Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

old church, and build an entirely new shrine over what was said to

be St. Peter's grave. He invited several architects to submit designs.

Bramante won with a proposal to rear a new basilica on the plan of a

Greek cross (with arms of equal length), and to crown its transept

crossing with a vast dome; in the famous phrase ascribed to him, he

would raise the dome of the Pantheon upon the basilica of Constantine.

In Bramante's intent the new majestic edifice would cover 28,900

square yards- 11,600 more than the area covered by St. Peter's

today. Excavation was begun in April, 1506. On April 11 Julius, aged

sixty-three, descended a long and trembling rope ladder to a great

depth to lay the foundation stone. The work progressed slowly as

Julius and his funds were more and more absorbed in war. In 1514

Bramante died, happily not knowing that his design would never be

carried out.

Many good Christians were shocked at the thought of destroying the

venerable old cathedral. Most of the cardinals were strongly

opposed, and many artists complained that Bramante had recklessly

shattered the fine columns and capitals of the ancient nave when

with better care he might have taken them down intact. A satire

published three years after the architect's death told how Bramante,

on reaching St. Peter's gate, had been severely rebuked by the

Apostle, and had been refused admittance to Paradise. But, said the

satirist, Bramante did not like the arrangement of Paradise anyway,

nor the steep approach to it from the earth. "I will build a new,

broad, and commodious road, so that old and feeble souls may travel on

horseback. And then I will make a new Paradise, with delightful

residences for the blessed." When Peter rejected this proposal

Bramante offered to go down to hell and build a new and better

inferno, since the old one must by this time be almost burned out. But

Peter returned to the question: "Tell me, seriously, what made you

destroy my church?" Bramante tried to comfort him: "Pope Leo will

build you a new one." "Well, then," said the Apostle, "you must wait

at the gate of Paradise until it is finished." `051719

It was finished in 1626.

III. THE YOUNG RAPHAEL

1. Development: 1483-1508

-

After Bramante's death Leo X named to succeed him, as

architectural director of the work at the new St. Peter's, a young

painter thirty-one years old, too young to bear on his shoulders the

weight of Bramante's dome, but the happiest, most successful, and

best-loved artist in history.

His good fortune began when he was born to Giovanni de' Santi,

then the leading painter at Urbino. Some pictures survive from

Giovanni's brush; they suggest an indifferent talent; but they show

that Raphael- named after the fairest of the archangels- was brought

up in the odor of painting. Visiting artists like Piero della

Francesca often stayed at Giovanni's home; and Giovanni was

sufficiently familiar with the art of his time to write

intelligently of a dozen Italian, and some Flemish, painters and

sculptors in his Rhymed Chronicle of Urbino. Giovanni died when

Raphael was only eleven, but apparently the father had already begun

to transmit the art to his son. Probably Timoteo Viti, who returned to

Urbino from Bologna in 1495 after studying with Francia, continued the

instruction, and brought to Raphael what he had learned from

Francia, Tura, and Costa. Meanwhile the boy grew up in circles that

had access to the court; and that refined society that Castiglione was

to describe in The Courtier was beginning to spread among the

lettered classes of Urbino the graces of character, manners, and

speech that Raphael would illuminate with his art and his life. The

Ashmolean Museum at Oxford has a remarkable drawing attributed to

Raphael in the period between 1497 and 1500, and traditionally

supposed to be a self-portrait. The face almost of a girl, the soft

eyes of a poet: these are the features that we shall meet again,

darker and a little wistful, in the engaging self-portrait (c. 1506)

in the Pitti Gallery.

Picture the youth of the earlier portrait passing at sixteen from

quiet and orderly Urbino to a Perugia where despotism and violence

were the order of the day. But Perugino was there, whose fame was

filling Italy; Raffaello's guardian uncles felt that the boy's

manifest talent deserved instruction from the best painters in

Italy. They could have sent him to Leonardo at Florence, where he

might have imbibed some deepening strain of that master's esoteric

lore; but there was something peculiar about the great Florentine,

something a bit left-handed- literally sinister- in his loves, which

disturbed all good uncles. Perugia was closer to Urbino, and

Perugino was returning to Perugia (1499) with presumably all the

technical tricks of Florentine painters at the tips of his brushes. So

for three years the handsome lad worked for Pietro Vannucci, helped

him to decorate the Cambio, mastered his secrets, and learned how to

paint virgins as blue and devout as Perugino's own. The Umbrian hills-

above all around the Assisi that Raphael could sight from the Perugian

plateau- gave teacher and pupil a full supply of such simple and

devoted mothers, fair with the forms of youth, yet molded to a

trustful piety by the Franciscan air that they breathed.

