Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino
(April 6 or March 28, 1483 – April 6, 1520), better known simply as
Raphael, was an Italian
painter and architect of
the High Renaissance, celebrated
for the perfection and grace of his paintings and drawings.
Together with
Michelangelo and
Leonardo da Vinci, he forms the
traditional trinity of great masters of that period.
Raphael was enormously productive, running an unusually large
workshop, and despite his death at thirty-seven, a large body of
his work remains.
Many of his works are found in the Apostolic
Palace
of The Vatican, where
the frescoed Raphael Rooms were the
central, and the largest, work of his career. After his
early years in Rome, much of his work was designed by him and
executed largely by the workshop from his drawings, with
considerable loss of quality. He was extremely influential in his
lifetime, though outside Rome his work was mostly known from his
collaborative
printmaking. After his
death, the influence of his great rival Michelangelo was more
widespread until the 18th and 19th centuries, when Raphael's more
serene and harmonious qualities were again regarded as the highest
models.
His career
falls naturally into three phases and three styles, first described
by Giorgio Vasari: his early years in
Umbria, then a period of about four years
(from 1504-1508) absorbing the artistic traditions of Florence
, followed by
his last hectic and triumphant twelve years in Rome
, working for
two Popes and their close associates.
Urbino
Raphael
was born in the small but artistically significant Central Italian
city of Urbino
in the
Marche region, where his father Giovanni Santi was court painter to the
Duke. The reputation of the court had been
established by Federico III
da Montefeltro, a highly successful condottiere who had been created Duke of Urbino by the Pope - Urbino formed part of the Papal States
- and who died the year before Raphael was
born. The emphasis of Federico's court was rather more
literary than artistic, but Giovanni Santi was a poet of sorts as
well as a painter, and had written a rhymed chronicle of the life
of Federico, and both wrote the texts and produced the decor for
masque-like court entertainments. His poem to
Federico shows him as keen to show awareness of the most advanced
North Italian painters, and
Early Netherlandish artists as
well. In the very small court of Urbino he was probably more
integrated into the central family circle than most court
painters.
Federico
was succeeded by his son Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, who
married Elisabetta Gonzaga,
daughter of the ruler of Mantua
, the most
brilliant of the smaller Italian courts for both music and the
visual arts. Under them, the court continued as a centre for
literary culture. Growing up in the circle of this small court gave
Raphael the excellent manners and social skills stressed by Vasari.
Court life in Urbino at just after this period was to become set as
the model of the virtues of the Italian humanist court by
Baldassare Castiglione's depiction of
it in his classic work
The
Book of the Courtier, published in 1528. Castiglione moved
to Urbino in 1504, when Raphael was no longer based there but
frequently visited, and they became good friends. Other regular
visitors to the court were also to become great friends:
Pietro Bibbiena and
Pietro Bembo, both later
Cardinals, were already becoming well
known as writers, and would be in Rome during Raphael's period
there. Raphael mixed easily in the highest circles throughout his
life, one of the factors that tended to give a misleading
impression of effortlessness to his career. He did not receive a
full
humanistic education
however; it is unclear how easily he read Latin.
Early life and work

Probable self-portrait drawing by
Raphael in his teens
His mother Màgia died in 1491 when Raphael was eight, followed on
August 1, 1494 by his father, who had already remarried. Orphaned
at eleven, Raphael's formal guardian became his only paternal uncle
Bartolomeo, a priest, who subsequently engaged in litigation with
his stepmother. He probably continued to live with his stepmother
when not living as an apprentice with a master. He had already
shown talent, according to
Giorgio
Vasari, who tells that Raphael had been "a great help to his
father". A brilliant
self-portrait
drawing from his teenage years shows his precocious talent. His
father's workshop continued and, probably together with his
stepmother, Raphael evidently played a part in managing it from a
very early age. In Urbino, he came into contact with the works of
Paolo Uccello, previously the court
painter (d.
1475), and Luca
Signorelli, who until 1498 was based in nearby Città di
Castello
.
According to Vasari, his father placed him in the workshop of the
Umbrian master Pietro
Perugino as an
apprentice "despite the tears of his mother". The evidence of an
apprenticeship comes only from Vasari and another source, and has
been disputed — eight was very early for an apprenticeship to
begin. An alternative theory is that he received at least some
training from
Timoteo Viti, who acted
as court painter in Urbino from 1495. But most modern historians
agree that Raphael at least worked as an assistant to Perugino from
around 1500; the influence of Perugino on Raphael's early work is
very clear: "probably no other pupil of genius has ever absorbed so
much of his master's teaching as Raphael did", according to
Wölfflin. Vasari wrote that it was impossible to distinguish their
hands at this period, but many modern
art
historians claim to do better and detect his hand in specific
areas of works by Perugino or his workshop. Apart from stylistic
closeness, their techniques are very similar as well, for example
having paint applied thickly, using an oil varnish medium, in
shadows and darker garments, but very thinly on flesh areas. An
excess of resin in the varnish often causes cracking of areas of
paint in the works of both masters.
The Perugino workshop was active in both
Perugia
and Florence
, perhaps
maintaining two permanent branches. Raphael is described as
a "master", that is to say fully trained, in 1501.
