Plate
I. The Ansidei Madonna Frontispiece
In the National Gallery, London
Page
II. The Madonna del Gran Duca 14
In the Pitti Palace, Florence
III. The Madonna della Sedia 24
In the Pitti Palace, Florence
IV. "La Belle Jardinière" 34
In the Louvre
V. The Madonna of the Tower 40
In the National Gallery, London
VI. Pope Julius II. 50
In the Uffizi Gallery, Florence
VII. Putto with Garland 60
In the Academy of St. Luca, Rome
VIII. Portrait of Raphael 70
In the Uffizi Gallery, Florence
I
"And I tell you that to paint one beautiful woman, I should need to see
several beautiful women, and to have you with me to choose the best,"
wrote Raphael, then at the zenith of his fame and good fortune, to his
life-long friend Count Baldassare Castiglione, who--the ideal courtier
himself--has given the world that immortal monument of Renaissance
culture, the Book of the Courtier. In penning these lines the prince of
painters intended, perhaps, no more than a pretty compliment to one who
was himself a model of courtesy and graceful speech, but the words
would gain deep significance if _picture_ were substituted for _woman_,
and if Castiglione were taken to signify the personification of
intellect and learning. For the beauty of Raphael's art, which in the
course of four centuries has lost none of its hold upon the admiration
of mankind, is distilled from the various elements of beauty contained
in the art that had gone before him and was being created around him;
and in choosing the best, at least as far as idea and conception are
concerned, he was guided by the deepest thinkers and keenest intellects
of what were then the world's greatest centres of culture.
Raphael was, indeed, born under a happy constellation. He was not a
giant of intellect, nor an epoch-making genius; as Michelangelo said of
him, he owed his art less to nature than to study; but he was born at a
time when two centuries of gradual artistic development had led up to a
point where an artist was needed to gather up the diverging threads and
bring the movement to a culmination, which will stand for all times as
a standard of perfection. Advantages of birth and early surroundings,
charm of appearance and disposition which made him a favourite wherever
he went, receptivity, adaptability, and application, and above all an
early and easy mastery of technique, were combined in Raphael to lead
him to this achievement. The smooth unclouded progress of his life from
recognition to fame, from prosperity to affluence, is not the turbulent
way of genius. Genius walks a sad and lonely path. Michelangelo, the
turbulent spirit, morose and dissatisfied, Lionardo da Vinci, pursuing
his high ideals without a thought of worldly success until his lonely
old age sees him expatriated and contemplating the fruitlessness of all
his labours--these men of purest genius have little in common with the
pliant courtier Raphael, the head himself of a little court of faithful
followers. The story goes that Michelangelo, in the bitterness of his
spirit, when meeting his happy rival at the head of his usual army of
some fifty dependants on his way to the Papal court, addressed him with
the words "You walk like the sheriff with his _posse comitatus_." And
Raphael, quick at repartee, retorted "And you, like an executioner
going to the scaffold." Whether the anecdote be true or not, it marks
the difference between the course of talent--albeit the rarest
talent--and that of genius.
[Illustration: PLATE II.--THE MADONNA DEL GRAN DUCA
(In the Pitti Palace, Florence)
This picture, remarkable for the effective simplicity of its design and
for the purity of the Virgin's face, derives the name by which it is
commonly known from the fact that it was bought in 1799 by the Grand
Duke Ferdinand III. from a poor widow, and held by him in such esteem
that he would never part from it and always took it with him on his
travels. At one time it was actually credited with the power of working
miracles. It is one of the first works of Raphael's Florentine period,
and now hangs in the Pitti Palace, Florence.]
What are the qualities of Raphael's art that have carried his fame
unsullied through the ages and made him the most popular, the most
admired, of all painters? The greatest of the primitives, and of the
later masters Velazquez, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Watteau, to mention
only a few of the brightest beacons in the realm of art, have at some
time or other been eclipsed and held in slight esteem. Raphael alone
escaped the inconstancy of popular favour; he was set up as an idol
before he left the world to mourn his untimely death, and in the course
of the years the world's idolatrous worship was extended even to the
feeble handiwork of his assistants, which often passed under his name.
Only within the memory of living men did this blind and
indiscriminating worship lead to a reaction as indiscriminating. But
this reaction was confined to a comparatively small circle of
æsthetically inclined art enthusiasts; and to-day, when the more
scientific methods of criticism have succeeded in sifting the wheat
from the chaff--the master's own work from the factory-like production
of his bottega--he has been reinstated in all his former glory.
Contemptuous hostility to Raphael's art has ceased to be a fashionable
pose. The frank acknowledgment of the perfection of this art is no
longer stayed by the consciousness of the harm done by that imperfect
imitation of the Raphaelic code of beauty, which has been the result of
all academic teaching in Europe since the founding of the Prix de Rome.
Beauty, formal beauty, pure and faultless, must appeal to everybody;
and Raphael means to us the perfection of beauty--such beauty as lies
in rhythm, balance, colour, form, and execution. It is a calculated
beauty, the lucid, unambiguous expression of an absolutely normal,
well-balanced mind assisted by an unerring hand; hence it is
intelligible to everybody without that unconscious mental effort which
is needed for the understanding of an art of greater emotional
intensity. It is of the very essence of art that it should express an
emotion; a picture which is merely imitative without holding a hint of
what the artist felt at the time of creating it, ceases to be a work of
art, even if it represents a subject beautiful in itself. On the other
hand, an ugly subject may be raised to sublime art by emotional
statement; but this emotion is of necessity more complex and more
difficult to understand than that simplest of all emotions, the
pleasure caused by the contemplation of beauty. This accounts for the
common fallacy that art and beauty are indissolubly connected, and for
the favouritism shown by all the successive generations to Raphael
whose brush was wedded to beauty in the classic sense, and whose art
knew nothing of the beauty of character.