When Perugino went again to Florence (1502) Raphael remained in

Perugia, and fell heir to the demand that his master had developed for

religious pictures. In 1503 he painted for the church of St. Francis a

Coronation of the Virgin, now in the Vatican: the Apostles and

Magdalen, standing around an empty sarcophagus, gaze upward to

where, on a pavement of clouds, Christ places a crown upon Mary's

head, while graceful angels celebrate her with the music of lute and

tambourines. There are many signs of immaturity in the picture:

heads insufficiently individualized, faces inexpressive, hands ill

formed, fingers rigid, and Christ Himself, obviously older than His

pretty mother, moving as awkwardly as a commencement graduate. But

in the angel musicians- the grace of their motion, the flow of their

draperies, the soft contour of their features- Raphael gives a

pledge of his future.

The picture was apparently successful, for in the following year

another church of San Francesco, in Citta di Castello, some thirty

miles from Perugia, ordered from him a similar picture- a Sposalizio

or Marriage of the Virgin (Brera). It repeats some figures from

the earlier painting, and copies the form of a similar picture by

Perugino. But the Virgin herself has now the peculiar mark and grace

of Raphael's women- the head modestly inclined, the oval face tender

and demure, the smooth curve of shoulder and arm and raiment; behind

her is a woman more buxom and alive, blonde and lovely; to the right a

youth in tight garb shows that Raphael has studied the human form

sedulously; and now all the hands are well drawn, and some are

beautiful.

About this time Pinturicchio, who had made Raphael's acquaintance in

Perugia, invited him to Siena as assistant. There Raphael made

sketches and cartoons for some of the brilliant frescoes with which

Pinturicchio, in the library of the cathedral, told such portions of

Aeneas Sylvius' story as befitted a pope. In that library Raphael

was struck by an antique statuary group, The Three Graces, that

Cardinal Piccolomini had brought from Rome to Siena; the young

artist made a hasty drawing of it, apparently to help his memory. He

seems to have recognized in these three nudes a different world and

morality than those that had been impressed upon him in Urbino and

Perugia- a world in which woman was a joyful goddess of beauty

rather than the sorrowful Mother of God, and in which the worship of

beauty was considered as legitimate as the exaltation of purity and

innocence. The pagan side of Raphael, which would later paint rosy

nudes in the bathroom of a cardinal, and place Greek philosophers

beside Christian saints in the chambers of the Vatican, developed

now in quiet company with that aspect of his nature and his art

which would produce The Mass of Bolsena and The Sistine Madonna.

In Raphael, more than in any other hero of the Renaissance, the

Christian faith and the pagan rebirth would live in harmonious peace.

Shortly before or after his visit to Siena he returned briefly to

Urbino. There he painted for Guidobaldo two pictures that probably

symbolized the Duke's triumph over Caesar Borgia: a St. Michael

and a St. George, both now in the Louvre. Never before, so far as we

know, had the artist succeeded so well in representing action; the

figure of St. George drawing his sword back to strike, while his horse

rears up in terror and the dragon claws at the knight's leg, is

startling in its vigor and yet pleasing in its grace. Raphael the

draftsman was coming into his own.

And now Florence called him, as it had called Perugino and a hundred

other young painters. He seemed to feel that unless he could live

for a while in that stimulating hive of competition and criticism, and

learn at first hand the latest developments in line and composition

and color, in fresco and tempera and oil, he would never be more

than a provincial painter, talented but limited, and fated at last for

obscure domesticity in the town of his birth. Late in 1504 he set

out for Florence.