His first documented work was the
Baronci altarpiece for the church of
Saint
Nicholas of Tolentino in
Città di Castello, a town halfway between Perugia and Urbino.
Evangelista da Pian di Meleto, who had worked for his father, was
also named in the commission. It was commissioned in 1500 and
finished in 1501; now only some cut sections and a preparatory
drawing remain.
In the following years he painted works for
other churches there, including the "Mond Crucifixion" (about 1503) and the
Brera
Wedding of the
Virgin (1504), and for Perugia, such as the Oddi Altarpiece. He very
probably also visited Florence in this period. These are large
works, some in
fresco, where Raphael
confidently marshalls his compositions in the somewhat static style
of Perugino. He also painted many small and exquisite
cabinet paintings in these years, probably
mostly for the connoisseurs in the Urbino court, like the
Three Graces and
St. Michael, and he began to paint
Madonnas and portraits.
In 1502 he went to
Siena
at the invitation of another pupil of Perugino, Pinturicchio,
"being a friend of Raphael and knowing him to be a draughtsman of
the highest quality" to help with the cartoons, and very likely the designs, for a fresco
series in the Piccolomini Library in
Siena
Cathedral
. He
was evidently already much in demand even at this early stage in
his career.
File:CrocefissioneRaffaello.jpg|The
Mond Crucifixion, 1502-3, very much in the
style of
PeruginoFile:PalaOddiRaffaello.jpg|The
Coronation of the Virgin
1502-3File:Raffaello Sposalizio.jpg|The
Wedding of the
Virgin, Raphael's most sophisticated altarpiece of this
period.File:Lvr-george.jpg|
Saint George and the Dragon, a
small work (29 x 21 cm) for the court of Urbino.
Influence of Florence
Raphael led a "nomadic" life, working in various centres in
Northern Italy, but spent a good deal of time in Florence, perhaps
from about 1504. However, although there is traditional reference
to a "Florentine period" of about 1504-8, he was possibly never a
continuous resident there. He may have needed to visit the city to
secure materials in any case. There is a letter of recommendation
of Raphael, dated October 1504, from the mother of the next Duke of
Urbino to the
Gonfaloniere of
Florence: "The bearer of this will be found to be Raphael,
painter of Urbino, who, being greatly gifted in his profession has
determined to spend some time in Florence to study. And because his
father was most worthy and I was very attached to him, and the son
is a sensible and well-mannered young man, on both accounts, I bear
him great love...".
As earlier with Perugino and others, Raphael was able to assimilate
the influence of Florentine art, whilst keeping his own developing
style. Frescos in Perugia of about 1505 show a new monumental
quality in the figures which may represent the influence of
Fra Bartolomeo, who Vasari says was a
friend of Raphael. But the most striking influence in the work of
these years is
Leonardo da Vinci,
who returned to the city from 1500 to 1506. Raphael's figures begin
to take more dynamic and complex positions, and though as yet his
painted subjects are still mostly tranquil, he made drawn studies
of fighting nude men, one of the obsessions of the period in
Florence. Another drawing is a portrait of a young woman that uses
the three-quarter length pyramidal composition of the
just-completed "
Mona Lisa", but still
looks completely Raphaelesque. Another of Leonardo's compositional
inventions, the pyramidal
Holy Family, was repeated in a
series of works that remain among his most famous easel paintings.
There is a drawing by Raphael in the
Royal Collection of
Leonardo's lost Leda and the
Swan, from which he adapted the
contrapposto pose of his own
Saint
Catherine of Alexandria. He also perfects his own version of
Leonardo's
sfumato modelling, to give
subtlety to his painting of flesh, and develops the interplay of
glances between his groups, which are much less enigmatic than
those of Leonardo. But he keeps the soft clear light of Perugino in
his paintings.
Leonardo was more than thirty years older than Raphael, but
Michelangelo, who was in Rome for this period, was just eight years
his senior. Michelangelo already disliked Leonardo, and in Rome
came to dislike Raphael even more, attributing conspiracies against
him to the younger man. Raphael would have been aware of his works
in Florence, but in his most original work of these years, he
strikes out in a different direction. His
Deposition of Christ draws on
classical
sarcophagi to spread the
figures across the front of the picture space in a complex and not
wholly successful arrangement. Wöllflin detects the influence of
the Madonna in Michelangelo's
Doni
Tondo in the kneeling figure on the right, but the rest of
the composition is far removed from his style, or that of Leonardo.
Though highly regarded at the time, and much later forcibly removed
from Perugia by the
Borghese, it stands
rather alone in Raphael's work. His classicism would later take a
less literal direction.
File:PalaAnsidei.jpg|The
Ansidei Altarpiece, ca. 1505,
beginning to move on from PeruginoFile:Raffael 030.jpg|The
Madonna of the
Meadow, ca. 1506, using Leonardo's pyramidal composition
for subjects of the Holy Family.File:Raffael
stcatherina.jpg|
Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1507,
borrows from the pose of Leonardo's
LedaFile:Raffael
004.jpg|
Deposition of
Christ, 1507, drawing from Roman sarcophagi.
