Raphael
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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