He behaved there with his usual modesty; studied the ancient

sculptures and architectural fragments that had been gathered into the

city; went to the Carmine and copied Masaccio; sought out and pored

over the famous cartoons that Leonardo and Michelangelo had made for

paintings in the Hall of Council in the Palazzo Vecchio. Perhaps he

met Leonardo; certainly for a time he yielded to that elusive master's

influence. It seemed to him now that beside Leonardo's Adoration of

the Magi, Mona Lisa, and The Virgin, Child, and St. Anne, the

paintings of the Ferrara, Bologna, Siena, Urbino schools were struck

with the rigor of death, and even the Madonnas of Perugino were pretty

puppets, immature young women of the countryside suddenly endowed with

an uncongenial divinity. How had Leonardo acquired such grace of line,

such subtlety of countenance, such shades of coloring? In a portrait

of Maddalena Doni (Pitti) Raphael obviously imitated the Mona

Lisa; he omitted the smile, for Madonna Doni apparently had none; but

he pictured well the robust form of a Florentine matron, the soft,

plump, ringed hands of moneyed ease, and the rich weave and color of

the garments that dignified her form. About the same time he painted

her husband, Angelo Doni, dark, alert, and stern.

From Leonardo he passed to Fra Bartolommeo, visited him in his

cell at San Marco, wondered at the tender expression, the warm

feeling, the soft contours, the harmonious composition, the deep, full

colors, of the melancholy friar's art. Fra Bartolommeo would visit

Raphael in Rome in 1514, and wonder in his turn at the swift ascent of

the modest artist to the pinnacle of fame in the capital of the

Christian world. Raphael became great partly because he could steal

with the innocence of Shakespeare, could try one method and manner

after another, take from each its precious element, and blend these

gleanings, in the fever of creation, into a style unmistakably his

own. Bit by bit he absorbed the rich tradition of Italian painting;

soon he would bring it to fulfillment.

Already in this Florentine period (1504-5, 1506-7) he was painting

pictures now famous throughout Christendom and beyond. The Budapest

Museum has a Portrait of a Young Man, perhaps a Self-portrait,

with the same beret and side glance of the eyes as in the

autoritratto of the Pitti Gallery. When Raphael was but twenty-three

he painted the lovely Madonna del Granduca (Pitti), whose

perfectly oval face, and silken hair, and small mouth, and

Leonardesque eyelids lowered in pensive affection, were framed in a

warm contrast of green veil and red robe; Ferdinand II, Grand Duke

of Tuscany, found such pleasure in contemplating this picture that

he took it with him on his travels- whence its name. Quite as

beautiful is the Madonna del Cardellino - of the Goldfinch

(Uffizi); the Infant Jesus is no masterpiece of conception of

design, but the playful St. John, arriving triumphantly with the

captured bird, is a delight to mind and eye, and the face of the

Virgin is an unforgettable representation of a young mother's tolerant

tenderness. Raphael gave this painting as a wedding present to Lorenzo

Nasi; in 1547 an earthquake crushed Nasi's mansion and broke the

picture into fragments; the pieces were so cleverly reunited that only

a Berenson, seeing it in the Uffizi, could surmise its vicissitudes.

The Madonna in the Meadow (Vienna) is a less successful variant;

here, however, Raphael gives us a remarkable landscape, bathed in

the soft blue light of an evening falling quietly upon green fields,

unruffled stream, towered town, and far-off hills. La Belle

Jardiniere (Louvre) hardly deserves to be the most famous of the

Florentine Madonnas; it almost duplicates the Madonna of the Meadow,

makes the Baptist absurd from nose to foot, and only redeems itself

with an ideal Infant standing with chubby feet upon the Virgin's

bare foot, and looking up at her with loving confidence. The last

and most ambitious of them in this period was the Madonna del

Baldacchino (Pitti)- the Virgin Mother enthroned under a canopy

( baldacchino ), with two angels parting its folds, two saints at each

side, two angels singing at her feet; all in all a conventional

performance, famous only because it is Raphael's.

