RAPHAEL
The original of our next picture is very small, only seven inches square,
yet I hope it will instantly appeal to you. The name of the artist,
Raphael, is perhaps the most familiar of all the names of the Old
Masters, mainly, it may be, because he was the painter of the Sistine
Madonna, the best known and best loved of Madonnas.
When Raphael drew and painted this picture of the 'Knight's Dream,'
about the year 1500, he was himself like a young knight, at the outset
of his short and brilliant career. As a boy he was handsome, gifted,
charming. His nature is said to have been as lovely as his gifts were
great, and he passed his short life in a triumphant progress from city
to city and court to court, always working hard and always painting
so beautifully that he won the admiration of artists, princes, and
popes. His father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter living in the town
of Urbino, in Central Italy, but Raphael when quite young went to
Perugia to study with the painter Perugino, a native of that town.
Perugia stands upon a high hill, like the hill in the background of
the picture of the 'Knight's Dream,' only higher, for from it you can
overlook the wide Umbrian plain as far as Assisi--the home of St.
Francis--which lies on the slope of the next mountain. That beautiful
Umbrian landscape, in which all the towns look like castles perched
upon the top of steep hills, with wide undulating ground between,
occurs frequently in the pictures of Perugino, and often in those of
his pupil Raphael. If you have once seen the view from Perugia for
yourself, you will realize how strongly it took hold of the imagination
of the young painter. Raphael had a most impressionable mind. It was
part of his genius that, from every painter with whom he came in contact
he imbibed the best, almost without knowing it. The artists of his
day, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the other great men, were
each severally employed in working out once and for all some particular
problem in connection with their art. Michelangelo, a giant in
intellect, painter, sculptor, architect, and poet, studied the human
body as it had not been studied since the days of ancient Greece. His
sculptured figures on the tombs of the Medici in Florence rank second
only to those of the greatest Greek sculptors, and his ceiling in the
Sistine Chapel is composed of a series of masterpieces of
figure-painting. He devoted himself largely in his sculpture and his
painting to the representation of the naked human body, and made it
futile in his successors to plead ignorance as an excuse for bad drawing.
As a colourist he was not pre-eminent, and his few panel pictures are
for the most part unfinished.
Leonardo da Vinci, the older contemporary of Raphael, first in Florence
and afterwards in the north of Italy, left a colossal reputation and
but few pictures, for in his search after perfection he became
dissatisfied with what he had done and is said to have destroyed one
masterpiece after another. For him the great interest in the aspect
of man and woman was not so much the form of the body as the expression
of the face. What was fantastic and weird fascinated him. At Windsor
are designs he made for the construction of an imaginary beast with
gigantic claws. He once owned a lizard, and made wings for it with
quicksilver inside them, so that they quivered when the lizard crawled.
He put a dragon's mask over its head, and the result was ghastly. The
tale gives us a side light on this extraordinary personage. When you
are led to read more about him you will feel the fascination of his
strong, yet perplexing personality. The faces in his pictures are
wonderful faces, with a fugitive mocking smile and a seeming burden
of strange thought. By mastery of the most subtle gradations of light,
his heads have an appearance of solidity new in painting, till Raphael
and some of his contemporaries learnt the secret from Leonardo.
Heretofore, Italian painters had been contented to bathe their
pictures in a flood of diffused light, but he experimented also with
effects of strong light and shade on the face. His landscape
backgrounds are an almost unearthly cold grey, and include the
strangest forms of rock and mountain. His investigations into several
of the scientific problems connected with art led to results which
affected in an important degree the work of many later artists.
If Raphael had less originality than Michelangelo or Leonardo, if
Leonardo was the first artist to obtain complete mastery over the
expression of the face and Michelangelo over the drawing of the figure,
Raphael was able to profit at once by whatever they accomplished. Yet
never was he a mere imitator, for all that he absorbed became tinged
with a magical charm in his fertile brain, a charm so personal that
his work can hardly be mistaken for that of any other artist.
Our picture of a 'Knight's Dream' was probably painted while Raphael
was under the influence of a master named Timoteo Viti, whose works
you are not likely to know, or much care about when you see them. It
was just after he had painted it that he came into Perugino's hands.
Although the 'Knight's Dream' is so small, and Raphael was but a boy
when he painted it, the picture has the true romantic air,
characteristic of the joyful years of the early Renaissance. He does
not seem to have felt the conflict between the old religious ideal
and the new pursuit of worldly beauty as Botticelli felt it. Yet he
chose the competition of these two ideals as the subject of this picture.
