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 RAFFAELLO Sanzio
(b. 1483, Urbino, d. 1520, Roma)
Italian painter and architect
of the Italian High Renaissance, his full name is Raffaello Sanzio. 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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