Chapter VI (1)

THE GOLDEN AGE
RAPHAEL AND MICHELANGELO

On pride and humility in Art—The new Grand Style defined—Umbrian
humility in the Early Painters—Gentile da Fabriano—The Fifteenth
Century—Luca Signorelli—Perugino—Raphael; Early development—Roman
triumph—Michelangelesque aberrations—Michelangelo.

Whether the greatest art is grounded in pride or in humility has divided the critics. To most it will seem evident that the artist’s assertion of his own powers is an act of pride—a pride of person which is often reinforced by that of nation and race. As fine a critic as John Ruskin, on the contrary, has insisted that the greatest art springs from humility—reverence for God, admiration of His works in nature, homage also to one’s earthly master in art and withal to the great tradition of one’s craft. The difference is world-wide. According to one interpretation or the other, the work of art becomes an act of display or of worship. Such opposites in the realm of analysis often meet comfortably enough in the realm of practice. A haughty individualist like Leonardo da Vinci insists that his investigations of appearance and reality lead to that knowledge of God without which love is impossible. And the Golden Age of painting itself, though mostly based on corporate and individual pride, has also its infusion of humility. If Michelangelo represents the flowering of three generations of research, of that pride of intellect which ever ruled Florence, so equally does Raphael represent many generations of humility and teachableness in his native Umbria. For about ten years pride and humility worked side by side, and that was the Golden Age. Pride prevailed over humility, and the classical style of Central Italy sunk to a pretentious exhibitionism.

Our theme is that brief moment of accomplishment which witnessed the rise of Rome as centre of art, and the greatest painting of Raphael and Michelangelo. We need not hesitate to apply to it the oldfashioned term, the Golden Age. But we shall not use it with quite the oldfashioned unction, knowing as we do the heavy sacrifice involved in attaining the so-called Grand Style, and the still heavier penalty it imposed upon the art that succeeded it.

The Florentines believed that painting had reached its height in the years 1504 and 1505, when Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were designing the great competitive battle-pieces for the Priors’ Palace at Florence, and Raphael was painting his loveliest Madonnas. Modern critics might rather be inclined to date the grand climacteric from a pathetic incident of a few years later. In 1508, when Pope Julius II wished to decorate the new ante-rooms of the Vatican, the famous _Stanze_ he called the best of the older painters—Sodoma, Perugino, Signorelli, among others. No sooner had they begun to decorate the vaults than their work seemed inadequate. They were turned off incontinently and the young man Raphael called down from Florence to take their place. The incident shows how suddenly the new beauty dawned upon the world of art patronage. Vividly conscious of its advent, the Italians were less conscious of the equally sudden waning of the great style. With the wisdom of hindsight we can now see that the whole development was a marvelous spurt, lasting a bare dozen years, from the battle cartoons of 1505 to Raphael’s tapestry cartoons of 1516. Raphael and Michelangelo, who created the lasting glory of the Renaissance, also dug its grave. Before considering the creative and destructive energies of these two giants, we may profitably note the characteristics of what whether for praise or mockery has ever since been called the Grand Style. And here I have little to do beyond condensing Professor Wölfflin’s excellent book.

In the Grand Style the accent was on maturity, decorum, and measured power. Vivacious and picturesque incidents are eschewed. The new art demands simplicity and centrality. The human figure dominates the compositions. The frame is filled densely with a complicated group. The figures themselves are ample and mature. The Madonna is no longer a girl, but a gracious woman of thirty years. The Christ Child is no longer an infant, but a well-grown lad, whose supple curves harmonize with those of grown folks. As to pose, the figures no longer are casually arranged or in some posture required by a specific action. They are cast in conventional poses which bring out the active beauty of the body. Heads swing across shoulders, the upper body turns against the thrust of the lower, the arms counter the action of the legs. Such counterpoise is always active, implying motion. Straight lines give way to weavings of S curves—so many springs whose tension is kept equal. Violent motion or torsion of the body is frequent, but one motion or torsion must be immediately taken up and balanced by some equivalent. Following the general principle of centrality, colors are fewer and more studied. In portraiture, for example, we no longer have landscape or elaborate interiors, but plain dark backgrounds. At all points we have left spontaneity and happy accident behind and have entered a world of exquisite calculation. Society had moved with art towards ideals of simplicity and decorum. You no longer find the braided, beribboned and jewelled coiffures of Botticelli’s women, but serene brows with the hair drawn back evenly from its part and disposed as a mass in a net. Young gallants wear their abundant locks much the same way and sport seignorial spade beards. Old men are even more magnificently provided with beards of monumental scale. Such men are clothed no longer in parti-colored raiment, but in richly sober black. The ideal is dignity, composure, and magnanimity. You may trace it through all its intricacies of casuistry in what is still one of the best pictures of what a gentleman and lady should be, the _Cortegiano_ of Baldassare Castiglione. It was finished in 1516 while his friend Raphael was designing the tapestry cartoons. And you may read much of this high teaching in Count Castiglione’s own sensitive and comprehending face, Figure 167, as Raphael then painted it. It breathes that fine interplay of pride and humility which was the mainspring of the Renaissance, and it brings us back to the double origin of the Grand Style in the pride of Florence and the humility of Umbria.

Umbria in the narrow sense includes only the lovely stretches of the upper Tiber, and the rolling banks of Lakes Trasimene and Bolsena. But all the way over the mountains to the Adriatic the civilization was of a similar type, and so the art. Thus we may reckon the Adriatic Marches from Ancona to Ravenna as Umbrian from the point of view of the historian of painting. There were no great cities and little commerce. It is a region of small hill-top communes within the walls of which the peasants huddled for protection at night, going down to the fields in the day. It was a country of hot passions and violent feuds, and equally of religious enthusiasm and mystical piety. Great heresies had swept the land and so had the joyous and practical Christianity of St. Francis, greatest of Umbria’s sons. We have much of the volatility that we noted in Siena, without, however, a capital city to centralize it, and we also have what Siena lacked—an abiding and beautiful humility. Umbria knew her provincial estate and accepted its limitations.

