Raphael (his full name Raffaello Sanzi or Santi),
Italian painter and architect of the Italian High
Renaissance. Raphael is best known for his Madonnas and
for his large figure compositions in the Vatican in
Rome. His work is admired for its clarity of form and
ease of composition and for its visual achievement of
the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur.
Early years at Urbino
Raphael was the son of Giovanni Santi and Magia di
Battista Ciarla; his mother died in 1491. His father
was, according to the 16th-century artist and biographer
Giorgio
Vasari, a painter "of no great merit." He was,
however, a man of culture who was in constant contact
with the advanced artistic ideas current at the court of
Urbino. He gave his son his first instruction in
painting, and, before his death in 1494, when Raphael
was 11, he had introduced the boy to humanistic
philosophy at the court.
Urbino had become a centre of culture during the rule
of Duke
Federico da Montefeltro, who encouraged the arts and
attracted the visits of men of outstanding talent,
including Donato
Bramante,
Piero della Francesca, and Leon Battista
Alberti, to his court. Although Raphael would be
influenced by major artists in Florence and Rome, Urbino
constituted the basis for all his subsequent learning.
Furthermore, the cultural vitality of the city probably
stimulated the exceptional precociousness of the young
artist, who, even at the beginning of the 16th century,
when he was scarcely 17 years old, already displayed an
extraordinary talent.
Apprenticeship at Perugia
The date of Raphael's arrival in Perugia is not
known, but several scholars place it in 1495. The first
record of Raphael's activity as a painter is found there
in a document of Dec. 10, 1500, declaring that the young
painter, by then called a "master," was commissioned to
help paint an altarpiece to be completed by Sept. 13,
1502. It is clear from this that Raphael had already
given proof of his mastery, so much so that between 1501
and 1503 he received a rather important commission - to
paint the
Coronation of the Virgin for the Oddi Chapel in the
church of San Francesco, Perugia (and now in the Vatican
Museum, Rome). The great Umbrian master Pietro
Perugino was executing the frescoes in the
Collegio del Cambio at Perugia between 1498 and
1500, enabling Raphael, as a member of his workshop, to
acquire extensive professional knowledge.
In addition to this practical instruction, Perugino's
calmly exquisite style also influenced Raphael. The
Giving of the Keys to St Peter, painted in 1481-82
by Perugino for the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican Palace
in Rome, inspired Raphael's first major work,
The Marriage of the Virgin (1504; Brera Gallery,
Milan). Perugino's influence is seen in the emphasis on
perspectives, in the graded relationships between the
figures and the architecture, and in the lyrical
sweetness of the figures. Nevertheless, even in this
early painting, it is clear that Raphael's sensibility
was different from his teacher's. The disposition of the
figures is less rigidly related to the architecture, and
the disposition of each figure in relation to the others
is more informal and animated. The sweetness of the
figures and the gentle relation between them surpasses
anything in Perugino's work.
Three small paintings done by Raphael shortly after
The Marriage of the Virgin -
Vision of a Knight,
Three Graces, and
St Michael - are masterful examples of narrative
painting, showing, as well as youthful freshness, a
maturing ability to control the elements of his own
style. Although he had learned much from Perugino,
Raphael by late 1504 needed other models to work from;
it is clear that his desire for knowledge was driving
him to look beyond Perugia.
Move to Florence
Vasari vaguely recounts that Raphael followed the
Perugian painter Bernardino
Pinturicchio to Siena and then went on to Florence,
drawn there by accounts of the work that
Leonardo da Vinci and
Michelangelo were undertaking in that city. By the
autumn of 1504 Raphael had certainly arrived in
Florence. It is not known if this was his first visit to
Florence, but, as his works attest, it was about 1504
that he first came into substantial contact with this
artistic civilization, which reinforced all the ideas he
had already acquired and also opened to him new and
broader horizons. Vasari records that he studied not
only the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and
Fra Bartolomeo, who were the masters of the High
Renaissance, but also "the old things of
Masaccio," a pioneer of the naturalism that marked
the departure of the early Renaissance from the Gothic.