Roman period
The Vatican "Stanze"
By the end of 1508, he had moved to Rome, where he lived for the
rest of his life. He was invited by the new
Pope Julius II, perhaps at the suggestion of
his architect
Donato Bramante, then
engaged on St. Peter's, who came from just outside Urbino and was
distantly related to Raphael. Unlike Michelangelo, who had been
kept hanging around in Rome for several months after his first
summons, Raphael was immediately commissioned by Julius to fresco
what was intended to become the Pope's private library at the
Vatican Palace. This was a much
larger and more important commission than any he had received
before; he had only painted one altarpiece in Florence itself.
Several other artists and their teams of assistants were already at
work on different rooms, many painting over recently completed
paintings commissioned by Julius's loathed predecessor,
Alexander VI, whose contributions, and
arms, Julius was determined to efface
from the palace. Michelangelo, meanwhile, had been commissioned to
paint the
Sistine Chapel
ceiling.
This first of the famous "Stanze" or "
Raphael Rooms" to be painted, now always known
as the
Stanza della
Segnatura after its use in Vasari's time, was to make a
stunning impact on Roman art, and remains generally regarded as his
greatest masterpiece, containing
The School of Athens,
The Parnassus and the
Disputa. Raphael was
then given further rooms to paint, displacing other artists
including Perugino and Signorelli. He completed a sequence of three
rooms, each with paintings on each wall and often the ceilings too,
increasingly leaving the work of painting from his detailed
drawings to the large and skilled workshop team he had acquired,
who added a fourth room, probably only including some elements
designed by Raphael, after his early death in 1520. The death of
Julius in 1513 did not interrupt the work at all, as he was
succeeded by Raphael's last Pope, the
Medici
Pope Leo X, with whom Raphael formed an
even closer relationship, and who continued to commission him.
Raphael's friend Cardinal Bibbiena was also one of Leo's old
tutors, and a close friend and advisor.
Raphael was clearly influenced by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel
ceiling in the course of painting the room. Vasari said Bramante
let him in secretly, and the scaffolding was taken down in 1511
from the first completed section. The reaction of other artists to
the daunting force of Michelangelo was the dominating question in
Italian art for the following few decades, and Raphael, who had
already shown his gift for absorbing influences into his own
personal style, rose to the challenge perhaps better than any other
artist. One of the first and clearest instances was the portrait in
The School of Athens of Michelangelo himself, as
Heraclitus, which seems to draw clearly from the
Sybils and
ignudi of the Sistine ceiling. Other figures in
that and later paintings in the room show the same influences, but
as still cohesive with a development of Raphael's own style.
Michelangelo accused Raphael of plagiarism and years after
Raphael's death, complained in a letter that "everything he knew
about art he got from me", although other quotations show more
generous reactions.
These very large and complex compositions have been regarded ever
since as among the supreme works of the
grand manner of the High Renaissance, and the
"classic art" of the post-antique West. They give a highly
idealised depiction of the forms represented, and
the compositions, though very carefully conceived in
drawings, achieve "sprezzatura", a term invented by
his friend Castiglione, who defined it as "a certain nonchalance
which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does
seem uncontrived and effortless ...". According to
Michael Levey, "Raphael gives his [figures] a
superhuman clarity and grace in a universe of Euclidian
certainties". The painting is nearly all of the highest quality in
the first two rooms, but the later compositions in the Stanze,
especially those involving dramatic action, are not entirely as
successful either in conception or their execution by the
workshop.
File:Massatbolsena.jpg|
The Mass
at Bolsena, 1514, Stanza di
EliodoroFile:Deliveranceofstpeter.jpg|
Deliverance of Saint Peter,
1514, Stanza di EliodoroFile:Giulio Romano 001.jpg|
The Fire in the Borgo, 1514,
Stanza dell'incendio del Borgo, painted by the workshop to
Raphael's design.
Other projects
The Vatican projects took most of his time, although he painted
several portraits, including those of his two main patrons, the
popes
Julius II
and his successor
Leo
X, the former considered one of his finest. Other portraits
were of his own friends, like Castiglione, or the immediate Papal
circle. Other rulers pressed for work, and King
Francis I of France was sent two
paintings as diplomatic gifts from the Pope.
For Agostino Chigi, the hugely rich banker and
Papal Treasurer, he painted the Galatea and designed further decorative
frescoes for his Villa
Farnesina
, and painted
two chapels in the churches of Santa Maria della Pace
and Santa Maria del Popolo
. He also designed some of the decoration for
the Villa Madama, the work in both villas being executed by his
workshop.
One of
his most important papal commissions was the Raphael Cartoons (now Victoria and
Albert Museum
), a series of 10 cartoons,
of which seven survive, for tapestries with scenes of the lives of
Saint Paul and Saint Peter, for the Sistine Chapel
. The cartoons were sent to Brussels
to be woven in the workshop of Pier van Aelst. It is possible that
Raphael saw the finished series before his death—they were probably
completed in 1520. He also designed and painted the
Loggia
at the Vatican, a long thin gallery then open to a courtyard on one
side, decorated with Roman-style
grottesche. He produced a number of significant
altarpieces, including
The Ecstasy of St.