Nowhere is this more plainly shown than in her art. For two centuries she was in the position of inducing foreign artists to come in, ever in an attitude of admiration and docility. Thus Giunta of Pisa, Cimabue and his Roman contemporaries; Giotto and his Florentine pupils; Simone Martini and other Sienese painters decorated the chief monument of Umbria, the Basilica of St. Francis at Assisi. Their work extended over a century to say 1330. Later still Sienese artists were employed at Perugia, among others, Taddeo Bartoli, and the region promised to become an artistic dependency of Siena. But with the dawning of the Renaissance and the extension of Florentine power beyond Arezzo, Florentine artists are preferred. We find Domenico Veneziano at Perugia, in 1438, in the pay of the ruling Baglioni. A little earlier Fra Angelico had painted for several years at Cortona. In the early fifties Benozzo Gozzoli painted his Franciscan frescoes at Montefalco, and was otherwise active in the Tiber valley. In 1468 Fra Filippo Lippi was called to Spoleto. Soon after, Umbria learned to depend on her own artists. In the Adriatic Marches there had been a limited penetration of Giotto’s style, chiefly by way of Padua and Rimini. By the end of the century the Lorenzettian manner dominated. It was succeeded by the influence of the Venetian Renaissance as exemplified by such rather backward artists as the Vivarini and Carlo Crivelli. Still later the diffused influence of Giovanni Bellini meets harmoniously that of Perugino.

Thus in humility and teachableness Umbria very slowly, and through most various stages of discipleship, worked out her own originality. And when it came one felt deeply in it the teaching of her spacious intervals and blue mountains.

It is so with the first notable painter that Umbria produced, Gentile da Fabriano.[61] He felt landscape as no artist before him. Born about 1360, he was trained by his fellow townsman, Alegretto Nuzi. Alegretto had made sound studies at Florence and had also observed with admiration the pictures of the Lorenzetti. His own altar-pieces have the Sienese splendor with a touch of sweetness that is wholly Umbrian. His pupil Gentile prefers more ornate and florid compositions such as we see in his early Coronation of the Virgin at Milan. Soon Gentile gave himself to the panoramic narrative style, outdoing the Lorenzetti in elaboration, vivacity, and gracefulness. Superficially he resembles such Florentine contemporaries as Lorenzo Monaco and Masolino, but his mood is broader and more genial, and his decorative accent more splendid. Before 1410 he was called to Venice to paint in the new Ducal Palace. His animated historical frescoes were soon destroyed by fire, but his sojourn was long enough to impress his manner, through his pupil Jacopo, Bellini, and numerous imitators, on the Venetian narrative school.

FIG. 168. Gentile da Fabriano. Adoration of the Magi.—_Uffizi._
]

FIG. 169. Gentile da Fabriano. The Nativity. Predella piece from
Adoration of Magi.—_Uffizi._
]

Passing to Florence, he left there the fullest expression of his gracious talent in the resplendent Adoration of the Kings, Figure 168, now in the Uffizi, which was painted for Palla Strozzi’s chapel in the Trinità. It was signed in May 1423, and perhaps because it was the season of flowers, Gentile painted in the rich pilasters growing sprays of morning glory, iris, anemone, and cornflower. Within its fantastic Gothic frame we witness a pageant such as Italy often saw on holy days—the procession of the Wise man moving through her streets. Around the Mother and her Child devotion reigns, but soon the scene passes off into the tumult of waiting men-at-arms, of chafing steeds, and snarling animals of the chase. The color is a radiance of scarlet, crimson, azure and gold, after the Gothic fashion. But the picture is more than Gothic in the tender and almost atmospheric shading of the rolling hills in the background. Skilfully blending Sienese idealism with narrative breadth and vivacity, the picture is the last and most magnificent memorial to a chivalry now merely an afterglow, but dying with all the iridescence of the sunset hour.

As is usually the case, the modern contribution of the picture is modestly made in the _predella_ panels. The Nativity, Figure 169, with the light radiating tenderly from the Christ Child and golden stars glimmering above the hill-top pastures is perhaps the first nocturne in art, and still one of the loveliest. The Flight into Egypt, shows a joyous sunrise creeping over the glad hills. The means are conventional, the highlights are touched in with gold, but the mood and effect are there. Young Masaccio surely considered these little panels before he undertook his more naturalistic adventure in structural light and shade.

FIG. 170. Andrea da Bologna. Madonna of Humility.—_Cleveland._
]

Soon Pope Martin V, returning from exile at Avignon and planning to restore the splendors of Christian Rome, called Gentile and set him to decorating the nave of St. John Lateran. Again fire has deprived us of the monumental works which constituted Gentile’s contemporary fame. We know that they won the praise of the greatest Flemish painter who visited Renaissance Italy, Rogier de la Pasture of Tournai. And two generations later crabbed Michelangelo declared almost sentimentally that Gentile was gentle both by name and by nature. For us it is important to note that Gentile forecast precisely the future triumphs of Raphael, carrying the glory of Umbrian painting widely through Italy before asserting it at Rome.

Of course such work as Gentile’s was highly exceptional in the Umbrian Marches. The average state of things is represented by the shy and humble Madonnas which Francescuccio Ghisi repeated indefinitely. This type of Madonna of Humility is nowhere more delightfully represented than in the lovely panel at the Cleveland Museum, Figure 170, for which I have elsewhere suggested the attribution of Andrea da Bologna.[62] She is most unlike the majestic Madonnas of Florence and Siena. To assure us that this gentle Mother is after all Queen of Heaven and the Second Eve come for our salvation, the artist has given her a resplendent aureole with tiny miniatures of her champions, the apostles, and has stretched at her feet that First Eve in whom we all sinned. The picture will have been painted before 1380, and, with its Byzantine reminiscences, it well exemplifies the mediævalism that held its own in the Adriatic Marches long after Tuscany had set her face towards the Renaissance.