But beauty alone does not constitute Raphael's greatness, or Bouguereau
and many other modern academic painters would have to be accounted
great instead of being merely dull and insipid. Raphael developed to
its utmost power of expressiveness the art of space-composition, the
secret of which was the heritage of the Umbrian painters. What
space-composition means cannot be better defined than it has been by
Mr. Berenson: "Space-composition differs from ordinary composition in
the first place most obviously in that it is not an arrangement to be
judged as extending only laterally, or up and down on a flat surface,
but as extending inwards in depth as well. It is composition in three
dimensions, and not in two, in the cube, not merely on the surface....
Painted space-composition opens out the space it frames in, puts
boundaries only ideal to the roof of heaven. All that it uses, whether
the forms of the natural landscape, or of grand architecture, or even
of the human figure, it reduces to be its ministrants in conveying a
sense of untrammelled, but not chaotic spaciousness. In such pictures,
how freely one breathes--as if a load had just been lifted from one's
breast; how refreshed, how noble, how potent one feels; again, how
soothed; and still again, how wafted forth to abodes of far-away
bliss!"
This sense of space and depth is achieved by methods which have nothing
in common with our modern art of creating the illusion of what is
called "atmosphere"--not by the "losing and finding" of contours, not
by the application of optical theories, such as the zone of
interchanging rays which dissolves all hard outlines, nor by the
blurring and fogging of the distance. Space-composition in the sense in
which it was practised by Raphael is closely akin to the art of
architecture in its appeal to our emotions.
As an illustrator, again, Raphael was unequalled as regards clear,
direct, measured statement of all that is essential to the immediate
grasping of the idea or incident depicted. The first glance at one of
Raphael's works, whether it be a small panel picture or a monumental
fresco, reveals its whole purport, and that in a manner so complete and
lucid and convincing as could not be achieved by any other method of
expression. With infallible sureness he invariably found the shortest
way for the harmonious statement of idea, form, and emotion, which in
his work are always found in perfect balance and so completely
permeated by each other as to constitute an indissoluble trinity.
Another reason for Raphael's powerful appeal--and in this he is perhaps
the most typical child of his period--is that his art unites in one
majestic current the two greatest movements of thought which have ever
fired the imagination of civilised Europe; classic antiquity and
Christian faith, when treated by Raphael's brush, cease to be
incompatible and live side by side in that measured harmony which is
the hall-mark of his art. Christianity is presented to us in the
glorious classic garb of the old world, and the myth and philosophy of
the ancients are brought into intimate relationship with Christian
teaching. He infuses new blood and life into the stones of ancient
Greece and Rome--unlike Mantegna who had remained cold and classic in
his relief-like reconstructions of antiquity; just as he accentuates
the human emotional side of the Madonna and Child _motif_ by discarding
all hieroglyphic symbolism and setting before our eyes the intimate
link of love that connects mother and babe. Almost imperceptibly his
cupids are transformed into child angels, and the Jehovah of his
"Vision of Ezekiel" has more in common with Olympian Jove than with
the mediæval conception of the Lord of Heaven.
[Illustration: PLATE III.--THE MADONNA DELLA SEDIA
(In the Pitti Palace, Florence)
The Madonna "of the Chair," one of the most characteristic and
deservedly popular of Raphael's numerous versions of the Virgin and
Child _motif_, belongs to the master's full maturity, and was painted
during his sojourn in Rome, at the time when he was occupied with the
stupendous task of decorating the _Stanze_ of the Vatican. It would be
difficult to find in the whole history of art a more pleasing solution
of the problem presented by a figure composition in the round. The
picture is now in the Pitti Palace, Florence.]
Just as Timoteo Viti, Perugino, Fra Bartolommeo, Lionardo da Vinci,
Masaccio, Michelangelo, and Sebastiano del Piombo (who imparted to him
something of the glow of Venetian colouring), had been the sources from
which Raphael drew his knowledge of technique, colour, composition, and
all the elements of pictorial style, so the humanists had paved his way
as regards the intellectual aspect of his art. His marvellous faculty
of rapid assimilation enabled him, on the one hand, to appropriate
whatever he found worthy of imitation in his precursors and
contemporaries, and thus to complete his technical equipment at an age
at which it was given to few to have achieved mastery; whilst, on the
other hand, his clear intellect, aided by the not entirely unmercenary
desire to please his patrons, helped him to carry out with
triumphant success the ideas evolved by the keenest thinkers of his
time. To doubt that the general idea, and perhaps a good many of the
details, of such a stupendous work as the fresco decoration of the
_Stanze_ at the Vatican, had originated in Raphael's head, is not to
detract from his greatness. He was a boy in his early teens when he
entered his first master's bottega. He was a youth of twenty-five when
he started on his great task; and the intervening years had been so
completely filled with the study of his craft and with the execution of
important commissions, that it is impossible to believe he could have
found much leisure for book-learning. And such learning was
indispensable for the conception of that elaborate scheme with all its
historical allusions and allegorical imagery. The wonder is that
Raphael could so completely enter into the suggestions made to him
from various sources, and to weave them into a tissue of immortal
beauty.