In 1505 he interrupted his stay in Florence to visit Perugia and

execute two commissions there. For the nuns of St. Anthony he

painted an altarpiece which is now one of the most precious pictures

in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Within a frame

beautifully carved, the Virgin sits on a throne, looking like

Wordsworth's "nun breathless with adoration"; in her lap the Child

raises a hand to bless the infant St. John; two exquisite female

figures- St. Cecilia and St. Catherine of Alexandria- flank the

Virgin; in the foreground St. Peter frowns and St. Paul reads; and

above, in a lunette, God the Father, surrounded by angels, blesses the

Mother of His Son, and with one hand upholds the world. In one panel

of the predella Christ prays on the Mount of Olives while the Apostles

sleep; and in another Mary supports the dead Christ while Magdalen

kisses His pierced feet. The perfect composition of the ensemble,

the appealing figures of the female saints, meditative and wistful,

the powerful conception of the passionate Peter, and the unique vision

of Christ on the Mount, make this "Colonna" Madonna the first

indubitable masterpiece of Raphael. In that same year 1506 he

painted a less imposing picture, a Madonna (National Gallery,

London) for the Ansidei family: the Virgin, straitly enthroned,

teaches the Child how to read; at her left St. Nicholas of Bari,

gorgeous in his episcopal robes, is also studious; at her right the

Baptist, suddenly thirty while his playmate is still an infant, points

the traditional finger of the Forerunner at the Son of God.

From Perugia Raphael seems to have gone again to Urbino (1506).

Now he painted for Guidobaldo a second St. George (Leningrad),

this time with a lance; a handsome young knight sheathed in armor

whose gleaming blue displays another phase of Raphael's skill.

Probably on the same visit he painted for his friends the most

familiar of his self-portraits (Pitti): black beret over long black

locks; face still youthful, and with no trace yet of beard; long nose,

small mouth, soft eyes; altogether a haunting face, that might have

been Keats's- revealing a spirit clean and fresh, and sensitive to

every beauty in the world.

Late in 1506 he returned to Florence. There he painted some of his

less renowned pictures- St. Catherine of Alexandria (London), and

the "Niccolini Cowper" Madonna and Child (Washington). About 1780

the third Earl Cowper smuggled this out of Florence in the lining of

his carriage; it is not one of Raphael's finest, but Andrew Mellon

paid $850,000 to add it to his collection (1928). `051720 A far

greater picture was begun by Raphael at Florence in 1507: The

Entombment of Christ (Borghese Gallery). It was ordered for the

church of San Francesco in Perugia by Atalanta Baglioni, who, seven

years before, had knelt in the street over her own dying son;

perhaps through Mary's grief she expressed her own. Taking

Perugino's Deposition as his model, Raphael grouped his figures in a

masterly composition, almost with the power of Mantegna: the emaciated

dead Christ, borne in a sheet by a virile and muscular youth and a

bearded straining man; a splendid head of Joseph of Arimathea; a

lovely Magdalen leaning in horror over the corpse; Mary fainting

into the arms of attendant women; every body in a different

attitude, yet all rendered with anatomical verity and Correggian

grace; a somber symphony of reds, blues, browns, and greens mingling

in a luminous unity, with a Giorgionesque landscape showing the

three crosses of Golgotha under an evening sky.

In 1508 Raphael received at Florence a call that changed the current

of his life. The new Duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria della Rovere, was

a nephew of Julius II; Bramante, a distant relative of Raphael, was

now a favorite with the Pope; apparently both the Duke and the

architect recommended Raphael to Julius; soon an invitation was sent

the young painter to come to Rome. He was glad to go, for Rome, not

Florence was now the exciting and stimulating center of the

Renaissance world. Julius, who had lived for four years in the

Borgia apartment, had tired of seeing Giulia Farnese playing Virgin on

the wall; he wished to move into the four chambers once used by the

admirable Nicholas V; and he wanted these stanze or rooms to be

decorated with paintings congenial to his heroic stature and aims.

In the summer of 1508 Raphael went to Rome.

2. Raphael and Julius II: 1508-13

-

Rarely since Pheidias had so many great artists gathered in one city

and year. Michelango was carving figures for Julius' gigantic tomb,

and was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling; Bramante was designing

the new St. Peter's; Fra Giovanni of Verona, master woodworker, was

carving doors and chairs and bosses for the stanze; Perugino,

Signorelli, Peruzzi, Sodoma, Lotto, Pinturicchio had already painted

some of the walls; and Ambrogio Foppa, called Caradosso, the Cellini

of his age, was making gold in every way.

