UC-NRLF ^B 37fl ES5 y^^^^^^^Mi^a^P^^^^ H ^^^^DMytt!'w.tJnx^^^^^ R ^^n^^^^^^^^l ^B^hK^!^^^I H^^^^^^Z^^^I ^^R^^^^^^^^HE ^^^^^^^^ # fjpn^^^^^^BI H ^^^^H^Bs^^^^^^i 1 H ^^kj^^^W^^^Km HI l^H MASTERS IN ART THE ^^^S jTVuSICIANS llgRARY Nevv^ Volumes, Just Issued INDISPENSABLE TO BOOK-LOVERS AND MUSIC-LOVERS ROBERT FRANZ FIFTY SONGS Edited by WM. FOSTER APTHORP For High Voice. For Low Voice. Bound in paper, each, $1.25; cloth, gilt, $2.25. Contains portrait, manuscript facsimile, critical in- troduction, bibliography, and 137 pages of music. A volume without a rival in any particular. FRANZ LISZT TWENTY ORIGINAL PIANO COMPOSITIONS Edited by AUGUST SPANUTH Bound in paper, each, $1.25 ; cloth, gilt, $2.25. Contains portrait of Liszt, biographic and critical introduction, bibliography, hints to players, and 147 pages of carefully edited music. Send for booklet giving full details and list of volumes preparing. OLIVER DITSON COMPANY, BOSTON, MASS. CHAS. H. DITSON & CO., New York (A844) J. E. 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For rates, schedules, etc., address A. S. HANSON, G. P. A. BOSTON In answering advertisements, please mention Masters in Art MASTERS I N ART and Beprfnw 42 Cl^aunci? Street Cl^e Colonial arcl^itecture of ;^arplan1i, peniuipltanta, an1iJ9trstma 21 Collection of JFiftp piaue This Collection, edited by Mr. Joseph Everett Chandler, reproduces, from photographs made under the direction of the author, the most beau- tiful and suggestive examples of Colonial archi- tecture in this region. Most of the views show domestic buildings, with exterior and interior views and details. The plates measure 1 1 by 14 inches. Price in portfolio, $12.00; bound in half-morocco, $14. 00. Fourth edition. Send for special circular. Ci^e Colonial arcl^itecture a ColUctton of Jiftp of l^^eto difflanH. piateei A standard work, which does for the architec- ture of New England what Mr. Chandler's col- lection does for Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The views represent domestic build- ings exclusively; and, taken together, this and the volume before named include all the better examples of domestic Colonial architecture. In size and appearance this book is uniform with "The Colonial Architecture of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia." Price in port- folio, $12.00; bound in half-morocco, $14.00. New edition. Send for special circular. pm ratDing 3ln 3rntt(trateli QTre atier. Wit)) j:anq)le, bp CbarleK ). ;^ag:tnnt0 ' ' Pen Drawing " is a text-book intended to sup- ply the student with just such instruction as he might derive from a competent and experienced teacher. Each of the seventy -tw6' UJdartrationj (which comprise specimens of the worltof many/ eminent modern pen draughtsmen) .exemplifies . some definite technical point, .slipwicrg fiovr, \ti attain a merit or avoid a defect. 130 pages, size 7 yi ^y s inches. Bound in cloth. Price, $1.00. Third edition-. c^ngUiej]^ Countri? i^owjscis 21 Collection of ne |)ttnUreli piatte, Eep= waentinj ne |)onlircli anU ClDentp=foar |)onie0 This collection of photographic views shows a wide variety of picturesque houses, mainly of small and medium size, which are suggestive for country-house building in this country. It rep- resents some of the best minor architecture in half-timber, brick, and stone of the Tudor, Elizabethan, and Georgian periods. The plates are 1 1 by 14 inches in size. Price in portfolio, $10.00; bound, $12.00. New edition. Send for special circular. c^nfilijEi]^ Countri? \^\xu\^t% 21 Collection of ne l|)anlireli eietojf Cboer n bp Balpb 2l1iani0 Iram, 2lrci)itect Many of the most useful and beautiful of the smaller English Country Churches, which repre- sent a type thoroughly adapted to American needs, are shown in this collection of eighty- seven exterior and thirteen interior photographic views of churches in the Norman, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular Styles. Uniform in size and style with " English Country Houses." In portfolio, $10.00; bound, $12.00. New edition. Send for special circular. j^ribate ^tablejs 21 g>pecial Bomber of tbe " 2[rcbitectaral RetJiem" Contains five hundred and forty-five illustra- tions, about one-half of which are plans, and the remainder exterior views of private stables ;ai}t American country and suburban T^ l'']'^\lf<^^ . churches. The work is now in its second edition. It will be found most helpful by building com- mittees of new churches, and will prove a valuable and interesting addition to any private library. Price, in Portfolio, $10.00 Bound, $12.00. Express paid BATES & GUILD COMPANY, Publishers, BOSTON, MASS. V. STERS IN ART CI)e iFreecos of i^apfiael UMBRIAN, ROMAN, FLORENTINE SCHOOLS 5 ^ - <5 O O ? w 5 ft S o <( d p s < 2 w ^ O B ?^ K &) O h < < Q X O ft fl o < J i -1 ta !h -* ft ?i <) *< to H g P ^ ""^ S a en o UASTESS IN AHT PLATE IX PHOTOQRAPH BY ALINARI [145] KAPHAEIj GAHLAND-BEAHEH ACADEMY OF ST. LUKE, SOME MASTEHS IN AHT PLATE X rHOTOQRAPH BY BRAUN, CLEMENT CIE. [147] EAPHAEIj THE TEIUMPH OF GAXATEA FAHNESIXA VIZiIiA, HOME PORTHAIT OF RAPHAEI. BT HIMBEU STAXZA IJELLA SEGXATUHA, VATICAN, HOME Raphael painted his own portrait, as one of the spectators, in * The School of Athens,' ( see Plate V. ) standing in the corner to the right beside the figure of the painter Sodoma, whom he has here represented out of courtesy as an associate in the deco- ration of the Stanza della Segnatura. Painted when he was twenty-seven years old, this portrait and one in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, to which it bears a strong re- semblance, are the only undoubtedly authentic likenesses of Raphael. In both he wears a black cap, his features are delicate, his complexion is olive, and his chestnut hair is worn long. [148] MASTERS IN ART Mnp'bMl l&an^to BORN 1483 : DIED 1520 