Cecilia and the
Sistine
Madonna. His last work, on which he was working up to his
death, was a large
Transfiguration, which
together with
Il Spasimo
shows the direction his art was taking in his final years—more
proto-
Baroque than
Mannerist.
File:Galatea Raphael.jpg|
Galatea,1512, his only major mythology,
for Chigi's villa.File:V&A - Raphael, The Miraculous Draught of
Fishes (1515).jpg|
The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, 1515,
one of the seven remaining
Raphael
Cartoons for tapestries.File:Raphael Spasimo.jpg|
Il
Spasimo 1517, brings a new degree of expressiveness to his
art.File:Transfiguration Raphael.jpg|
Transfiguration, 1520,
unfinished at his death.
Workshop
Vasari says that Raphael eventually had a workshop of fifty pupils
and assistants, many of whom later became significant artists in
their own right. This was arguably the largest workshop team
assembled under any single
old master
painter, and much higher than the norm. They included established
masters from other parts of Italy, probably working with their own
teams as sub-contractors, as well as pupils and journeymen. We have
very little evidence of the internal working arrangements of the
workshop, apart from the works of art themselves, often very
difficult to assign to a particular hand.
The most important figures were
Giulio
Romano, a young pupil from Rome (only about twenty-one at
Raphael's death), and
Gianfrancesco
Penni, already a Florentine master. They were left many of
Raphael's drawings and other possessions, and to some extent
continued the workshop after Raphael's death. Penni did not achieve
a personal reputation equal to Giulio's, as after Raphael's death
he became Giulio's less-than-equal collaborator in turn for much of
his subsequent career.
Perino del
Vaga, already a master, and
Polidoro da Caravaggio, who was
supposedly promoted from a labourer carrying building materials on
the site, also became notable painters in their own right.
Polidoro's partner,
Maturino da
Firenze, has, like Penni, been overshadowed in subsequent
reputation by his partner.
Giovanni da
Udine had a more independent status, and was responsible for
the decorative
stucco work and grotesques
surrounding the main frescoes. Most of the artists were later
scattered, and some killed, by the violent
Sack of Rome in 1527. This did however
contribute to the diffusion of versions of Raphael's style around
Italy and beyond.
Vasari emphasises that Raphael ran a very harmonious and efficient
workshop, and had extraordinary skill in smoothing over troubles
and arguments with both patrons and his assistants - a contrast
with the stormy pattern of Michelangelo's relationships with both.
However though both Penni and Giulio were sufficiently skilled that
distinguishing between their hands and that of Raphael himself is
still sometimes difficult, there is no doubt that many of Raphael's
later wall-paintings, and probably some of his easel paintings, are
more notable for their design than their execution. Many of his
portraits, if in good condition, show his brilliance in the
detailed handling of paint right up to the end of his life.
Other pupils or assistants include
Raffaellino del Colle,
Andrea Sabbatini,
Bartolommeo Ramenghi,
Pellegrino Aretusi,
Vincenzo Tamagni,
Battista Dossi,
Tommaso Vincidor,
Timoteo Viti (the Urbino painter), and the
sculptor and architect
Lorenzetto
(Giulio's brother-in-law). The printmakers and architects in
Raphael's circle are discussed below. It has been claimed the
Flemish
Bernard van Orley worked
for Raphael for a time, and Luca Penni, brother of Gianfrancesco,
may have been a member of the team.
Portraits
File:Raffaello - ElisabettaGonzaga.jpg|
Portrait of Elisabetta
Gonzaga, ca. 1504File:09julius.jpg|
Portrait of Pope Julius
II, ca. 1512File:Altoviti.jpg|
Portrait of Bindo
Altoviti, ca. 1514File:01castig.jpg|
Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, ca.
1515.
Architecture
After
Bramante's death in 1514, he was named architect of the new
St
Peter's
. Most of his work there was altered or
demolished after his death and the acceptance of Michelangelo's
design, but a few drawings have survived. It appears his designs
would have made the church a good deal gloomier than the final
design, with massive piers all the way down the nave, "like an
alley" according to a critical posthumous analysis by
Antonio da Sangallo the
Younger. It would perhaps have resembled the temple in the
background of the
The Expulsion of
Heliodorus from the Temple.

The
Palazzo Aquila, now
destroyed
He designed several other buildings, and for a short time was the
most important architect in Rome, working for a small circle around
the Papacy. Julius had made changes to the street plan of Rome,
creating several new thoroughfares, and he wanted them filled with
splendid palaces.
An important building, the Palazzo Aquila for Leo's Papal
Chamberlain, was completely destroyed
to make way for
Bernini's
piazza
for St. Peter's, but drawings of the facade and courtyard remain.
The facade was an unusually richly decorated one for the period,
including both painted panels on the top story (of three), and much
sculpture on the middle one.
The main
designs for the Villa Farnesina were not by Raphael, but he did
design, and paint, the Chigi Chapel
for the same patron, Agostino Chigi, the Papal Treasurer.
Another building, for Pope Leo's doctor, the
Palazzo di Jacobo
da Brescia, was moved in the 1930s but survives; this was
designed to complement a palace on the same street by Bramante,
where Raphael himself lived for a time.