The Knight, clothed in bright armour and gay raiment, bearing no
relation at all to the clothes worn in 1500, rests upon his shield
beneath the slight shade of a very slender tree. In his dream there
appear to him two figures, both of whom claim his knightly allegiance
for life: one, a young and lovely girl in a bright coloured dress with
flowers in her hair, tempts him to embrace a life of mirth, of
Jest and youthful Jollity,
Quips and Cranks and wanton Wiles,
Nods and Becks and wreathed Smiles.
The other resembles the same poet's
Pensive Nun, devout and pure,
Sober, steadfast, and demure.
She holds sword and book, symbols of stern action and wise
accomplishment. Which the knight will choose we are not told, perhaps
because Raphael himself never had to make the choice. He was too gifted
and too fond of work to be tempted from it by anything whatever. Always
joyous and always successful, he was able to paint any subject, sacred,
profane, ancient, or modern, so long as it was a happy one. He was
too busy and too gay to feel pain and sorrow, as Botticelli felt them,
and to paint sad subjects. To him the visible world was good and
beautiful, and the invisible world lovely and happy likewise. His
Madonnas are placid or smiling mothers. The fat and darling babies
they hold are indeed divine but not awesome. Yet the extraordinary
sweetness of expression, nobility of form, and beauty of colouring
in the Madonnas make you almost hold your breath when you look at them.
In the 'Knight's Dream' there is a simple beauty in the pose and
grouping of the figures. You can hardly fancy three figures better
arranged for the purpose of the subject. There is something inevitable
about them, which is the highest praise due to a mastery of design
in the art of composition. Raphael's surpassing gift was in fitting
beautiful figures into any given space, so that it seems as though
the space had been made to fit the figures, instead of the figures
to fit the space. You could never put his round Madonnas into a square
frame. The figures would look as wrong as in a round frame they look
right. If you were to cut off a bit of the foreground in any of his
pictures and add the extra piece to the sky, you would make the whole
look wrong, whereas perhaps you might add on a piece of sky to Hubert
van Eyck's 'Three Maries' without spoiling the effect.
[Illustration: THE KNIGHT'S DREAM
From the picture by Raphael, in the National Gallery, London]
The colouring of the picture, too, is jewel-like and lovely, but the
uncoloured drawing is itself full of charm. The grace of line, which
was to distinguish all the works of his mature years, is already
manifest in this effort of his boyhood. It seems to foretell the sweep
of the Virgin's drapery in the Sistine Madonna, and the delightful
maze of curves flowing together and away again and returning upon
themselves which outline the face, the arms, hands, and draperies of
St. Catherine in the National Gallery. You will find it well worth
a little trouble to look long and closely at one of Raphael's well-known
Madonnas till you clearly see how the composition of all the parts
of it is formed by the play of long and graceful curves.
You can see from the drawing of the 'Knight's Dream,' which is hung
quite near the painting in the National Gallery, how carefully Raphael
thought out the detail of the picture before he began to paint. He
seems even to have been afraid that he might not be able to draw it
again so perfectly; therefore he placed the drawing over the panel
and pricked it through. The marks of the pin are quite clear, and it
brings one nearer this great artist to follow closely the process of
his work. It makes the young boy genius of 1500 almost seem akin to
the struggling boy and girl artists of the present time.
From Perugia Raphael went to Florence, where he painted a number of
his most beautiful Madonnas. Then, in 1508, he was called to Rome by
Pope Julius II. to decorate some rooms in the Vatican Palace. The
Renaissance popes were possessed of so great wealth, and spent it to
such purpose, that its spending influenced the art of their age. Many
of the rooms in the Vatican had been decorated by Botticelli and other
good artists of the previous half-century, but already the new pope
considered their work out of date and ordered it to be replaced by
Michelangelo and Raphael. For nine years Raphael worked at the
decoration of the palace, always being pressed, hurried, and even
worried by two successive popes who employed him. The wall spaces which
he had to fill were often awkwardly broken up with windows and doors,
but he easily overcame whatever difficulties were encountered. To
succeed apparently without struggle was a peculiar gift granted to
Raphael above any other artist of his day. The frescoes painted by
him in the Vatican illustrated subjects from Greek philosophy and
medieval Church history, as well as from the Old and New Testament.