UMBRIAN, ROMAN, FLORENTINE SCHOOLS THE present monograph treats only of Raphael's frescos. His easel- pictures were considered in Masters in Art, Volume 1, Part 12, in which another account of his life and further criticisms of his art will be found. RAPHAEL SANZIO, or Santi, was born on Good Friday of the year k. 1483, in the ducal city of Urbino, situated among the Apennine moun- tains close to the frontiers of Tuscany and Umbria. His father, Giovanni Santi, a painter of considerable reputation and also a man of some literary attainments, was ever a welcome guest at the palace of the Duke of Urbino, whose miniature court was at that time one of the chief artistic and intellec- tual centers of Italy; and the rich treasures contained in the ducal residence, with which Raphael was familiar from his earliest youth, may well have stim- ulated the boy's love for art. Few facts are recorded of Raphael's childhood. When he was eight years old his mother died; and on the death of his father three years later he was left to the guardianship of a stepmotiier and an uncle, Bartolommeo Santi. From his father he had already learned the elements of drawing and paint- ing, and it is probable that later he was placed in the studio of the Umbrian painter Timoteo Viti, then hving in Urbino, and that when sixteen or seven- ^ teen years of age he was sent to Perugia to study under Pietro Perugino, the acknowledged head of the Umbrian school. Perugino seems to have devoted special pains to the artistic education of his talented scholar; and it was not long before Raphael, having been allowed to assist his master in his work, was engaged in painting pictures on his own account for various neighboring churches. In all his work done during this apprenticeship, however, Perugi- no's influence is so strongly apparent, and his style so closely imitated, that it is at first sight difficult to distinguish the paintings of the pupil from those of the master. There is no direct proof for Vasari's statement that Raphael visited Siena at about this time, and assisted Pinturicchio in his fresco decora- tions of the cathedral library of that city, though such may have been the fact; but we hear of him in Urbino in 1504, and know that towards the close [149] 24 MASTERSINART of that year he went to Florence, reports having reached him of the enthusi- asm caused by the exhibition there of Leonardo da Vinci's and Michelangelo's great cartoons for the decoration of the hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. The Duchess Giovanna, sister of the Duke of Urbino, who had heard of Raphael's wish to visit Florence, gave him a letter warmly recommending him to the Gonfaloniere of the city, Piero Soderini. "The bearer of this," she wrote, "will be Raphael, painter of Urbino, who, being endowed with natural talent for his profession, has decided to spend some time in Florence in order to study art. And since his father was a very excellent man and dear to me, and the son is a discreet and gentle youth, I am very fond of him, and wish him to attain to perfection." Notwithstanding his youth he was at that time only twenty-one Raphael was welcomed as an equal by the artists of Florence, among whom he made many friends; and the beauty of his person and charm of his man- ner insured him an immediate popularity. We hear of him as a frequent visitor at the workshop of Baccio d'Agnolo, the architect, where all the well- known painters and sculptors of the city were wont to gather to discuss the various problems of their art; and we know that he spent many hours in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of the Carmine studying the works of Masac- cio, which awakened that sense of the dramatic afterwards perceptible in his own great frescos. With the genius for assimilation for seizing upon the best there was in the achievement of others and making it his own that characterized him from the beginning, Raphael was quick to develop his rapidly maturing powers under the various influences to which he was now subjected. Above all did the subtlety of modeling and beauty of expression in Leonardo da Vinci's work attract him. "He stood dumb," says Vasari, "before the grace of Leonardo's figures, and thought him superior to all other masters; and, leaving the manner of Perugino, he endeavored with infinite pains to imitate the art of Da Vinci. At the same time Michelangelo's mas- tery of the human frame made a profound impression upon his mind, and he applied himself with ardor to learn the principles of anatomy. Night and day he devoted himself to the task, and studied the structure of the body with such unwearied industry that in a few months he learned what others take years to acquire." At the end of a few months Raphael's stay in Florence was interrupted by a visit to Perugia, where, in 1505, we find him executing several impor- tant commissions and engaged upon his first fresco a representation of the Trinity painted for the monks of the Monastery of San Severo. This work, now httle more than a wreck, was left unfinished by Raphael, and was com- pleted after his death by his old master, Perugino. In the spring of 1506 he seems to have spent some months in his native town, where he painted several pictures for the Duke of Urbino; but in Sep- tember of that year he returned to Florence, where many of his finest easel- pictures, principally those of which the Madonna and Child form the sub- ject, were then painted. It was while occupied with numerous important works in Florence that Raphael, in the autumn of 1508, upon the recom- [150] RAPHAEL 25 mendation, so Vasari says, of his fellow-citizen the architect Bramante, re- ceived from Pope Julius ii. a summons to Rome, where already many of the most famous artists of Tuscany, Umbria, and Northern Italy were engaged in the service of that pontiff. Michelangelo