It would add little to our survey of Umbria to dwell on Ottaviano Nelli at Urbino, a gently vivacious story-teller; nor yet on those early painters at Camerino and San Severino who tinged the softer native style with the splendid severity of the early Venetian manner. I pass their works with regret, for they are often lovely in their frank dependence on greater spirits. In a general survey the middle years of the fifteenth century in Umbria show rather little to attract us until the rise of Pietro Perugino. He emerges in an artistic world dominated in the Tiber Valley by the Florentine, Gozzoli, and beyond the mountains by Carlo Crivelli and the Vivarini. Such predecessor of Perugino as Benedetto Bonfigli of Perugia need not detain us. He had learned a little, a very little, from the Florentine, Domenico Veneziano, paints Madonnas with a modest ideality; and narratives, the life of St. Ercolano in the Communal Palace of Perugia, with abundant and muddled detail, after the fashion of Gozzoli and Domenico di Bartolo. His _bottega_ was a factory of those quaint and often terrible religious banners, Figure 171, which the devout Umbrians carried processionally to avert the recurrent plague. We need not dwell upon Perugino’s alleged master, Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, whose ugly and emphatic draughtsmanship derives from Verrocchio and the Pollaiuoli. We may best appreciate Perugino’s extraordinary originality by considering contemporaries who came up with equal advantages. Lorenzo di San Severino exemplifies the usual Umbrian blend of Gozzoli and Venetian influences. And in such a picture as the Enthroned Madonna, Figure 172, in the Holden Collection, at Cleveland, he attains an ideality of feeling and a beauty of workmanship of the most refreshing sort. This picture must have been painted about 1490. It may represent the high mark reached in the Marches towards the end of the century—may thus dispense us from considering such inherently charming painters as Girolamo da Camerino and his fellow townsman Giovanni Boccatis.

FIG. 171. Bontigli Plague Banner. The Virgin protecting her Devotees
from plague Shafts hurled by Christ.—_Chiesa del Gonfalone,
Perugia._
]

FIG. 172. Lorenzo di San Severino. Madonna and Saints.—_Cleveland, O._
]

A very similar training produces more ambitious but hardly more pleasing results in Niccolò Liberatore of Foligno, (1430 to 1502). Early influenced by Gozzoli, he later aped the intensity of the Venetian, Carlo Crivelli. Niccolò thus chafes within the modest bounds proper to art in Umbria. He essays tragedy and too often achieves burlesque. He paints, like most of the Umbrians, processional banners, and also the most complicated altar-pieces, in which cusps, carving and pinnacles almost efface the Madonna and saints, who show a peasantlike uneasiness amid so much splendor. Such is the character of the triptych in the Vatican, which is dated 1466. It represents rather favorably Niccolò’s at once slender and ambitious talent.

FIG. 173. Melozzo da Forlì. Pope Sixtus IV and his Court.
Fresco.—_Vatican._
]

Such obscure artists as we have been considering[63] could maintain the idealism out of which a Perugino should grow, could provide his spiritual background. They could do little to nurture him on the positive side. That task fell to men of greater power, who had saturated themselves with Florentine realism—Melozzo da Forlì[64] and Luca Signorelli. Both were pupils of that giant among Umbro-Florentines, Piero della Francesca. Melozzo was born in 1438 and early employed by the Dukes of Urbino. He practices an energetic draughtsmanship both in decoration and portraiture, indulges the boldest foreshortening, adds a positive athleticism to that pride of life which we have noted in more static form in his master. Thus his frescoes for the domes of the sacristy of the Santa Casa at Loreto, and the justly famous fragments of playing angels from the demolished sacristy of old St. Peter’s at Rome reveal a strength and measured audacity which at once rival the contemporary effort of Mantegna at Mantua and forecast the more pagan exuberance of Mantegna’s greatest pupil, Correggio. This robust and masculine manner appears in a more restrained and traditional form in the superb fresco portraits of Pope Sixtus IV and his Court, Figure 173, in the Vatican. Such work transcends Umbrian standards.

FIG. 174. Luca Signorelli. Pan, God of Music.—_Berlin._
]

Even more does the intense and rugged art of Melozzo’s fellow disciple, Luca Signorelli.[65] Born at Cortona in 1441, we know little of his early career except that he studied with Piero della Francesca, passed to Florence and was permanently swayed by the anatomical and passionate realism of Antonio Pollaiuolo. Signorelli’s early work is obscure to us. We may well study him first in the pastoral mythology, Pan, God of Harmony, Figure 174, now at Berlin. It was painted about 1490 for the Medici, for the villa for which Botticelli designed the Primavera and Birth of Venus. It is inferior to its companion pieces in imagination and delicacy, and particularly in color, but in its own measured way it echoes delightfully the poetic wistfulness of early Florentine humanism. Similar qualities of imagination are in the great fresco The Last Days of Moses, in the Sistine Chapel, painted in 1482 after his design. But the vein is exceptional in Signorelli. Soon he gave himself to a rugged realism, unpleasing in his religious themes. Meeting little favor in the great cities, he painted many altar-pieces for the Umbrian towns. These pictures are stern in spirit and leaden in color. There is no attempt to please. Relentlessly Signorelli pursued his personal quest of expressive anatomy. Legend tells us that, dry-eyed, he sketched the fair body of his own murdered son for the picture of the Entombment at Cortona. We see him introducing nude figures into the background of the round Madonna at the Uffizi, Figure 175. The experimentalist dominates the artist.

