a felicity unattained in the
Parnassus and the Attila,--the more ample outlines and the increased
volume of forms in the Angels, and the Heliodorus and his accomplices on
the foreground.
_A description of two Drawings by Raffaello, from an account of
the Collection of Drawings and Prints in the Gallery of Duke
Albrecht, of Sachsen Teschen, at Vienna_.[96]