Still, his principal teachers in Florence were
Leonardo and Michelangelo. Many of the works that
Raphael executed in the years between 1505 and 1507,
most notably a great series of Madonnas including
The Madonna of the Goldfinch (c. 1505; Uffizi
Gallery, Florence), the
Madonna del Prato (c. 1505; Kunsthistorisches
Museum, Vienna), the
Esterházy Madonna (c. 1505-07; Museum of Fine Arts,
Budapest), and
La Belle Jardinière (c. 1507; Louvre Museum, Paris),
are marked by the influence of Leonardo, who since 1480
had been making great innovations in painting. Raphael
was particularly influenced by Leonardo's
Madonna and Child with St. Anne pictures, which are
marked by an intimacy and simplicity of setting uncommon
in 15th-century art. Raphael learned the Florentine
method of building up his composition in depth with
pyramidal figure masses; the figures are grouped as a
single unit, but each retains its own individuality and
shape. A new unity of composition and suppression of
inessentials distinguishes the works he painted in
Florence. Raphael also owed much to Leonardo's lighting
techniques; he made moderate use of Leonardo's
chiaroscuro (i.e., strong contrast between light and
dark), and he was especially influenced by his sfumato
(i.e., use of extremely fine, soft shading instead of
line to delineate forms and features). Raphael went
beyond Leonardo, however, in creating new figure types
whose round, gentle faces reveal uncomplicated and
typically human sentiments but raised to a sublime
perfection and serenity.
In 1507 Raphael was commissioned to paint the
Deposition of Christ that is now in the Borghese
Gallery in Rome. In this work, it is obvious that
Raphael set himself deliberately to learn from
Michelangelo the expressive possibilities of human
anatomy. But Raphael differed from Leonardo and
Michelangelo, who were both painters of dark intensity
and excitement, in that he wished to develop a calmer
and more extroverted style that would serve as a
popular, universally accessible form of visual
communication.
Last years in Rome
Raphael was called to Rome toward the end of 1508 by
Pope Julius II at the suggestion of the architect
Donato Bramante. At this time Raphael was little known
in Rome, but the young man soon made a deep impression
on the volatile Julius and the papal court, and his
authority as a master grew day by day. Raphael was
endowed with a handsome appearance and great personal
charm in addition to his prodigious artistic talents,
and he eventually became so popular that he was called
"the prince of painters."
Raphael spent the last 12 years of his short life in
Rome. They were years of feverish activity and
successive masterpieces. His first task in the city was
to paint a cycle of frescoes in a suite of medium-sized
rooms in the Vatican papal apartments in which Julius
himself lived and worked; these rooms are known simply
as the Stanze. The
Stanza della Segnatura (1508-11) and
Stanza d'Eliodoro (1512-14) were decorated
practically entirely by Raphael himself; the murals in
the Stanza dell'Incendio (1514-17), though designed by
Raphael, were largely executed by his numerous
assistants and pupils.
The decoration of the Stanza della Segnatura was
perhaps Raphael's greatest work. Julius II was a highly
cultured man who surrounded himself with the most
illustrious personalities of the Renaissance. He
entrusted Bramante with the construction of a new
basilica of St. Peter to replace the original
4th-century church; he called upon Michelangelo to
execute his tomb and compelled him against his will to
decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; and, sensing
the genius of Raphael, he committed into his hands the
interpretation of the philosophical scheme of the
frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura. This theme was
the historical justification of the power of the Roman
Catholic church through Neoplatonic philosophy.
The four main fresco walls in the Stanza della
Segnatura are occupied by the
Disputa and the
School of Athens on the larger walls and the
Parnassus and
Cardinal Virtues on the smaller walls. The two most
important of these frescoes are the Disputa and the
School of Athens. The Disputa, showing a celestial
vision of God and his prophets and apostles above a
gathering of representatives, past and present, of the
Roman Catholic church, equates through its iconography
the triumph of the church and the triumph of truth. The
School of Athens is a complex allegory of secular
knowledge, or philosophy, showing
Plato and Aristotle surrounded by philosophers, past
and present, in a splendid architectural setting; it
illustrates the historical continuity of Platonic
thought. The School of Athens is perhaps the most famous
of all Raphael's frescoes, and one of the culminating
artworks of the High Renaissance. Here Raphael fills an
ordered and stable space with figures in a rich variety
of poses and gestures, which he controls in order to
make one group of figures lead to the next in an
interweaving and interlocking pattern, bringing the eye
to the central figures of Plato and Aristotle at the
converging point of the perspectival space. The space in
which the philosophers congregate is defined by the
pilasters and barrel vaults of a great basilica that is
based on Bramante's design for the new St Peter's in
Rome. The general effect of the fresco is one of
majestic calm, clarity, and equilibrium.
About the same time, probably in 1511, Raphael
painted a more secular subject, the
Triumph of Galatea in the Villa Farnesina in Rome;
this work was perhaps the High Renaissance's most
successful evocation of the living spirit of classical
antiquity. Meanwhile, Raphael's decoration of the papal
apartments continued after the death of Julius in 1513
and into the succeeding pontificate of Leo X until 1517.
