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Raffaello Sanzio,
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.
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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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