was about to begin his task of decorating the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the walls of which had already been painted by Signorelli, Perugino, Botticelli, Pinturicchio, and others. Bramante was occupied with the erection of St. Peter's; and now the young Raphael, at that time twenty-five years of age, was called upon to con- tribute his share in the decoration of the Palace of the Vatican. Leaving his work at Florence to be finished by other hands, Raphael hastened to obey the pope's summons; and upon his arrival in Rome was received with great kindness by Julius, and at once began the work assigned to him. This was the decoration in fresco of the Stanza della Segnatura, the room where official documents received the papal seal. Upon the vault, already adorned by Sodoma with an elaborate decorative scheme, the greater part of which was cleared away before Raphael began his work, he painted in the rect- angles 'Adam and Eve,' 'Astronomy,' 'Judgment of Solomon,' and 'Apollo and Marsyas,' and above, four allegorical figures, 'Theology,' 'Poetry,' 'Phi- losophy,' and 'Justice.' Upon the right wall he painted the first of his mon- umental frescos, the celebrated 'Disputa;' opposite this, 'The School of Athens;' and on the two remaining walls, broken by large windows, are rep- resented respectively 'Parnassus' and 'Jurisprudence,' with figures of Justin- ian and Pope Gregory ix. on either side of the window underneath the last. Taken as a whole, the frescos of this stanza of the Vatican are generally regarded as the greatest of Raphael's achievements. "Never again," writes Mr. Henry Strachey, "did he attain to so faultless a unity of theme. Many were the causes which prevented him from rising again to such perfection. The great obstacle was success. When Julius handed over the first room to Raphael he was an unknown young man of promise; when he finished it, some two and a half years later, he was acknowledged to have but one rival in Italy Michelangelo. While the painter was unknown the pope did not trouble about the subjects of the pictures nor how quickly they were done; but when Julius found what manner of man he had to paint his wallsfor him he was impatient to have more, and that quickly. Unfortunately, instead of allowing Raphael to weave an ideal framework for the decoration of the next room to be painted, he was forced, for political reasons, into painting the triumphs of the Church. When we pass from the Stanza della Segnatura to the Stanza d' Eliodoro we pass from the highest form of ideal art to an art in- spired by illustration that is, painting of which the motive is not an ab- stract one, like poetry or philosophy, but which, instead, occupies itself with making clear a story or incident." Raphael's reputation in Rome was now completely established. Loaded with honors by the pope, whose satisfaction with the w.ork of his now favor- ite painter was unbounded, he was ordered to paint the walls of the adjoin- ing apartment, now called the Stanza d' Eliodoro, without delay. The sub- ject given him was the divine protection of the Church, and in the fresco or [151] 26 MASTERSINART *The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple of Jerusalem,' which he now painted, allusion is made to the liberation of Italy from the invading army of France; and 'The Miracle of Bolsena,' which followed, is significant of the supreme power of the Church. Raphael's work in the Vatican was interrupted at this point by the death of Pope Julius; but Giovanni de' Medici, who under the name of Leo x. succeeded to the papal chair, proved no less stanch a patron, and from the first distinguished him with marks of special favor. He bade him proceed with the decorations of the Vatican apartments; and Raphael accordingly painted *The Retreat of Attila,' introducing the figure of the new pontiff as St. Leo arresting the barbarians in their invasion, and on the remaining wall of the Stanza d' Eliodoro depicted *The Deliverance of St. Peter,' in allusion to the escape of Leo x. from captivity after the battle of Ravenna. With the exception of 'The Miracle of Bolsena,' Raphael employed in the execution of these frescos a band of assistants, who worked, it is true, from his designs and under his direction, thus making possible the vast amount of work which was accomplished during his short life, but whose touch too often marred the creations of their master. In the Stanza dell' Incendio, decorated between 1514 and 1517, only one fresco, 'Incendio del' Borgo,' was to any extent painted by Raphael. His drawings exist for the single figures contained in the other frescos of this room 'The Coronation of Charle- magne,' ' The Oath of Leo in.,' and * The Battle of Ostia ' but most of the painting was done by pupils; and the Sala di Costantino, the last of the so- called stanze, was painted after Raphael's death. While these great works in the Vatican were in progress Raphael was en- gaged upon numerous other important undertakings. He decorated the sump- tuous bathroom of Cardinal Bibbiena in the Vatican with a series of myth- ological subjects, and painted several Madonna pictures, including the famous * Madonna di Foligno,' and many portraits of the chief personages at the court of Leo X. It had become, indeed, impossible for him to fill the orders that poured in from all sides; and "kings and cardinals counted themselves fortu- nate if they could obtain a picture even designed by this illustrious master." In the year 1514, after the death of Bramante, the pope appointed Raphael chief architect of St. Peter's, at an annual salary of three hundred ducats, and in the following year named him inspector of antiquities, with power to pur- chase any ancient marbles discovered in Rome or the vicinity that it might seem to him advisable that the city