Julius assigned to Raphael the Stanza della Segnatura, so called

because usually in this room the Pope heard appeals and signed

pardons. He was so pleased with the youth's first paintings here,

and saw in him so excellent and pliable an agent to execute the

grand conceptions that seethed in the papal brain, that he dismissed

Perugino, Signorelli, and Sodoma, ordered their paintings whitewashed,

and offered to Raphael the opportunity to paint all the walls of the

four rooms. Raphael persuaded the Pope to retain some of the work done

by the earlier artists; most of it, however, was covered over, so that

the major paintings might have the unity of one mind and hand. For

each room Raphael received 1200 ducats ($15,000?); and on the two

rooms that he did for Julius he spent four and a half years. He was

now twenty-six.

The plan for the Stanza della Segnatura was lordly and sublime:

the paintings were to represent the union of religion and

philosophy, of classic culture and Christianity, of Church and

state, of literature and law, in the civilization of the

Renaissance. Probably the Pope conceived the general plan, and chose

the subjects in consultation with Raphael and the scholars of his

court- Inghirami and Sadoleto, later Bembo and Bibbiena. In the

great semicircle formed by one side wall Raphael pictured religion

in the persons of the Trinity and the saints, and theology in the form

of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church discussing the nature of

the Christian faith as centered in the doctrine of the Eucharist.

How carefully he prepared himself for this first test of his ability

to paint on a monumental scale may be seen from the thirty preliminary

studies that he made for this Disputa del Sacramento. He recalled

Fra Bartolommeo's Last Judgment in Santa Maria Nuova at Florence,

and his own Adoration of the Trinity in San Severo at Perugia; and

on them he modeled his design.

The result was a panorama so majestic as almost to convert the

most obdurate skeptic to the mysteries of the faith. At the top of the

arch, radial lines, converging upward, make the uppermost figures seem

to bend forward; at the bottom the converging lines of a marble

pavement give the picture depth. At the summit God the Father- a

solemn, kindly Abraham- holds up the globe with one hand, and with the

other blesses the scene; below Him the Son sits, naked to the waist,

as in a shell; on His right Mary in humble adoration, on His left

the Baptist still carrying his shepherd's staff crowned with a

cross; beneath Him a dove represents the Holy Spirit, third person

of the Trinity; everything is here. Seated on a fluffy cloud around

the Saviour are twelve magnificent figures of Old Testament or

Christian history: Adam, a bearded Michelangelesque athlete, almost

nude; Abraham; a stately Moses holding the tables of the Law; David,

Judas Maccabaeus, Peter and Paul, St. John writing his evangel, St.

James the Greater, St. Stephen, St. Lawrence, and two others of

debated identity; among them, and in the clouds- everywhere except

in the beards- cherubim and seraphim dart in and out, and angels weave

through the air on the wings of song. Dividing and uniting this

celestial assembly from an earthly throng below are two cherubim

holding the Gospel, and a monstrance displaying the Host. Around

this a varied assemblage of theologians gathers to consider the

problems of theology: St. Jerome with his Vulgate and his lion; St.

Augustine dictating The City of God; St. Ambrose in his episcopal

robes; Popes Anacletus and Innocent III; the philosophers Aquinas,

Bonaventura, and Duns Scotus; the dour Dante crowned as if with

thorns; the gentle Fra Angelico; the angry Savonarola (another

Julian revenge on Alexander VI); and finally, in a corner, bald and

ugly, Raphael's protecting friend Bramante. In all these human figures

the young artist has achieved an astonishing degree of

individualization, making each face a credible biography; and in

many of them a degree of superhuman dignity ennobles the whole picture

and theme. Probably never before had painting so successfully conveyed

the epic sublimity of the Christian creed.

But could the same youth, now twenty-eight, represent with equal

force and grandeur the role of science and philosophy among men? We

have no evidence that Raphael had ever done much reading; he spoke

with his brush and listened with his eyes; he lived in a world of form

and color in which words were trivial things unless they issued in the

significant actions of men and women. He must have prepared himself by

hurried study, by dipping into Plato and Diogenes Laertius and

Marsilio Ficino, and by humble conversation with learned men, to

rise now to his supreme conception, The School of Athens - half a

hundred figures summing up rich centuries of Greek thought, and all

gathered in an immortal moment under the coffered arch of a massive

pagan portico. There, on the wall directly facing the apotheosis of

Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D

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