FIG. 175. Signorelli. Madonna.—_Uffizi._
]

In the year 1500, being nearly sixty, he found the real use for his truculent art. He was called to paint in the Chapel of S. Brixio, in the Cathedral of Orvieto. The subject was the Last Judgment. More than fifty years earlier Fra Angelico had begun the work with angel choirs in the vaults. With a far different temper Signorelli continued the task. At the entrance and back of the Chapel he showed mankind scourged by the final plagues. In the four arched spaces at the sides he set The Preaching of Antichrist, a sinister scene detailed with all the circumstantiality of the Early Renaissance. For the three remaining scenes, the Resurrection of the Dead, Figure 176, the Condemnation of the Sinful, Figure 177, and the Reward of the Just, he invented new modes both of interpretation and of composition. How far we are from the solemn assizes of Giotto or the garden and labyrinth motives of Fra Angelico! In every case we have in the lunette celestial figures, or at least supernal, while below we have swarming masses of nude folk, bewildered at the forgotten light, aspiring heavenwards or shrinking from the clutches of the fiends.

What distinguishes these frescoes is a magnificently just matter-of-factness. Only one question is raised by the artist. Given the literal truth of the Book of Revelations, how would the last judgment look, and how would one feel if he were indeed there? So he reasons it out—the struggle of the skeletons to push up to the light, their reinvestiture successively with sinews, muscles and skin, the embarrassment as a half assembled body vainly seeks recognition. And all this he contrasts with the confident, strong bearing of the archangels above. Again in the Ascent of the Just to Heaven, the aspiration is chiefly physical, magnificently so. These clean strong bodies chiefly wish to escape the corruption from which the last trump has summoned them. And even the guardian angels are less tender than jubilant at the thought of fit recruits to replenish St. Michael’s celestial militia. Equally the damned wince, not from conscience, but from physical dread of the chains and claws and the imminence of the eternal fires.

FIG. 176. Luca Signorelli. The General Resurrection.—_Cathedral,
Orvieto._
]

FIG. 177. Luca Signorelli. The Souls of the Damned.—_Cathedral,
Orvieto._
]

This sturdy, upright art seems hardly Italian. The spirit of it is ruthless and Northern. It mitigates nothing, tells pretty much everything, presents the body in its ugliness, disregards obvious considerations of style. Yet as a successful blend of a vast technical experiment in anatomy with an honest and powerful effort of imagination, this is one of the most remarkable achievements of the Italian Renaissance. It has little of the Italian nobility, but it powerfully influenced those who had. Perugino and Raphael imitated Signorelli’s orderly arrangement of his scenes in a double, vertical order, and Michelangelo fed his dream of a heroic world of splendid nudity from the drastic visions of Signorelli. Over-rich and over-emphatic as Signorelli is, he is also an elemental, tonic power. No one is quite the same after a visit to the Chapel of S. Brixio.

If Signorelli was the greatest character in Umbria before Raphael, Pietro Perugino was the finest intelligence and taste. He was born in 1446 at Città della Pieve and at nine years old was put with a poor Perugian painter. His early activity is matter only of ingenious conjecture.[66] There is an ambiguous range of pictures variously ascribed to him and to Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, a difficult and rather unimportant problem which I willingly let alone. What is certain is that in his early twenties Perugino was studying with Verrocchio at Florence alongside of Leonardo da Vinci. By 1481 and 1482 Perugino emerges artistically full-grown in the Sistine Chapel.

His superiority, as shown in the fresco of the Giving of the Keys to Peter, Figure 118, and in numerous works of his forty-two remaining years, is so uniform and almost monotonous that its greatness has until recently passed unnoticed. Only such critics as Mr. Berenson and Professor Wölfflin have done him full justice. He worked upon perfectly clear and conscious ideals of simplicity, symmetry, and spaciousness; in all of which he took issue with his times. Rejecting the picturesque richness and confusion of the Early Renaissance, he took counsel of the Byzantine painters and of Fra Angelico at San Marco. They taught him the worth of simple geometrical forms of figure composition, and how to sacrifice details to broad effects. That his groups disposed in simple pyramids, oblongs, or ovals should not seem too bare, he cunningly varied the positions of the figures, thus relieving the severity of the underlying symmetry. Every tilted head, pointed foot and swaying thigh has its precise compositional value. As for the figures, there is no strenuousness of draughtsmanship, they are simply good enough. A principle of artistic economy, alien to the spirit of the moment, rules here as elsewhere.

FIG. 178. Perugino. Mystical Crucifixion. Fresco.—_Santa Maria
Maddalena de’ Pazzi. Florence._
]

So far he appears as a critic and amender of the Early Renaissance style. His positive contribution was a particularly spacious and lovely sort of landscape, an immensity of light and air to set behind the restricted patterns of his figures. This landscape is a beautiful generalization of the scenery of the upper Tiber valley. The forms are few. Feathery trees mark the middle distance; a river valley opens gently with interlocking banks toward distant blue mountains. Above a silvery horizon, the heavens gradually deepen to an intense blue, accentuated by sparse floating clouds. There are few colors, a warm brown, a fresh green, a paler and a deeper blue, a variety of grays. With these simple means is attained a sense of infinite space and of encompassing peace.

All these perfections are in the great frescoed Crucifixion Figure 178, in the convent of Santa Maria Maddelena dei Pazzi, at Florence. The date is 1495, Perugino’s fifty-second year. The lyrical quietism of the effect rests on delicate evasions of the very formal symmetry. Such features as the tilted head of the Saint John and the three trees at the left balancing the Magdalen at the right of the cross are essential. Indeed any slight change either in the position of the figures or the lines of the landscape would produce a discord.

FIG. 179. Perugina. Enthroned Madonna.—_Vatican._
]

We have a very similar effect with the addition of a stately and simple architecture in the enthroned Madonna of the Vatican. Figure 179. Again the formality of the pyramidal pattern is relieved by varied dispositions of the figures which individually considered may seem affected, but which are essential to the composition. More overtly emotional but still restrained is the Deposition, Figure 180a, of the Uffizi Gallery. It is arranged as an oval with catenary internal curves, anticipating much more complicated patterns of Raphael. At this moment, 1494, no living artist but Leonardo could have woven this group together with such certainty of taste, and he could have hardly equalled its broad and serene landscape.