should possess. It was at about this time, too, in accordance with the wish of the pope, that Raphael executed his ten celebrated "cartoons" illustrating the acts of the Apostles Peter and Paul designs for tapestries intended to cover the lower half of the walls of the Sis- tine Chapel in the Vatican. When completed these cartoons were sent to Flanders, where the tapestries (still preserved in a room in the Vatican) were woven. Three of the.original cartoons are lost; the remaining seven are now in the South Kensington Museum, London. In addition to his work in the papal service, Raphael was also engaged in executing commissions for the wealthv banker Agostino Chigi, not only at [152] RAPHAEL 27 Chigi's villa near Rome, now the Villa Farnesina, where the fresco of *The Triumph of Galatea' still adorns the wall, but in the chapel of the Chigi family in the Church of Santa Maria della Pace, where he painted his famous Sibyls, and that of Santa Maria del Popolo, where he designed the mosaics for the cupola of a chapel. The last important decorative works of the painter's life were the frescos painted in the Villa Farnesina, representing the story of Cupid and Psyche, and a series of fifty-two small frescos, enframed in arabesques, of scenes from the Old and New Testaments, known as ' Raphael's Bible,' which adorn the loggie of the Vatican. Both these works, however, were executed almost wholly by pupils. Indeed, the frescos of the Vatican loggie, now ruined by restoration, show no trace of the master's hand. The host of pupils who worked under Raphael's direction formed a sort of royal retinue about him ; and, as Vasari tells us, " he was never seen to go to court but surrounded and accompanied, as he left his house, by some fifty painters, all men of ability and distinction, who thus attended him to give evidence of the honor in which they held him. He did not indeed lead the life of a painter, but that of a prince." And in this little court the most per- fect harmony reigned, due to the personality of the painter, the charm and sweetness of whose nature no man could withstand. "All became as of one mind," says Vasari, "once they began to labor in the society of Raphael, continuing in such unity and concord that all harsh feeling and evil disposi- tions became subdued and disappeared at the sight of him; every vile and base thought departing from the mind before his influence." His favorite pupils, Giulio Romano and Gianfrancesco Penni, were members of his house- hold; and among his friends and most frequent guests were cardinals, dis- tinguished scholars, and all the celebrated men who formed the courts of Julius II. and Leo x. The story that Raphael fell in love with the daughter of a baker," la For- narina," is now believed to be without foundation. Vasari tells us that there was one woman whom the painter cared for all his life, and in two sonnets written by Raphael he addresses his lady-love as one far above him, vowing that he will never reveal her name. A marriage with Maria, niece of his close friend Cardinal Bibbiena, seems to have been arranged for, but the lady's early death prevented the marriage, for which Raphael apparently showed no great desire. It was towards the end of his life, probably in 1 5 1 8 or 1519, that Raphael painted, entirely with his own hand, that most famous of all his easel-pictures, 'The Sistine Madonna,' executed for the monks of the Monastery of San Sisto of Piacenza, and now in the Dresden Gallery. In the following year, while engaged upon his celebrated painting of 'The Transfiguration,' and before he had quite completed it, he was taken sick with a fever, contracted, some say, while superintending excavations in the malarial quarters of Rome, and, according to others, the result of a sudden chill occasioned by waiting in one of the vast halls of the Vatican in attendance upon the pope. Worn out by overwork, Raphael sank rapidly, and, after an illness of only a few [153] 28 MASTERSINART days, died on the evening of Good Friday, his thirty-seventh birthday, April 6, 1520. Great were the grief and consternation caused by the news of his death. The whole city mourned, and the pope himself was overcome by sorrow at the loss of his favorite painter. Raphael's body was placed beneath his un- finished picture of 'The Transfiguration,' in the studio wherein he had last worked. Thither all Rome came to look upon the face of the "divine painter," who had been so much beloved; and all the artists of the city, followed by a vast concourse of people, bore his body to the grave, which he had himself selected, beneath the great dome of the Pantheon. Cije art of 3aapi)ael GEORGE B. ROSE 'RENAISSANCE MASTERS' IT is to Raphael more than to any one else that the modern world owes its conception of beauty that beauty in which the physical and spiritual shall mingle in ever-varying proportions, but in which neither shall ever be entirely lacking; the beauty of the 'Sistine Madonna,' whose great eyes are full of the light of heaven as she is revealed upon her cloudy throne; the beauty of the 'Madonna of the Chair,' the ideal of happy motherhood; the beauty of the young athlete worthy to have entered the Olympic games, who hangs from the wall in the 'Incendio del' Borgo'; the beauty of Apollo and the Muses thrilled with the rapture of divine harmony upon the wooded sum- mit of Parnassus, beauty in countless forms, never sensual nor gross, al- ways truly physical and truly spiritual, always attractive, and always enno- bling. . . . Outside of the physical beauty and the spiritual elevation of his types, Raphael's highest qualities as an artist those in which he remains unap- proached and unapproachable are in illustration and composition. Nor should it be inferred that his works lack decorative qualities. As a colorist he is inferior to the