The
Villa
Madama
, a lavish hillside retreat for Cardinal Giulio de'
Medici, later Pope Clement VII, was
never finished, and his full plans have to be reconstructed
speculatively. He produced a design from which the final
construction plans were completed by
Antonio da Sangallo the
Younger. Even incomplete, it was the most sophisticated villa
design yet seen in Italy, and greatly influenced the later
development of the genre; it appears to be the only modern building
in Rome of which
Palladio made a measured
drawing.
Only some
floor-plans remain for a large palace planned for himself on the
new "Via Giulia" in the Borgo
, for which he was accumulating the land in his last
years. It was on an irregular island block near the river
Tiber. It seems all facades were to have a
giant order of
pilasters
rising at least two storeys to the full height of the
piano nobile, "a gandiloquent feature
unprecedented in private palace design".
In 1515 he was given powers as "Prefect" over all antiquities
unearthed entrusted within the city, or a mile outside. Raphael
wrote a letter to Pope Leo suggesting ways of halting the
destruction of ancient monuments, and proposed a visual survey of
the city to record all antiquities in an organised fashion. The
Pope's concerns were not exactly the same; he intended to continue
to re-use ancient masonry in the building of St Peter's, but wanted
to ensure that all ancient inscriptions were recorded, and
sculpture preserved, before allowing the stones to be reused.
Drawings

Lucretia, engraved by Raimondi
after a drawing by Raphael.
Raphael was one of the finest draftsmen in the history of Western
art, and used drawings extensively to plan his compositions.
According to a near-contemporary, when beginning to plan a
composition, he would lay out a large number of stock drawings of
his on the floor, and begin to draw "rapidly", borrowing figures
from here and there. Over forty sketches survive for the
Disputa in the Stanze, and there may well have been many
more originally; over four hundred sheets survive altogether. He
used different drawings to refine his poses and compositions,
apparently to a greater extent than most other painters, to judge
by the number of variants that survive: "... This is how Raphael
himself, who was so rich in inventiveness, used to work, always
coming up with four or six ways to show a narrative, each one
different from the rest, and all of them full of grace and well
done." wrote another writer after his death. For
John Shearman, Raphael's art marks "a shift of
resources away from production to research and development".
When a final composition was achieved, scaled-up full-size cartoons
were often made, which were then pricked with a pin and "pounced"
with a bag of soot to leave dotted lines on the surface as a guide.
He also made unusually extensive use, on both paper and plaster, of
a "blind stylus", scratching lines which leave only an indentation,
but no mark. These can be seen on the wall in
The School of
Athens, and in the originals of many drawings. The "Raphael
Cartoons", as tapestry designs, were fully coloured in a glue
distemper medium, as they were
sent to Brussels to be followed by the weavers.
In later works painted by the workshop, the drawings are often
painfully more attractive than the paintings. Most Raphael drawings
are rather precise—even initial sketches with naked outline figures
are carefully drawn, and later working drawings often have a high
degree of finish, with shading and sometimes highlights in white.
They lack the freedom and energy of some of Leonardo's and
Michelangelo's sketches, but are nearly always aesthetically very
satisfying. He was one of the last artists to use
metalpoint (literally a sharp pointed piece of
sliver or another metal) extensively, although he also made superb
use of the freer medium of red or black chalk. In his final years
he was one of the first artists to use female models for
preparatory drawings—male pupils ("garzoni") were normally used for
studies of both sexes.
Printmaking
Raphael made no
prints himself, but
entered into a collaboration with
Marcantonio Raimondi to produce
engravings to Raphael's designs, which
created many of the most famous Italian prints of the century, and
was important in the
rise of the
reproductive print. His interest was unusual in such a major
artist; from his contemporaries only
Titian,
who had worked much less successfully with Raimondi, shared it. A
total of about fifty prints were made; some were copies of
Raphael's paintings, but other designs were apparently created by
Raphael purely to be turned into prints. Raphael made preparatory
drawings, many of which survive, for Raimondi to translate into
engraving.
The most famous original prints to result from the collaboration
were
Lucretia, the
Judgement of Paris and
The
Massacre of the Innocents (of which two virtually identical
versions were engraved). Among prints of the paintings
The Parnassus (with considerable
differences) and
Galatea were also especially well-known.
Outside Italy, reproductive prints by Raimondi and others were the
main way that Raphael's art was experienced until the twentieth
century.
Baviero Carocci, called "Il
Baviera" by Vasari, an assistant who Raphael evidently trusted with
his money, ended up in control of most of the copper plates after
Raphael's death, and had a successful career in the new occupation
of a publisher of prints.
File:PhrygianSibylRaphael.jpg|Drawing for a
Sybyl in the Chigi Chapel
.File:Raimondi3.jpg|
The Massacre of the
Innocents, engraving by (?) Raimondi from a design by Raphael.
The version "without fir tree".File:Urteil des
Paris.jpg|
Judgement of Paris, still influencing
Manet, who used the seated group in his
most famous work.