In the first years of the new century Perugino decorated the merchants’ exchange of Perugia, the Cambio, with frescoes partly religious, partly moral and symbolical. The most famous represent the Virtues, Figure 180, in pairs, hovering in the heavens with their representatives below. For example, Prudence and Justice with the great law-givers. So Fortitude and Temperance are represented respectively by the venerable forms of brave Horatius, and Leonidas; of Cato and Cincinnatus. It seems that Perugino executed most of this latter decoration through assistants, and it has been suggested that Raphael is responsible both for the design and painting of the beautiful Sibyls.[67]

FIG. 180. Perugino. Prudence and Justice with their Representatives.
Fresco.—_Cambio, Perugia._
]

Like most of his contemporaries Perugino outlived his fame. He was insulted by Michelangelo, criticized for repeating his figures, thrust out of the Vatican in 1508 and superseded by his former helper, Raphael. And his exquisite art in his later years shows a certain relaxation. He died of the plague in 1524 and was denied Christian burial, although in his day he had painted plague banners to protect the faithful.

The known atheism of Perugino affords a curious problem. How reconcile it with the mild and gentle religiosity of his art? Were he a modern artist, one might hold that he entered by æsthetic sympathy into experiences of religion which his rational self denied. For an atheist of the Renaissance the explanation seems too subtle. They were of tough fibre and kept their sympathy logically in hand. Mr. Berenson has offered the ingenious explanation that in his noble composition in space Perugino appealed to emotions which are so nearly akin to religion as to be readily substituted therefor. In the great spaces of Perugino the spirit finds liberation and a sense of the infinite. Such intuition of infinity one finds also in personal religion, and the two experiences are in a degree interchangeable. Æsthetically satisfactory, this explanation may fail to convince a devout person. He will want to know how the art of an avowed atheist enthralled the pious folk inhabiting the valley sanctified by the memory of St. Francis. Whatever be the explanation, the space composition of Perugino later sufficed to express Raphael’s vision of the central mystery of Christianity, of the nobility of pagan intellect and of the serene splendor of the Grecian Olympians.

FIG. 180_a._> Perugino. The Deposition.—_Uffizi._
]

Raphael Sanzio[68] is the finest example of the Umbrian virtue of teachableness. His course is a series of exquisitely felt admirations. His readiness to assimilate any sort of excellence was his strength, and at times his weakness, for he was not always self-critical enough to reject merits alien to his own personality. His admitted primacy rests on perfection of composition, and that perfection represented a beautiful synthesis of the methods of Perugino, Fra Bartolommeo, and Leonardo da Vinci. In dramatic power, force of draughtsmanship, and charm of color many of his contemporaries surpassed him. His, indeed, is a triumph of tact and judgment, and not of any single achievement. He seems one of the young men of the Platonic dialogues come back to earth—graciously prudent, gently effective, superior yet companionable. He approached art as his fellow Umbrian, St. Francis, approached life, with friendly confidence. He was equally at home with noble and artisan, with austere prelate and libertine humanist. Men readily gave him their loyalty and women their love.

Raphael Sanzio was born at Urbino in 1483. His father, Giovanni, a mediocre poet and painter, left him an orphan at eleven. Raphael’s first steps in painting were probably guided by Timoteo Viti, who practiced, partly under Perugino’s influence, the timidly idyllic style of the Northern Marches—Bologna and Ferrara. Such boyish efforts of Raphael as the Orleans Madonna, the Three Graces, and the Dream of a Knight, in the National Gallery show Raphael’s complete assimilation of this idyllic manner. The little picture at London in which a stripling Hercules slumbers between an attractive girlish Wisdom and a most innocent effigy of Vice—holding the flower that signifies the primrose path—shows us Raphael at seventeen and by no means precocious.

In the year 1500 he was called from Urbino to work in Perugino’s home shop at Perugia, soon rising to the position of foreman. In four years he made the most devout and complete assimilation of his master’s style. Such pictures as the Coronation of Mary, in the Vatican, and the Marriage of the Virgin, Figure 181, at Milan, would surely be reckoned as consummate Perugino’s were it not for signatures and old tradition. The Marriage of the Virgin in particular is merely a rearrangement of Perugino’s composition for the Giving of the Keys to Peter. But Raphael has eliminated unnecessary incidents and has outdone Perugino himself in sweetness and calm. The picture was finished in 1504, and that year Raphael took letters of recommendation from his first patroness, the Duchess of Urbino, to the Magistracy of Florence.

FIG. 181. Raphael. Marriage of the Virgin.—_Milan._
]

FIG. 182. Raphael. Maddalena Doni.—_Pitti._
]

Imagine a youngster of twenty-one who has diligently mastered a pictorial style only to learn that it is already obsolete. That is Raphael taking the manner of Perugino to a Florence agog over the battle cartoons of Leonardo and Michelangelo. The coolness with which young Raphael faced this emergency is characteristic. In four years he made himself over into a realistic draughtsman. Abandoning the readymade faces and figures of Perugino, he wisely held to Perugino’s sweetness and spacious compositional patterns. Young Raphael achieves an extraordinary act of criticism. He takes from the reformers just what he needs and no more—from Leonardo his incisiveness and psychology as a draughtsman and his dense and rich compositional patterns, from Fra Bartolommeo his dignity and monumentality, from Michelangelo very little as yet; and, withal, he retains whatever still seemed valuable from his Umbrian experience. Thus with resolute and unperturbed intelligence within four years he completely reconstructed his style, and put himself on a parity with older contemporaries who had been experimenting for a score of years.

The steps of this re-education are most interesting. In 1505 he did the portraits of Agnolo Doni and his wife Maddalena, Figure 182. The posture of the woman is that of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The draughtsmanship and characterization are severe, the hint of Umbrian landscape is a survival. In later portraits we shall see the elimination of accessories, the line yielding to the most refined modelling in light and dark, the effect concentrated without insistency. A comparison of the Doni portraits with those of ten years later, the Julius II and the Fornarina, will tell better than words of the tendency of Raphael’s portraiture towards its ultimate mastery.