great Venetians, but his color is always agreeable and appropriate, and the harmony of his lines is decorative in the highest degree. In the art of composition Raphael's preeminence has never been contested. In the grouping of the figures so as to form an agreeable and impressive whole he has no rival. It is not merely the balancing of group against group on a flat surface, which had been done so often and so admirably before him ; it is the composition in space, the composition in three dimensions, in which he excels. We have all climbed to some eminence from which we have over- looked a wide expanse of country, and remember the thrill which we have experienced, the exaltation, the sense of enlarged vitality, the charm of the infinite that has stirred our souls. Something of this there is in Raphael's pictures. And his skill in grouping his figures is such that they remind us of the rhythmic harmony of music ; not, like architecture, of music that is frozen, [154] RAPHAEL 29 but of music that is throbbing and palpitating with life. Nor is it necessary to go out of doors to experience the feeling of space. The same exhilarating sense comes upon us as we stand beneath the arches of a vast cathedral, and none of Raphael's pictures gives it more strongly than ' The School of Athens.' To produce it is perhaps the highest achievement of architecture; to give the illusion of it is one of the greatest feats of painting. And it is this faculty, which Raphael possessed in so supreme a degree, of giving at the same time a realizing sense of nature's boundless extent and of man's inherent superi- ority, that imparts to his works a large portion of their unrivaled charm. . . . When he arrived at the zenith of his fame Raphael was so overwhelmed with commissions that he had recourse to the assistance of his pupils, often furnishing only a sketch, and leaving to them the entire work of painting. His inexhaustible fertility enabled him to dash off these designs with extreme rapidity, and in the meantime he was himself working industriously with his brush. . . . To realize the difference between Raphael and his pupils we need only to go to the Villa Farnesina at Rome and look at his 'Galatea,' that most beautiful of pictures inspired by the art of antiquity, so full of the sea's splendor and of the exultant spirit of pagan joy, and then pass into the adjoining inclosed loggia decorated by his pupils with the story of Cupid and Psyche after his designs. Nothing could be more deliciously perfect than his own painting, while the work of his disciples offends the eye by its coarse- ness and haste. Still, through the imperfection of the workmanship there shines forth the divine beauty of Raphael's conception ; and owing to the brevity of his life, his works, without the assistance of his pupils, must have been comparatively few, and we should have been deprived of many a mar- vel of composition, whose merits may be impaired, but not destroyed, by the inferiority of the workmanship. Apart from the assistance received from his disciples, Raphael was the most productive artist that ever lived. His early death limited his artistic activity to a period of twenty years, and yet he has filled the galleries of the world with the most varied masterpieces; and although his life was so short and so busy that he could not have become a very profound scholar, yet the whole spirit of Greek poetry is in his 'Galatea,' the whole spirit of Greek philos- ophy is in his 'School of Athens'; and, while he became so thoroughly a Greek that his work would have been hailed by Pericles with delight, he still re- mained the highest and purest type of the Cnristian artist. PRIOR to Raphael artists were too self-conscious because of their strug- gling ignorance; their crudities made art too apparent. After Raphael artists became self-conscious because of their knowledge; their power made them proud of display. Hence the works of both schools, of the Preraphaelites and the Postraphaelites, arrest by their singularities, though of course they may also charm by their beauty. Raphael touched the happy medium between these two extremes. He was not too ideal to be mystic, not too realistic to be commonplace. He made the familiar beautiful, and the beautiful familiar. WILLIAM TIREBUCK [155] 30 MASTERS IN ART HENRY STRACHEY 'RAPHAEL* AMONG Italian painters none were so preoccupied by questions of form L as were the Florentines. Indeed, the expression of form, either by out- line or modeling, may be said to be the distinguishing characteristic of their school. To this passion for the realization of the shapes of things other con- siderations were sacrificed. In Venice, on the other hand, it was the prob- lems of colored light and the study of atmosphere which interested the artists. The school to which Raphael may be considered to have chiefly belonged, the Umbrian, was much more in sympathy with the Venetians than with the Florentines. To him a figure primarily belonged to its surroundings. It might be the principal part, but it always remained a part of the whole. The group was always more important to him than the individual. Thus in his works we never get that "extreme characteristic expression" of individual life that we do in P'lorentine work. In Michelangelo's bodies we feel their life in every form, straining in the tense muscles and resting in those that are relaxed. In every part of his fig- ures we are made to feel the living, moving organism. With Raphael the impression produced is quite different. In studying his sense of form one cannot but be struck by his keen feeling for the proportion and harmony of the human body, by his wonderful feeling for the beauties resulting from well- ordered movement. At the same time it is curious to note how indifferent he seems to have been to those minute subtleties