Raphael

And now we are face to face with the most famous and most beloved name in modern art -- Raphael Sanzio. There have been in the last five centuries artists of far greater genius. Michelangelo was grander and more powerful, Leonardo at once more profound and more refined. In Raphael you never get the sweet world's taste as in Giorgione, nor its full pride and splendour as in Titian and Veronese. And I am calling up only Italian names -- how many others, if we chose to cross the Alps! -- and it is only as Illustrator that he rivals these: for in the more essential matters of figure-painting Raphael is not for a moment to be ranked on a level with the great Florentines; nor does he, like the Venetians, indelibly dye the world with resplendent colour. If you measure him with the standards that you would apply to artists like Pollaiuolo or Degas, you will soon condemn him to the radiant limbo of heavily gilt mediocrities; for movement and form were to his temperament, if not to his mind, as repugnant as ever they were to his patriarchal precursor, Duccio. Sift the legions of drawings ascribed to him until you have reduced their number to the few unmistakably his. Would you then venture to place even these few among the works of the greatest draughtsmen? Or look at his 'Entombment', the only composition which he attempted to treat entirely as every serious figure-painting should be treated, for the tactile values and the movement that it may be made to impart. You see that the poor creature, most docile and patient, had toiled and sweated to achieve what his head understood but his heart felt not -- direct communications of force. The result is one of the most uncouth 'academies' that may be seen, at least outside of that charnel-house of prize pictures, the diploma gallery of the École des Beaux-Arts at Paris.

Raphael's teachers

Ever ready to learn, Raphael passed from influence to influence. At whose feet did he not sit? Timoteo Viti's, Perugino's and Pintoricchio's, Michelangelo's, Leonardo's, and Fra Bartolommeo's, and finally, Sebastiano del Piombo's. From the last-named, Sanzio, then already at the very height of his career and triumph, humbly endeavoured to acquire those potent secrets of magical colour which even a second-rate Venetian could teach him. And although he learned his lesson well -- for in this the Umbrians ever had been distant cousins, as it were, of the Venetians -- yet twice only did he attain to signal achievement in colour: the fresco, so splendid as mere painting, which represents the 'Miracle of Bolsena', and that exquisite study in grey, the 'Portrait of Baldassare Gastiglione'. But what are these beside the mural paintings of Veronese, or the portraits of Titian? At his rarest best Raphael, as a master of colour, never went beyond Sebastiano.

Whether, then, we are on the look-out for eminent mastery over form and movement, or for great qualities of colour and mere painting, Raphael will certainly disappoint us. But he has other claims on our attention -- he was endowed with a visual imagination which has never even been rivalled for range, sweep, and sanity. When surpassed, it has been at single points and by artists of more concentrated genius. Thus gifted, and coming at a time when form had, for its own sake, been recovered by the Naturalists and the essential artists, when the visual imagery, of at least the Italian world, had already suffered along certain lines, the transformation from the Medieval into whatever since has been for all of us the modern, when the ideals of the Renaissance were for an ineffable instant standing complete, Raphael, filtering and rendering lucid and pure all that had passed through him to make him what he was, set himself the task of dowering the modern world with the images that to this day, despite the turbulent rebellion and morose secession of recent years, embody for the great number of cultivated men their spiritual ideals and their spiritual aspirations. 'Belle comme une madonne de Raphael' is, among the most artistic people in Europe, still the highest praise that can be given to female beauty. And, in sooth, where shall one find greater purity, more utter loveliness than in his 'Granduca Madonna', or a sublimer apparition of woman than appeared to St. Sixtus? Who, as a boy reading his Homer, his Virgil, or his Ovid, and dreaming dreams and seeing visions, but has found them realized a thousandfold in the 'Parnassus'! Who has ever had an ideal of intellectual converse in nobler surroundings but has looked with yearning at the 'Disputa' and the 'School of Athens'! Has Galatea ever haunted you? Tell me, has she not imparted a thousand times more life and freedom and freshness since you have seen her painted by Raphael in the midst of her Tritons and SeaNymphs? Antiquity itself has, in the figure-arts, left no embodiment so exultingly complete of its own finest imaginings.

Raphael as humanist

We go to Raphael for the beautiful vesture he has given to the Antiquity of our yearnings; and as long as the world of the Greeks and Romans remains for us what I fervently pray it may continue to be, not only a mere fact, but a longing and a desire, for such a time shall we, as we read the Greek and Latin poets, accompany them with an imagery either Raphael's own, or based on his; so long shall we see their world as Raphael saw it -- a world where the bird of morning never ceased to sing.