File:Galatea
(engraving).jpg|Galatea, engraving after the fresco in the Villa
Farnesina
Private life and death
Raphael lived in the Borgo, in rather grand style in a palace
designed by Bramante. He never married, but in 1514 became engaged
to Maria Bibbiena, Cardinal Medici Bibbiena's niece; he seems to
have been talked into this by his friend the Cardinal, and his lack
of enthusiasm seems to be shown by the marriage not taking place
before she died in 1520. He is said to have had many affairs, but a
permanent fixture in his life in Rome was "La Fornarina",
Margherita Luti, the daughter of a baker (
fornaro) named
Francesco Luti from Siena who lived at Via del Governo Vecchio. He
was made a "
Groom of the Chamber"
of the Pope, which gave him status at court and an additional
income, and also a knight of the Papal
Order of the Golden Spur. Vasari
claims he had toyed with the ambition of becoming a
Cardinal, perhaps after some
encouragement from Leo, which also may account for his delaying his
marriage.
According to Vasari, Raphael's premature death on
Good Friday (April 6, 1520) (possibly his 37th
birthday), was caused by a night of excessive sex with Luti, after
which he fell into a fever and, not telling his doctors that this
was its cause, was given the wrong cure, which killed him.
Whatever the cause, in his acute illness, which lasted fifteen
days, Raphael was composed enough to receive the
last rites, and to put his affairs in order. He
dictated his will, in which he left sufficient funds for his
mistress's care, entrusted to his loyal servant Baviera, and left
most of his studio contents to Giulio Romano and Penni.
At his
request, Raphael was buried in the Pantheon
.
Vasari, in his biography of Raphael, says that Raphael was also
born on a Good Friday, which in 1483 fell on March 28. This would
mean that while Raphael was born and died on Good Friday, he was
actually older than 37 on the 1520 Good Friday which fell on April
6.
His funeral was extremely grand, attended by large crowds. The
inscription in his marble sarcophagus, an
elegiac distich
written by
Pietro Bembo, reads: "Ille
hic est Raffael, timuit quo sospite vinci, rerum magna parens et
moriente mori." Meaning: "Here lies that famous Raphael by whom
Nature feared to be conquered while he lived, and when he was
dying, feared herself to die."
Critical reception
Raphael was highly admired by his contemporaries, although his
influence on artistic style in his own century was less than that
of Michelangelo.
Mannerism, beginning at
the time of his death, and later the
Baroque, took art "in a direction totally opposed"
to Raphael's qualities; "with Raphael's death, classic art - the
High Renaissance - subsided", as
Walter Friedländer put it. He was
soon seen as the ideal model by those disliking the excesses of
Mannerism:
the opinion ...was generally held in the middle of the
sixteenth century that Raphael was the ideal balanced painter,
universal in his talent, satisfying all the absolute standards, and
obeying all the rules which were supposed to govern the arts,
whereas Michelangelo was the eccentric genius, more brilliant than
any other artists in his particular field, the drawing of the male
nude, but unbalanced and lacking in certain qualities, such as
grace and restraint, essential to the great artist.
Those, like Dolce and Aretino,
who held this view were usually the survivors of Renaissance Humanism, unable to follow
Michelangelo as he moved on into Mannerism.
Vasari himself, despite his hero remaining Michelangelo, came to
see his influence as harmful in some ways, and added passages to
the second edition of the
Lives
expressing similar views.
Raphael's compositions were always admired and studied, and became
the cornerstone of the
training of the
Academies of art. His period of greatest influence was from the
late 17th to late 19th centuries, when his perfect decorum and
balance were greatly admired. He was seen as the best model for the
history painting, regarded as the
highest in the
hierarchy of
genres. Sir
Joshua Reynolds in
his
Discourses praised his "simple, grave, and majestic
dignity" and said he "stands in general foremost of the first [ie
best] painters", especially for his frescoes (in which he included
the "Raphael Cartoons"), whereas "Michael Angelo claims the next
attention. He did not possess so many excellences as Raffaelle, but
those he had were of the highest kind..." Echoing the
sixteenth-century views above, Reynolds goes on to say of Raphael:
The excellency of this extraordinary man lay in the
propriety, beauty, and majesty of his characters, his judicious
contrivance of his composition, correctness of drawing, purity of
taste, and the skilful accommodation of other men’s conceptions to
his own purpose.
Nobody excelled him in that judgment, with which he
united to his own observations on nature the energy of Michael
Angelo, and the beauty and simplicity of the antique.
To the question, therefore, which ought to hold the
first rank, Raffaelle or Michael Angelo, it must be answered, that
if it is to be given to him who possessed a greater combination of
the higher qualities of the art than any other man, there is no
doubt but Raffaelle is the first.
But if, according to Longinus, the sublime, being the
highest excellence that human composition can attain to, abundantly
compensates the absence of every other beauty, and atones for all
other deficiencies, then Michael Angelo demands the
preference.
Reynolds was less enthusiastic about Raphael's panel paintings, but
the slight sentimentality of these made them enormously popular in
the 19th century:"We have been familiar with them from childhood
onwards, through a far greater mass of reproductions than any other
artist in the world has ever had..." wrote
Wölfflin, who was born in 1862, of
Raphael's Madonnas.
In 19th century England the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
explicitly reacted against his influence (and that of his admirers
such as "Sir Sploshua"), seeking to return to styles before what
they saw as his baneful influence. According to a critic whose
ideas greatly influenced them,
John
Ruskin:
The doom of the arts of Europe went forth from that
chamber [the Stanza della Segnatura], and it was brought about in
great part by the very excellencies of the man who had thus marked
the commencement of decline.