of form which were sought after with such success by the great Florentines. When, for instance, he had represented enough of the structure of the body to make his 'Apollo' a living thing he stopped. His preoccupation was that his figure should fill a noble and rhythmic space in the design of the whole work. To have insisted on the inner life of the body would have distracted our attention from the serenity with which the god harmoniously dominates his surroundings. . . . But if excelled by the Florentines in appreciation of the inner mysteries of form, and surpassed by the Venetians in the crowning glories of color, there remains one domain of art in which Raphael reigns supreme. In com- position no one before or after has ever approached to within a distance which makes comparison possible. I do not mean to suggest that there are not plenty of instances, ancient and modern, of supremely good composition. But no other painter ever so habitually showed such complete mastery over the art. It matters not to Raphael whether he is using one figure or twenty, whether his space is rectangular, circular, or both, and lopsided also. In every instance the given space is filled with a pattern of figures exactly suitable to the decorative requirements and to the true expression of the sentiment of the work. It made no difference to him, when planning *The Miracle of Bolsena,' that the window in the wall to be painted was not in the center, leaving but a narrow strip on one side. The irregularity of the space was so turned to account that we feel that for the proper expression of the con- ception a wall of this shape had to be found. Hitherto I have spoken only of the pattern of the picture in two dimensions, height and breadth. With the use of these two many artists have stopped. But Raphael proceeded far- [156] RAPHAEL 31 ther, and used also depth in relation to composition. Mr. Berenson has aptly called this of which I speak "space composition," and has pointed out that this space composition was the peculiar heritage of the Umbrians, and that Perugino was a master of the art in his own way, but that it was left for Raphael to develop it to the full. Vasari says that Raphael owed the architecture of the vast and airy hall in which the congress of philosophers of his 'School of Athens' takes place to Bramante; but if Bramante suggested the proportions and lines of the building we may be quite sure that no one but Raphael disposed the light and shade, for it is by this disposition that the spaces are controlled and harmonized. Although no horizon is visible, the blue sky with white floating clouds car- ries the eye away to infinite distance. But this distance is so finely expressed that is, in its spiritual rather than its physical effect that there is no vio- lation of the law of decoration which forbids too great realism in expressing distance for fear of suggesting holes in the wall. How great must have been the difiiculty of producing the exact tones required for this delicate business of making one object stand just the right distance behind another! In an oil- painting slight modifications are easy, but with a fresco of this size the diffi- culties must have been great. Only by the possession of some high quality of calculating the effect of each piece as the work proceeded can we account for such an achievement. . . . In his short life Raphael may be said to have swept away the middle ages as far as art was concerned. The beginning of the great change was brought about by Leonardo da Vinci, who finished the 'Last Supper' in 1497 the first picture of the Renaissance which had obtained complete freedom. In 1499 Michelangelo carved the 'Pieta,' in St. Peter's, in which this same per- fect freedom from archaic forms is manifested. At this last date Raphael was working in his master's shop in Perugia, and it cannot be said that he achieved the freedom already reached by the two elder artists till he went to Rome and began painting the Stanza della Segnatura, in 1508. But if Raphael was not a pioneer in freeing art from medieval trammels, he was the painter who spread the light over the whole field of painting. Leonardo's strange and mysterious temperament limited the scope of his performance to a weird and beautiful land of dawn. Michelangelo's intense individuality and completely personal way of looking at things also restricted his range. In their own special provinces both Leonardo and Michelangelo pene- trated farther into the heart of things than did Raphael. But the special sig- nificance and wonder of the work of Raphael is the width of the field he illuminated. Leonardo dwelt in dim regions, penetrable only to the most poetical of imaginations; Michelangelo soared into the farthest regions of the spirit, leaving behind all accidents of place and time; Raphael, on the con- trary, walked in the world, and, like the sun, shone everywhere, all humanity feeling his influence. If his spirit was not so penetrating as that of the other two, his sympathies were wider. To him the earth was a place filled with beautiful things, which had only to be brought together and touched by the talisman of his art to fall into harmony with each other and with the rest of humanity. [1571 32 MASTERS IN ART MIDWAY between Correggio and the strong individuality of Michel- angelo stands Raphael, the most serene, restrained, and perfect of paint- ers, who alone, by virtue of these qualities, is worthy to rank with the Greeks. GIOVANNI MORELLI E. H. AND E. W. BLASHFIELD 'ITALIAN CITIES' IN the years which began the sixteenth century the art of Italy attained its meridian in its capital city and in the house of its supreme rulers, through the painting of the stanze of the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel. There has never in the history of art been an environment