As an illustrator of sacred writ he never attempted that verisimilitude
in Eastern surroundings to which Hubert van Eyck leaned, neither was
he satisfied with the dress of his own day in which other painters
were wont to clothe their sacred characters. The historical sense,
which has driven some modern artists to much antiquarian research to
discover exactly what Peter and Paul must have worn, did not exist
before the nineteenth century. Raphael felt, nevertheless, that the
clothes of the Renaissance were hardly suitable for Noah and Abraham,
so he invented a costume of his own, founded upon Roman dress, but
different from oriental or contemporary clothes. The Scripture
illustrations of Raphael most familiar to you may probably be his
cartoon designs for tapestry in the South Kensington Museum, which
were bought by Charles I. In these you can see what is meant about
the clothes, but you will not be surprised at them, because the same
have been adopted by the majority of Bible illustrators ever since
the days of Raphael. His pictures became so popular that it was thought
whatever he did must be right. The dress was a mere detail in his work,
but it was easy to copy and has been copied persistently from that
day to this. It is curious to think that the long white robes, which
Christ wears in the illustrations of our present-day Sunday School
books and other religious publications, are all due to imitation of
Raphael's designs.
The first room he finished for Julius II. was so rich in effect and
beautiful in colour that the Pope could scarcely wait for more rooms
as fine. Raphael had to call in a large number of assistants to enable
him to cover the walls fast enough to please the Pope, and the quality
of the work began to deteriorate. The uneven merit of his frescoes
foretold the consequence of overwork despite his matchless facility
and power. But in his panel pictures, when he was not hurried, his
work continued to improve until he reached his crowning achievement
in the Sistine Madonna painted three years before his death.
Raphael was thirty-seven when he died in 1520, and very far from coming
to the end of his powers of learning. Each picture that he painted
revealed to him new difficulties to conquer, and new experiments to
try, in his art. We seem compelled to think that had he lived and
laboured for another score of years, the history of painting in Italy
might have been different. In Rome and Florence no successor attempted
to improve upon his work. His pupils and assistants were more numerous
than those of any other painter, but when they had obtained some of
his facility of drawing and painting they were contented. None of them
had Raphael's genius, yet all wished to paint like him; so that for
the following fifty years Rome and Florence and Southern Italy were
flooded with inferior Raphaelesque paintings, which tended to become
more slip-shod in execution as time went on, and more devoid of any
personal note. It was just as though his imitators had learnt to write
beautifully and then had had little to say.
Leonardo da Vinci died a few months before Raphael. Several of his
pupils were artists of ability, and lived to carry on his traditions
of painting in the north of Italy. Leonardo himself had been so erratic,
produced so little, and so few of his pictures survive, that many know
him best in his pupils' work, or through copies and engravings of his
great 'Last Supper'--a picture that became an almost total wreck upon
the walls of the Refectory in Milan, for which it was painted. His
influence upon his contemporaries at Milan was very great, so that
during some years hardly a picture was painted there which did not
show a likeness to the work of Leonardo. He had created a type of female
beauty all his own. The face will impress itself upon your memory the
first time you see it, whether in a picture by Leonardo or in one by
a pupil. You can see it in the National Gallery in the great 'Madonna
of the Rocks,' and in the magnificent drawing at Burlington House.
It is not a very beautiful face, but it haunts the memory, and the
Milanese artists of Leonardo's day never threw off their recollection
of it.
With far less power than Leonardo, one of his imitators, Bernardino
Luini, painted pictures of such charm and simplicity that almost
everyone finds them delightful. If you could see his picture of the
angels bearing St. Catherine, robed in red, through the air to her
last resting-place upon the hill, you would feel the beauty and peace
of his gentle nature revealed in his art. But the spell of Leonardo
vanished with the death of those who had known him in life. The last
of his pupils died in 1550, and with him the Leonardo school of painting
came to an end.
There is one more painter belonging to the full Renaissance too famous
to remain entirely unmentioned. This is Correggio, a painter affected
also by the pictures of Raphael and Leonardo, but individual in his
vision and his work. He passed his life in Parma, in the north of Italy,
inheriting a North Italian tradition, and hearing only echoes of the
world beyond. His canvases are thronged with fair shapes, pretty women
and dancing children, ethereally soft and lovely. But it is in his
native town that the angels soar aloft with the Virgin in the dome
of the cathedral, and the children frolic on the walls of the convent.
These are his masterpieces you would like best.
In 1550 the impetus given to painting in Italy by the Renaissance was
drawing to an end. The great central epoch may be said to have
terminated in Tuscany a few years after the deaths of Leonardo and
Raphael in 1520. But we have said nothing yet of Venice, where, in
1520, artists whose visions and whose record of them were to be as
wonderful as those of Botticelli and Raphael, were as yet sleeping
in their cradles.