The perfection of execution and the beauty of feature
which were attained in his works, and in those of his great
contemporaries, rendered finish of execution and beauty of form the
chief objects of all artists; and thenceforward execution was
looked for rather than thought, and beauty rather than
veracity.
And as I told you, these are the two secondary causes
of the decline of art; the first being the loss of moral
purpose.
Pray note them clearly.
In mediæval art, thought is the first thing, execution
the second; in modern art execution is the first thing, and thought
the second.
And again, in mediæval art, truth is first, beauty
second; in modern art, beauty is first, truth second.
The mediæval principles led up to Raphael, and the
modern principles lead down from him.
He was still seen by 20th century critics like
Bernard Berenson as the "most famous and
most loved" master of the High Renaissance, but it would seem he
has since been overtaken by Michelangelo and Leonardo in this
respect.
See also
Notes
- Variants include "Raffaello Santi", "Raffaello da Urbino" or
"Rafael Sanzio da Urbino". The surname Sanzio derives from
the latinization of the Italian
Santi into Santius. He normally signed documents
as "Raphael Urbinas" - a latinized form. Gould:207
- Jones and Penny, pp. 1 and 246. He died on his thirty-seventh
birthday, and was both born and died on Good Friday, according to different
sources. The matter has been much discussed, as both cannot be
true.
- See, for example
- Vasari, pp. 208, 230 and passim.
- Urbino: The Story of a Renaissance City By June
Osborne, p.39 on the population, as a "few thousand" at most; even
today it is only 15,000 without the students of the University
- Jones and Penny, pp. 1-2
- Vasari:207 & passim
- Jones & Penny:204
- Vasari, at the start of the Life. Jones &
Penny:5
- Ashmolean Museum image
- Jones and Penny: 4-5, 8 and 20
- Simone Fornari in 1549-50, see Gould:207
- Jones & Penny:8
- contrasting him with Leonardo and Michelangelo in this respect.
Wölfflin:73
- Jones and Penny:17
- Jones & Penny:2-5
- It was later seriously damaged during an earthquake in
1789.
- Jones and Penny:5-8
- One surviving preparatory drawing appears to be mostly by
Raphael; quotation from Vasari by - Jones and Penny:20
- Gould:207-8
- Jones and Penny:5
- National Gallery, London Jones
& Penny:44
- Jones & Penny:21-45
- Vasari, Michelangelo:251
- Jones & Penny:44-47, and Wöllflin:79-82
- image
- drawing
- Jones & Penny:49, differing somewhat from Gould:208 on the
timing of his arrival
- Vasari:247
- although Julius was no great reader - an inventory compiled
after his death has a total of 220 books, large for the time, but
hardly requiring such a receptacle. There was no room for bookcases
on the walls, which were in cases in the middle of the floor,
destroyed in the 1527 Sack of Rome. Jones & Penny:4952
- Jones & Penny:49
- Jones & Penny:49-128
- Jones & Penny:101-105
- Blunt:76, Jones & Penny:103-5
- Book of the Courtier 1:26 The whole passage
- Levey,
Michael; Early Renaissance, p.197 ,1967, Penguin
- One a portrait of Joanna of Aragon,
Queen consort of Naples, for which Raphael sent an assistant to
Naples to make a drawing, and probably left most of the painting to
the workshop. Jones & Penny:163
- Jones & Penny:133-147
- Jones & Penny:192-197
- Jones & Penny:235-246, though the relationship of Raphael
to Mannerism, like the definition of Mannerism itself, is much
debated. See Craig Hugh Smyth, Mannerism & Maniera,
1992, IRSA Vienna, ISBN 3900731330
- Jones and Penny:146-147, 196-197, and Pon:82-85
- Jones and Penny:147, 196
- Vasari, Life of Polidoro online in English Maturino for one is never heard of
again
- Vasari:207 & 231
- See for example, the Raphael Cartoons
- Jones & Penny:163-167 and passim
- The direct transmission of training can be traced to some
surprising figures, including Brian Eno, Tom Phillips and Frank Auerbach [1]
- Vasari (full text in Italian) pp197-8 & passim; see also Getty Union Artist Name List entries
- Jones & Penny:215-218
- Jones & Penny:210-211
- Jones & Penny:221-222
- Jones & Penny:219-220
- Jones and Penny:226-234; Raphael left a long letter describing
his intentions to the Cardinal, reprinted in full on pp.247-8
- Jones & Penny:224(quotation)-226
- Jones & Penny:205 The letter may date from 1519, or before
his appointment
- drawing, probably not the final one
- GB Armenini (1533-1609) De vera precetti della
pittura(1587), quoted Pon:115
- Jones & Penny:58 & ff; 400 from Pon:114
- Ludovico Dolce (1508-68), from his L'Aretino of 1557,
quoted Pon:114
- quoted Pon:114, from lecture on The Organization of
Raphael's Workshop, pub. Chicago, 1983
- Not surprisingly, photographs do not show these well, if at
all. Leonardo sometimes used a blind stylus to outline his final
choice from a tangle of different outlines in the same drawing.