more favorable and more try- ing. On the one hand, enthusiasm had reached the very highest point, the tree nurtured painfully, lovingly by the banks of the Arno was ready to bear fruit; in the Vatican had just been enthroned a pope who willed tyrannously that his ideal should be attained, the ideal of an environment unsurpassed in beauty and inspiration by anything which the world had seen. On the other hand, all the art of Florence, the art which was an inherit- ance from Giotto and Donatello, Masaccio and Lippi, and which was actually in the hands of Botticelli, Perugino, and Signorelli, was ready to pour, bub- bling at the point of its highest enthusiasm, into the channel of papal service. Great artists stood clustered about the throne: Giuliano da Sangallo, founder of a dynasty of architects; Bramante, to whom had been allotted the planning of the greatest church in Christendom; humanists and poets and cardinals who were more famous as collectors than as temporal princes. Luca Signo- relli and Pietro Perugino were still upon their scaffolding of the Sistine Chapel ; the young Michelangelo was already preparing his drawings, and soon would thunder and lighten from the vaulting. To conquer in such company was to conquer utterly; Raphael Sanzio was summoned from Florence by Pope Julius, and, within a short space of time, three peers, Bramante, Michelangelo, and Raphael, as if so many counterparts of the triple ranges of their master's tiara, crowned the art of the Renaissance in the Eternal City. Raphael's conquest of his surroundings was almost magical: he arrived a youth, well spoken of as to skill, yet by reputation hardly even par interpares; in ten short years how long if we count them as art history he died, having painted the Vatican, the Farnesina, world-famous altar-pieces; having planned the restoration of the entire city; having reconciled enemies and stimulated friends, and having succeeded without being hated. He achieved this success by his great and manifold capacity, but, most of all, because in art he was the greatest assimilator and composer who ever lived. The two words are each other's complements; he received impres- sions, and he put them together; his temperament was exactly suited to this marvelous forcing-house of Rome, for a Roman school never really existed, it was simply the Tusco-Umbrian school, throned upon seven hills and grow- ing grander and freer in the contemplation of antiquity. To this contempla- tion Raphael brought not only a brilliant endowment, but an astonishing mental accumulation ; the mild eyes of the Uffizi portrait were piercing when they looked upon nature or upon art, and behind them was an alembic in [158] RAPHAEL 33 which the things that entered through those eyes fused, precipitated, or crys- tallized as he willed. . . . The study of the works of Raphael is necessarily the study of the evolu- tion of the pictorial art of Central Italy. For two hundred years great paint- ers had been working at problems of suggestion, expression, and technical achievement. Giotto had taught art to be real and dramatic, grand and simple at once; the naturalists had learned to paint man; their greater contempo- raries to express him in his essential attributes; Masaccio had made man's body a solid realization in an ambient environment; BotticeUi had used that body as a sort of pattern for lovely decorative composition of lines; Ghir- landajo had found in it a pretext for dignified portraiture; Signorelli had made it material for the expression of movement by muscular construction; and Perugino had pierced its envelop for the pietistic ecstasy beneath. Each of these men, with more or less width of purpose and scope of realization, had cultivated his own vantage-point till the art fields of Italy were indeed those of the bliithe Zeit. Then came Raphael, the grand harvester, and bound up the sheaves of the Renaissance. But he did not collect and bind only; he sifted, he rejected, and he added, added mightily. The age had wreaked itself upon experiment experiment in expression, anatomy, perspective, composition, and decora- tive detail. Raphael judged all this experiment, and taking the various re- sults, examined and almost instinctively selected from each what was best suited to the needs of pictorial presentation, what was best worth saving, per- petuating, and sublimating. Having done all this, he synthetized his material, and in presenting it, added so much of his own that the result of his alem- bication more than justified his eclecticism. For three hundred years after Raphael's death he was famous less by his mural paintings than by his transportable pictures, which carried his name to tens of thousands who lived beyond the Alps, and by the engraved reproduc- tions of his tapestry cartoons which told Bible stories to Europe, Protestant and Catholic alike. Most of all, he held his public by his treatment of the subject which through its universal humanity was the touchstone of every artist's power to appeal to the heart, the Mother and Child. Not the Queen of Heaven of the fourteenth century; not even the Mary of the fifteenth century, human and sympathetic, but made more or less official by the throne and the paraphernalia of ceremonial worship; not these, but just a mother with a baby was enough for the early sixteenth-century artists, and among them all none was simpler in his treatment of costume, none rejected acces- sory more readily than Raphael. . . . This subject of the Holy Family has been with a certain public, and that a large one, the most popular in the entire range of Raphael's works, and the admiration given it at times has been, if not too lavish, certainly too in- discriminate. Later criticism, in attempting to put an end to this undiscern- ing praise, has gone too far on the other side; for if three