What wonder then that Raphael became on the instant, and has ever remained, the most beloved of artists! A world which owed all that was noblest and best in it to classical culture, found at last its artist, the Illustrator who, embodying Antiquity in a form surpassing its own highest conceptions, satisfied at last its noblest longings. Raphael, we may say, was the master artist of the Humanists, and the artist of people nurtured on the Classics he remains.

But there is in our civilization another element which, though it is certainly much less important in our conscious intellectual life, and of much less interest to the pictorial imagination, is said, nevertheless, to be morally superior and poetically grander -- all the Hebraic element, I mean, that has come to us from the Old and New Testaments. Sanzio here, also, performed a task by which we have benefited ever since, for, imperturbably Hellenic in spirit, he has given an Hellenic garb to the Hebraic universe. In pictures which he either executed or superintended, or at least inspired, Raphael has completely illustrated both the Old and New Testaments; and such has been the spell of these Illustrations that they have trickled down to the lowest strata of society, and it will take not one but ten thousand M. Tissots to win even the populace away from them. And this imagery, in which Raphael has clothed the Hebrew world for us, is no more Hebraic than that of Virgil, singing the new order of things when the lion shall lie down with the lamb. Raphael has brought about the extraordinary result that, when we read even the Hebrew classics, we read them with an accompaniment of Hellenic imagery. What a power he has been in modern culture, Hellenizing the only force that could have thwarted it! If you would have examples in proof of what I have been saying, look at the Loggia, look at the cartoons for the tapestries, look at Marcantonio's engravings, but look, above all, in the Pitti at the 'Vision of Ezekiel'. Is it thus that Jehovah revealed himself to his prophets? Is it not rather Zeus appearing to a Sophocles? Raphael's Bible

Raphael has enshrined all the noble tenderness and human sublimity of Christianity, all the glamour and edifying beauty of the antique world, in forms so radiant that we ever return to them to renew our inspiration. But has he not also given us our ideals of beauty? The Florentines were too great as figure-artists, the Venetians as masters of colour and paint, to care much for that which in Art, as distinguished from Illustration, is so 'unimportant as what in life we call beauty. The 'beautiful woman' is apt to be what the real artist considers a bad subject -- one in the painting of which it is exceedingly difficult, if at all possible, to present form or line. Such a woman, delightful though she may be in life, and ethically and socially perhaps the most desirable type, is apt to become in art a vulgar chromo. Many efforts have been made in our times, by artists who were mere Illustrators -- or at least have had influence as such only -- to change the ideal; but the fatalistic and ailing woman they tried to make popular, though more attractive to tastes bored with health. and lovableness, is not in itself any more artistic than the other. So the type of beauty to which our eyes and desire still return is Raphael's -- the type which for four hundred years has fascinated Europe. Not artist enough to be able to do without beauty, and the heir of the Sienese feelings for loveliness, too powerfully controlled by Florentine ideals not to be guided somewhat by their restraining and purifying art, Sanzio produced a type, the composite of Ferrarese, Central Italian, and Florentine conceptions of female beauty, which, as no other, has struck the happy mean between the instinctive demands of life and the more conscious requirements of art. And he was almost as successful in his types of youth or age -- indeed, none but Leonardo ever conceived any lovelier or more dignified. Only for manhood was Raphael perhaps too feeble -- and yet, I am not sure.

A surprise awaits us. This painter whose temperament we fancy to have been somewhat languid, who presented ideals Hesperidean, idyllic, Virgilian, could, when he chose, be not only grand in his conceptions -- that we know already -- but severe, impassive, and free from any aim save that of interpreting the object before him. And Raphael's portraits, in truth, have no superiors as faithful renderings of soul and body. They are truthful even to literal veracity, perceived in piercing light, yet reconstructed with an energy of intellectual and artistic fusion that places them among the constellations. Need we cite instances? Bear in mind the various portraits in the Stanze of Julius II; the cruel refinement of the Madrid bust of a young Cardinal; the genial faces of Navagero and Beazzano; the brutish greasiness of Leo X, nevertheless not wholly repellent; and, best of all, the majestic portrait of a young Roman matron -- such as Cornelia must have looked -known in the Pitti as 'La Donna Velata'.