In 1505 Raphael returned for a time to Perugino to paint the fresco of the Trinity at the Convent of San Severo. In the splendid geometrical pattern he has already improved on the flat groupings of Perugino. The consistory of Saints bends back in depth after the fashion of a semi-dome. Raphael borrows the new motive from Fra Bartolommeo’s fresco of the Last Judgment painted in 1499 for the Florentine Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Sixteen years later Perugino added the languid saints at the base of the Trinity, a touching reversal of the natural relations of master and pupil. As for Raphael, in a single experiment he has mastered the sort of symmetrical composition in depth which should suffice within five years for his masterpiece, the Disputa.

FIG. 183. Raphael. Madonna del Granduca.—_Pitti._
]

FIG. 184. Raphael. La Belle Jardinière.—_Louvre._
]

The matronly sweetness of Raphael’s early madonnas has won them affection from the first. With increasing dignity, they retain a hint of the girlish refinement of their predecessors of the Early Renaissance. But they are less assertively fastidious, more normal and natural. All these obvious reasons for liking them are sound, and these pictures afford as well an insight into Raphael’s consciously directed studies. The effect is ever towards richer and more complicated composition, and towards more interesting and stylistic dispositions of the figures. The naturalness is that of taste and calculation. Near the beginning of the series we have the lovely Madonna of the Grand Duke, 1505, Figure 183. The upright, frontal position and form and serene oval of the face recall Perugino. But reality has supervened,—Perugino never painted such a Bambino,—and for the sake of concentration the background is kept plain. We see in the Madonna of the Tempi Family, at Munich, the Madonna turned in three-quarters position, the pose energized, the body swaying in a slight counterpoise. Then he tries seated poses which offer the triangular pattern of Leonardo. Perhaps the earliest of this series is the lovely Cowper Madonna, now in the Widener Collection. Soon he adds figures, constructs the pyramids more ornately and restores the background of landscape. At the head of this line is the Madonna of the Finch in the Pitti. It illustrates that gracious formality which Leonardo established in the Madonna of the Rocks. Finding the balance of the two standing nude children a little too obvious, Raphael carries the motive to its perfection in the Belle Jardinière of the Louvre. Figure 184. Here, to break the rigid symmetry, the St. John kneels, and superfluous trees have been cleared away from the background. He seeks further to enrich the pyramid, and in the Madonna of the Canigiani family, at Munich, Figure 185, finished in 1507, we have at once the densest of symmetries and the stylistic handling of all the figures in active and counterpoised attitudes. In two years the process is complete. Later, in the Madonna of the Fish and of the Pearl, executed by students, Raphael will adopt diagonal arrangements, he will take up the old Circular form in the Madonna of the Chair, and will amplify the simple patterns of Perugino in the Sistine Madonna and the Madonna of Foligno. The forms and faces will become graver, nobler, more mature, but the whole course is fully anticipated in the joyous and lucid years of experiment from 1505 to 1507.

FIG. 185. Raphael. Canigiani Holy Family.—_Munich._
]

In that year Raphael pulled himself together to produce a masterpiece and signally failed. So far he must have seemed only a charming painter, a more gracious Fra Bartolommeo or a more learned Albertinelli, he will now surpass Leonardo and equal Michelangelo—a perilous competition for a man of twenty-five. In 1507 Atalanta Baglioni of Perugia ordered a Deposition to be set over the tomb of her murdered son, the tyrant Astorre. Raphael, in a theme properly lyrical and pathetic, tries to add tumult and drama—tries too hard. At first he adopted a scheme very similar to that of Perugino’s masterpiece, with the dead Christ on the ground, a quietly mourning group and a spacious landscape. The design is shown in a pen sketch at Oxford. He rejects this motive as too quiet and familiar. By successive efforts and exaggerations he arrives at the picture which we now see in the Borghese Gallery. Figure 186. It has become a disagreeable tangle of legs, a display of over-muscular arms which support nothing—a welter of histrionic gestures. The clew to the trouble is in the effective but meaningless pose of the woman at the right, which is borrowed directly from Michelangelo’s Madonna of the Doni Family. Figure 195. The landscape no longer liberates the spirit, but almost crowds the figures out of the frame. Doubtless so self-critical an artist as Raphael learned much from this failure. It must have shown him that the rich density and measured dramatic effect of Leonardo were not as accessible as he had thought, and he accordingly restudied the whole problem of energetic monumental design. Moreover it showed him, at least for some years, that Michelangelo was the worst of models for him and threw him back upon his proper exemplars, Perugino and Fra Bartolommeo—in short, upon that native humility which was at once his charm as a man and his strength as an artist.

FIG. 186. Raphael. The Entombment.—_Borghese, Rome._
]

In 1508 Raphael was called to Rome through the influence of a former Urbino friend, Bramante, now the architect of new St. Peter’s. The task set by Pope Julius II was the decoration of the four new antechambers called the _Stanze_. About the same time Michelangelo began on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Thus the two artists worked within two hundred feet of each other, but held apart partly by a natural rivalry, and even more by the irascible and suspicious nature of Michelangelo. And two masterpieces were produced as from two different worlds—Michelangelo’s all tragic and perturbed, Raphael’s all hopeful and serene. Between 1509 and 1511 Raphael frescoes the Camera della Segnatura, mostly with his own hand. The scheme comprised the finest leading ideals of contemporary humanism, and the little room is the most important of documents for the student of the Renaissance. Religious authority, legal justice, secular philosophy and science, the arts—such are the four great themes impersonated on the side walls, and echoed in symbol and human illustration on the beautiful ceiling; these are the props of a perfect society.

