_Giovanni Santi_ (Umbrian: about 1440-1494).
This picture is of peculiar interest because it is by Raphael's
father. It does not, however, give a full idea of the extent
to which Raphael's talent was hereditary, for Giovanni's easel
pictures, such as this, are inferior to his wall pictures.
The young Raphael had all the advantages of an atmosphere of
artistic culture. Giovanni, like his father before him, was
a well-to-do burgher, and kept originally a general retail
shop, but he afterwards--under the teaching, it is thought,
of Melozzo da Forli--took to painting, and his house, if one
may judge from Piero della Francesca's visit in 1467, was a
resort of painters. At the brilliant court of Duke Federigo of
Urbino, Giovanni moreover acquired a taste for literature, and
there is a long rhyming chronicle by him extant in which he
describes the Duke's visit to Mantua, and amongst other things
praises greatly the works of Mantegna, Melozzo, and Piero
della Francesca. But to see how much of Raphael's genius was
original, one has only to compare this picture by the father
with one (say 744) by the son. Giovanni's female heads are not
without a mild dignity of their own; but his works lack the
soft grace and winning charm that distinguish his son's.
"Worth study, in spite of what critics say of its crudity. Concede its
immaturity, at least, though an immaturity visibly susceptible of a
delicate grace, it wins you nevertheless to return again and again,
and ponder, by a sincere expression of sorrow, profound, yet resigned,
be the cause what it may, among all the causes of sorrow inherent in
the ideal of maternity, human or divine. But if you keep in mind,
when looking at it, the facts of Raphael's childhood,[180] you will
recognise in his father's picture, not the anticipated sorrow of the
Mater Dolorosa over the dead son, but the grief of a simple household
over the mother herself taken early from it. This may have been the
first picture the eyes of the world's great painter of Madonnas rested
on; and if he stood diligently before it to copy, and so copying,
quite unconsciously, and with no disloyalty to his original, refined,
improved, substituted,--substituted himself, in fact, his finer
self--he had already struck the persistent note of his career" (Pater:
_Miscellaneous Studies_, p. 32).