In contrast to the generalized allegories in the Stanza
della Segnatura, the decorations in the second room, the
Stanza d'Eliodoro, portray specific miraculous events in
the history of the Christian church. The four principal
subjects are
The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple,
The Miracle at Bolsena,
The Liberation of St Peter, and
Leo I Halting Attila. These frescoes are deeper and
richer in colour than are those in the earlier room, and
they display a new boldness on Raphael's part in both
their dramatic subjects and their unusual effects of
light. The Liberation of St Peter, for example, is a
night scene and contains three separate lighting effects
- moonlight, the torch carried by a soldier, and the
supernatural light emanating from an angel. Raphael
delegated his assistants to decorate the third room, the
Stanze dell'Incendio, with the exception of one fresco,
the
Fire in the Borgo, in which his pursuit of more
dramatic pictorial incidents and his continuing study of
the male nude are plainly apparent.
The Madonnas that Raphael painted in Rome show him
turning away from the serenity and gentleness of his
earlier works in order to emphasize qualities of
energetic movement and grandeur. His
Alba Madonna (1508; National Gallery, Washington)
epitomizes the serene sweetness of the Florentine
Madonnas but shows a new maturity of emotional
expression and supreme technical sophistication in the
poses of the figures. It was followed by the
Madonna di Foligno (1510; Vatican Museum) and the
Sistine Madonna (1513; Gemäldegalerie, Dresden),
which show both the richness of colour and new boldness
in compositional invention typical of Raphael's Roman
period. Some of his other late Madonnas, such as the
Madonna of Francis I (Louvre), are remarkable for
their polished elegance. Besides his other
accomplishments, Raphael became the most important
portraitist in Rome during the first two decades of the
16th century. He introduced new types of presentation
and new psychological situations for his sitters, as
seen in the portrait of
Leo X with Two Cardinals (1517-19; Uffizi,
Florence). Raphael's finest work in the genre is perhaps
the
Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (1516; Louvre), a
brilliant and arresting character study.
Leo X commissioned Raphael to design
10 large tapestries to hang on the walls of the
Sistine Chapel. Seven of the ten cartoons (full-size
preparatory drawings) were completed by 1516, and the
tapestries woven after them were hung in place in the
chapel by 1519. The tapestries themselves are still in
the Vatican, while seven of Raphael's original cartoons
are in the British royal collection and are on view at
the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. These cartoons
represent
Christ's Charge to Peter,
The Miraculous Draught of Fishes,
The Death of Ananias, The Healing of the Lame Man,
The Blinding of Elymas, The Sacrifice at Lystra, and
St Paul Preaching at Athens. In these pictures
Raphael created prototypes that would influence the
European tradition of narrative history painting for
centuries to come. The cartoons display Raphael's keen
sense of drama, his use of gestures and facial
expressions to portray emotion, and his incorporation of
credible physical settings from both the natural world
and that of ancient Roman architecture.
While he was at work in the Stanza della Segnatura,
Raphael also did his first architectural work, designing
the church of Sant' Eligio degli Orefici. In 1513 the
banker Agostino Chigi, whose
Villa Farnesina Raphael had already decorated,
commissioned him to design and decorate his funerary
chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo. In 1514
Leo X chose him to work on the basilica of St Peter's
alongside Bramante; and when Bramante died later that
year, Raphael assumed the direction of the work,
transforming the plans of the church from a Greek, or
radial, to a Latin, or longitudinal, design.
Raphael was also a keen student of archaeology and of
ancient Greco-Roman sculpture, echoes of which are
apparent in his paintings of the human figure during the
Roman period. In 1515 Leo X put him in charge of the
supervision of the preservation of marbles bearing
valuable Latin inscriptions; two years later he was
appointed commissioner of antiquities for the city, and
he drew up an archaeological map of Rome. Raphael had by
this time been put in charge of virtually all of the
papacy's various artistic projects in Rome, involving
architecture, paintings and decoration, and the
preservation of antiquities.
Raphael's last masterpiece is the
Transfiguration (commissioned in 1517), an enormous
altarpiece that was unfinished at his death and
completed by his assistant
Giulio Romano. It now hangs in the Vatican Museum.
The Transfiguration is a complex work that combines
extreme formal polish and elegance of execution with an
atmosphere of tension and violence communicated by the
agitated gestures of closely crowded groups of figures.
It shows a new sensibility that is like the prevision of
a new world, turbulent and dynamic; in its feeling and
composition it inaugurated the Mannerist movement and
tends toward an expression that may even be called
Baroque.
Raphael died on his 37th birthday. His funeral mass
was celebrated at the Vatican, his Transfiguration was
placed at the head of the bier, and his body was buried
in the Pantheon in Rome.
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