Religious authority and theology are represented by the famous fresco called erroneously the Dispute concerning the Sacrament, Figure 187. Christ, as the fully revealed member of the Trinity, sits in a heaven rayed and studded with gold; beside him sit the prophets and apostles—the actual witnesses of his passion. The seated group sweeps grandly back describing a sort of semi-dome in space. Below and precisely in the centre, on an altar, glitters the wafer which in the recurrent miracle of the Mass becomes Christ’s body. To right and left of the altar are closely compacted and agitated groups insisting on the truth of the miracle of transubstantiation. These are the martyrs and church doctors, those who after the apostolic age either in experience or divine intuition certified to the central mystery of the Church. The upper group is composed after the fashion of Fra Bartolommeo and Perugino, is a mere expansion of Raphael’s fresco at San Severo; the lower group is held together after the fashion of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, the vehemence of the particular gestures being assimilated in a running balance of thrust against thrust, so that the whole effect is of a rich and energetic harmony. The figures themselves are established adequately, but in draughtsmanship are inferior either to Leonardo’s or Michelangelo’s. With the thriftiness of a born decorator, Raphael makes the figure count in its place and beyond that takes no unnecessary pains. It might indeed be argued that the decoration would be worse as a whole if the parts were more perfect. Finally, note how essentially classical, Roman, juridical the motive is; how concrete and material. Raphael seeks to express nothing more mystical than the obvious equation of Christ and the host, and he merely cites a multitude of witnesses to prove that the equation is true. This very simplicity of motive has thoroughly humanized what might have been a tenuous theme. The picture is a magnificent conclave out of many ages, a symbol of the cumulative splendor of the Catholic tradition.

FIG. 187. Raphael. La Disputa—The Truth of the Eucharist.
Fresco.—_Vatican._
]

FIG. 188. Raphael. The School of Athens. Fresco.—_Vatican._
]

On the opposite wall, in the School of Athens, Figure 188, Raphael pictures a similar continuity of human thought on the secular plane. The arched space opens into a vast basilica whose gods, represented as colossal statues at the sides, are Apollo and Minerva. Raphael has studied the Basilica of Constantine and has modestly scanned Bramante’s plans for new St. Peter’s. He invents a vaulted interior more impressive than any that man has ever built. Within finite bounds he suggests the infinity of Umbrian space. Without the figures, or with quite other figures, we should still have a great picture. But the group is as nobly disposed as the architecture. You may imagine a foreshortened ring of which the reverend forms of Plato and Aristotle are the twin jewels. Aristotle at the right is in the vigor of middle age as a scientist should be. His disciples crowd towards him or gather in secondary groups about some leader. Science is social and co-operative. Raphael puts himself in this group. Plato at the left is immensely old and feeble. Speculative philosophy requires only strength of spirit. His disciples are generally isolated in personal meditation. Philosophical truth is arrived at not in society but in solitude. Certain ardent young faces recall Leonardo da Vinci, and the construction of the group is his. We have linking motives, like that of sprawling Diogenes on the steps, curves that repeat or counter the vault above, turns and thrusts of bodies in active balance, an energetic variety within a serene harmony. The mood is less agitated than that of the Disputa, while the composition is freer. Human science and philosophy are at once less bound than is theology, and move more equably because they strive for more readily attainable ends. Like its companion piece, the School of Athens is both a citation of witnesses and a profession of faith, of faith in the capacity of the human mind.

The fresco of Parnassus repeats approximately the grouping of the School of Athens, but changes the mood to one of lyrism, and shifts the scene to a hill top. About Apollo and the Muses wander the forms of the elder and recent poets. Often the faces are a bit insipid, but no one thinks of that, so easy are the postures, so gracious the whole effect, so instinct with the quiet good breeding of an academic pastoral. All the Umbrian reticence and discretion and humility of Raphael are in this beautifully calculated work. It betrays, too, certain ominous symptoms of display, in the way, for example, in which the figures at the window protrude beyond the wall. Primarily this is only a way of softening two ugly angles of the window opening, but it is also a concession to Michelangelo’s dangerous habit of painting away the architecture. All the forms have an amplitude and dignity akin to that of classical sculpture. Hellas is for Raphael no longer a far-away, inaccessible world, as it was, for example, to Botticelli. Raphael has effectively reconstructed it, in part by a gracious act of intuition, in part by study of the wall paintings and statues of old Rome.

FIG. 189. Raphael. Prudence, Temperance, Force—generally called
Jurisprudence. Fresco.—_Vatican._
]

The decoration of the Camera della Segnatura was completed triumphantly with the fresco symbolizing Jurisprudence, Figure 189, in which Raphael invents a new and beautiful compositional formula. Having to deal with a lunette awkwardly shortened by the window, he used three seated figures signifying the judging, restraining and rewarding aspects of justice. There is no strict centrality and no exact symmetry. The large curves of the figures play off from each other in a continuous rhythm melting into the bounding curve. One may conceive it in terms of the growth of plants, as so many sprays meeting, diverging, opposing each other, and all managing to conform to the line of an arch. It is a type of composition that Raphael will develop with still greater subtlety in the Sibyls of the Madonna della Pace.

When Raphael finished the Camera della Segnatura he was about twenty-eight years old. His remaining nine years added certain remarkable portraits, the Castiglione, the Leo X, Figure 190, the Fornarina and the young Cardinal at Madrid, one sublime altar-piece, in the Sistine Madonna; a dramatic masterpiece in the Transfiguration, and a few frescoes. But in the main these are years of retrogression. His popularity had got beyond his power to utilize it. Michelangelo in 1512 had unveiled the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Raphael, with all Rome, felt qualities of energy and grandeur which he himself lacked, and, with less than his usual intelligence, began a fruitless emulation. The last three _Stanze_ show in their very look that Raphael is no longer his unperturbed self. The figures no longer hold up their place on the wall, they crowd out toward the spectator appallingly. The compositions no longer show restful patterns which conform to the flatness of the wall. There are disturbing flashes of light and obscure gaps. The figures themselves are contorted and vehement; straining sinews and knotted muscles are advertised for their own sake. Emulating the sublimity of Michelangelo, Raphael only achieves sensationalism. Then he is no longer a painter but a director of painting. Nothing but the designs are now his own. The working sketches and cartoons are by his pupils, who work under the sway of a young Mantuan of facile and brutal talent, Giulio Romano. One passes through the last three Stanze with mixed feelings. The high pleasures of art are left behind; remains the spell of great power and intelligence now almost untouched by taste.