Pon:106-110.
- Lucy Whitaker, Martin Clayton, The Art of Italy in the
Royal Collection; Renaissance and Baroque, p.84, Royal
Collection Publications, 2007, ISBN 978 1 902163 291
- Pon:104
- National Galleries of Scotland
- Pon:102. See also a lengthy analysis in: Landau:118 ff
- The enigmatic relationship is discussed at length by both
Landau and Pon in her Chapters 3 and 4.
- Pon:86-87 lists them
- "Il Baviera" may mean "the Bavarian"; if he was German, as many
artists in Rome were, this would have been helpful during the 1527
Sack; Marcantonio had many printing-plates looted from him. Jones
and Penny:82, see also Vasari
- Pon:95-136 & passim; Landau:118-160, and passim
- Vasari:230-231
- Art historians and doctors debate whether the right hand on the
left breast in La Fornarina reveal a cancerous breast
tumour detailed and disguised in a classic pose of love."The
Portrait of Breast Cancer and Raphael's La Fornarina",
The
Lancet, December 21, 2002/December 28, 2002.
- Various other historians provide different theories:
Bernardino Ramazzini (1700), in his
De morbis artificum, noted that painters at the time
generally led “sedentary lives and melancholic disposition” and
often worked “with mercury- and lead-based materials.” Bufarale
(1915) “diagnosed penumonia or a military fever” while Portigliotti
suggested “pulmonary disease.” Joannides has stated that “Raphael
died of over-work. Note also that Raphael's age at death is also
debated by some, with Michiel asserting that Raphael died at
thirty-four, while Pandolfo Pico and Girolamo Lippomano arguing
that Raphael died at thirty-three. For all see: Shearman:573.
- Vasari:231
- Art historian John Shearman, addressed this apparent
discrepancy: "The time of death can be calculated from the
convention of counting from sundown, which Michaelis puts at 6.36
on Friday 6 April, plus half-an-hour to Ave Maria, plus three
hours, that is, soon after 10.00 pm. The coincidence noted between
the birth-date and death-date is usually thought in this case
(since it refers to the Friday and Saturday in Holy Week, the
movable feast rather than the day of the month) to fortify the
argument that Raphael was also born on Good Friday, i.e., 28 March
1483. But there is a notable ambiguity in Michiel’s note, not often
noticed: Morse … Venerdi
Santo venendo il Sabato, giorno della sua Nativita, may also
be taken to mean that his birthday was on Saturday, and in that
case the awareness could as well be the date, thus producing a
birth-date of 7 April 1483." Shearman:573.
- Chastel
André, Italian Art,p. 230, 1963, Faber
- Walter Friedländer, Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian
Painting, p.42 (Schocken 1970 edn.), 1957, Columbia UP
- Blunt:76
- See Jones & Penny:102-4
- The 1772 Discourse Online text of Reynold's Discourses The whole passage
is worth reading.
- Wölfflin:82,
- Ruskin, Pre-Raphaelitism, S. 127 online at Project Gutenburg
- Berenson, Bernard, Italian Painters of
the renaissance, Vol 2 Florentine and Central Italian Schools,
Phaidon 1952 (refs to 1968 edn), p.94
- For what it is worth, Amazon UK's "Renaissance" top 25
bestsellers list included 5 books with Leonardo in the title, 3
with Michelangelo, and 1 with Raphael. accessed December 6th, 2007. Their US site does not
run a comparable list.
Main references
- Blunt, Anthony, Artistic
Theory in Italy, 1450-1660, 1940 (refs to 1985 edn), OUP, ISBN 0198810504
- Gould, Cecil, The Sixteenth
Century Italian Schools, National Gallery Catalogues, London
1975, ISBN 0947645225
- Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny,
Raphael, Yale, 1983, ISBN 0300030614
- Landau, David in:David Landau & Peter Parshall, The
Renaissance Print, Yale, 1996, ISBN 0300068832
- Pon, Lisa, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi,
Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print, 2004, Yale UP, ISBN
9780300096804
- Shearman, John; Raphael in
Early Modern Sources 1483-1602, 2003, Yale University Press,
ISBN 0300099185
- Vasari, Life of Raphael
from the Lives of the
Artists, edition used: Artists of the Renaissance
selected & ed Malcolm Bull, Penguin 1965 (page nos from BCA
edn, 1979)
- Wölfflin, Heinrich;
Classic Art; An Introduction to the Renaissance, 1952 in
English (1968 edition), Phaidon, New York.
Further reading
- The standard source of biographical information is now: V.
Golzio, Raffaello nei documenti nelle testimonianze dei
contemporanei e nella letturatura del suo secolo, Vatican City
and Westmead, 1971
- Raphael: From Urbino to Rome; Hugo Chapman, Tom Henry,
Carol Plazzotta, Arnold Nesselrath, Nicholas Penny, National Gallery Publications
Limited, 2004, ISBN 1857099990 (exhibition catalogue)
- The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, Marcia B. Hall,
Cambridge University Press, 2005, ISBN 052180809X,
- Raphael: A Critical Catalogue of His Paintings; Jürg
Meyer zur Capellen, Stefan B. Polter, Arcos, 2001, ISBN
3935339003
External links