FIG. 190. Raphael. Pope Leo X.—_Pitti._
]

FIG. 191. Raphael. Heliodorus driven from the Temple by a Celestial
Horseman. Fresco.—_Vatican._
]

The Stanza of Heliodorus finished in 1514 contains a superbly dramatic fresco of Heliodorus, Figure 191, thrust by a celestial horseman from the temple he would profane. The execution is mostly by Giulio Romano. Raphael himself appears in one of his most massive designs, the Mass of Bolsena. The theme is a sceptical priest persuaded of the truth of the sacramental miracle through the bleeding of the wafer. The miracle takes place in the presence of Pope Julius II. There is a weight of character in the picture which is unique in Raphael’s mural painting. The adjustment of masses is in an impeccable symmetry all the more difficult that the space is irregular and refractory. The fine figures that carry the theme down into the narrow rectangles alongside the window are in part repainted by a young rival of Raphael, Michelangelo’s protegé, Sebastiano del Piombo.

The Chamber of the _Incendio_, finished in 1517, shows even more plainly the devastating influence of Michelangelo. The subject is a fire arrested miraculously by Pope Leo IV, Figure 192. It is a magnificent display of poses and anatomy, an artistic show window rather than a decoration. The eye wanders in bewilderment to find the picture and finds nothing but isolated, splendid forms posing superbly or simulating unfelt emotions. From the point of view of decoration, the space has been systematically violated. Again the remorseless hand of Giulio Romano is everywhere felt. This is the last anteroom of the Vatican which Raphael saw finished, though he left to his helpers many sketches for the two remaining _Stanze_.

FIG. 192. Raphael’s Design executed by Giulio Romano. Il Borgo. The
Fire at Rome.—_Vatican._
]

In 1516 and 1517 Raphael is superintending half a dozen great tasks at once. From the early months of 1515 he had been Bramante’s successor as architect of new St. Peter’s, the same year he became superintendent of all archæological excavations at Rome. To these heavy administrative charges he adds the decoration of the Farnesina, the continuation of the _Stanze_, designs for mosaics in Santa Maria del Popolo, plans for two private palaces, sixteen cartoons for the Vatican tapestries, and the preliminary studies for the Loggia of the Vatican. He designs half a dozen great altar-pieces and paints with his own hand the Portrait of Leo X, the marvelous St. Cecilia at Bologna, the Sibyls of the Pace, and the Sistine Madonna. He was rich and beloved, great nobles pressed him with social attentions, and a cardinal vainly sought to ally him with his family by marriage.

We can consider these multiform activities of the later years only in general terms. The tapestry cartoons at South Kensington representing the miracles of St. Peter and St. Paul complete that magnificent line of narrative painting that begins with Giotto. Raphael works for simplicity and concentration and dignity in an eminently classic spirit. One feels the influence of Masaccio. Though rudely executed to guide the Flemish weavers and executed by the assistant, Penni, the mind of Raphael controls the form throughout. Such designs as the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, Paul Preaching at Athens, the Death of Ananias, the Blinding of the Sorcerer Elymas are among the marvels of our art. Yet many of these designs are over-studied, and few I feel fully bear the comparison with the best of Giotto and Masaccio. A little over-emphasis of style recalls the bitter word of Michelangelo concerning Raphael—that he succeeded not by grace of nature but by study.

The frescoes of the Life of Psyche, in the Farnesina, are beautiful in arrangement and full of a robust paganism. But the wall is overcharged with the weight of figures which too often show Giulio Romano’s heavy and insolent hand. All the same, the whole effect is gracious and the garlanded borders of the coves and spandrels by Giovanni da Udine are delightful. To realize how much these frescoes lost from student execution one has only to consider the Galatea, Figure 192a, in the same Palace, which Raphael painted himself in 1514. It is on the verge of over-ripeness, but keeps its saving element of restraint. In answer to an inquiry from that great diplomat and gentleman, Count Baldassare Castiglione, Raphael wrote that though beautiful models were not rare, for the Galatea as for other figures, he had followed only an idea; and indeed the mind’s eye is what ever counts with Raphael.

FIG. 192_a._> Raphael. Galatea. Fresco.—_Farnesina, Rome._
]

FIG. 193. Raphael. The Sistine Madonna.—_Dresden._
]

Raphael’s final work for the Vatican was the decoration of an open, vaulted Loggia. He invented fifty-two little Bible stories, leaving most of the painting to his assistant, Penni, and he drew about the arches, pilasters and window frames the most delicious arabesques. From study of similar decoration in the Baths of Titus he worked out a style, crisp, formal and sophisticated, and as various as Gothic ornament itself. Geometrical, animal, and plant forms meet and blend audaciously. There is interplay of spiral and angular motives, the whole effect is highly playful and ingenious. The style has had vogue to our own day and still speaks to us charmingly of the unserious side of Raphael.

FIG. 194. Raphael. The Transfiguration.—_Vatican._
]

Perhaps in the harassed, competitive years we have been describing, Raphael turned occasionally upon his own ingenuity, and refreshed himself by renewing these simple and gracious modes in which he had been bred. Such a theory would account for the Sistine Madonna, Figure 193, and in part for his last picture, the Transfiguration. The most memorable of Raphael’s Madonnas is based on the lucid symmetry of Perugino. Although, for greater concentration, the background is merely a sky, the hovering figures are easily spaced in the usual triangle. The effect is ineffably grand and gentle. A quiet silvery cloudland is created and filled by the devotion of the attendant saints and the inspired glance of the Virgin and her Son. With all the resources of the Renaissance, Raphael has expressed an emotion as intense and reverent as that of Fra Angelico. It is an amazing act of the sympathetic intelligence, for there is no reason to suppose that the painter was ever a deeply religious spirit.