centuries called Raphael "divine," many a student of the Romantic epoch, and especially of our own days, when surface-handling is so highly esteemed, has dismissed his [159] 34 MASTERS IN ART work contemptuously, zs pompier y painty, and wooden. Some of it is all of these three things, but none of it is worthy of contempt, for the least of his works shows, in some degree, either his compositional force or his superiority over his contemporaries in certain directions. . . . If some of his compositions seem to us academic, through the sense of preoccupation conveyed, we must not forget that some of what appears to us conventionality comes from the fact that these compositions were so well founded, so admirably ponderated, that imitators have stolen the thought with- out submitting to the preoccupation, and through their own weakness have made the original seem conventional. As to surface-handling, if we accord it the meaning that it usually conveys to-day, that of clever manipulation of pigment, we must remember that practically it did not exist for Raphael's contemporaries. Fresco was the medium used by Tuscans during centuries of wall-decoration, and fresco being water-color, no loading for the sake of effect could be obtained, nor could tricks of handling be perceived at all in works placed at so great a distance from the eye as were most mural dec- orations. . . . The fact that skilful manipulation of pigment in surface-handling did not obtain until after Raphael's time does not, however, excuse a relative indif- ference to handling which makes his modeling sometimes appear unconsid- ered, if we compare it with the close and subtle treatment of some of his con- temporaries. Many late fifteenth-century works have a closeness of modeling which is almost Flemish; Raphael's is not like this, and his modeling is at the point of evolution where it ceased to have the delicate, if rather dry, close- ness of certain primitive Tuscan masters, without approaching the breadth of Titian's later manner, or giving even the slightest hint of the robust, square touches which came in the seventeenth century with Velasquez and Hals. Every artist eventually makes his effect with what he cares for most, and modeling per se, whether close or broad, was not what Raphael liked best or next to best. So it was with his color; the evolution of his art work shows that he did not hold color as dearly as an Umbrian and a pupil of Perugino might have been expected to. Had he cared to keep his mind to it he could have always been an agreeable colorist, but probably never an individually great one. ... In his later days, when great commissions crowded upon him, when en- voys from kings and dukes stood at his elbow, urging him more and more to satisfy their masters, it would seem as if Raphael grew to care less for color and to slur it. Now and then he had notable changes of heart, as in 'The Miracle of Bolsena.' In this we see Raphael again as assimilator. Having profited by the experiments made by other men in the direction of character, composition, movement, he now, after seeing and admiring the color of the Venetians in the work of Sebastiano del Piombo, reproduces it with surpris- ing success. It is admirably comprehended, but it is not quite Venetian; all the more that it is based upon the work of a man who was himself soon af- fected by the Roman school. It is strong and glowing, but he falls short of Titian; for if the fresco-work of Titian in Padua be coarse in handling, it is [160] RAPHAEL 35 not so in color, while there is a touch of color-coarseness in 'The Miracle ot' Bolsena.' . . . But Raphael experimented and selected incessantly, and kept what he thought was most useful to his presentation; towards the end of his days he sought not nearly so much for color as for dramatic relief; therefore he clung to the black shadows of Leonardo and Fra Bartolommeo, shadows which have blackened still more by the effect of time, and which became more dis- agreeable with Raphael than with Da Vinci, because his modeling was much harder than the latter's. In short, Raphael was able to acquit himself admi- rably in color, but generally preferred to give the time and thought to some- thing else. . . . As a composer, Raphael was absolute monarch and ruled as he pleased, taking other men's compositions, if he chose, bettering them, and founding upon them, or inventing new ones of his own, without the slightest sug- gestion of straining; indeed, he banished all sense of strain from his com- position as completely as he eschewed the ugly or painful in his choice of subject. His figures in some of his later works might gesticulate and roll their eyes; but they are easily composed, and, as was fitting in one who over- looked and judged, he brought to art a quality which led all his other ones, the quality of high serenity. After his drawings, and in almost equal degree, it is Raphael's composition which brings us nearest to him as an artist, closest to his real intention. In other ways the pupil-assistant is constantly interposed between the master and ourselves, but collaboration, which may blunt outline and make color heavy, is almost powerless to distort composition^ Through the art of com- position he takes his spectator directly by the hand; by concentration he focuses the eye of that spectator upon the point in his picture which is most important; then, by the ordering of the lines, and lights, and shadows, he leads him, as he wishes, from point to point, and gifts him with a sense of well-being, born of the wise distribution of the masses, the chiaroscuro, and the lines. This itinerary is involuntary to the spectator, but is, therefore, all the more delightful, and of this art of composition Raphael was the greatest master of the modern world. C|)e jTrestos of 3^ap1^ael DESCRIPTIONS OF THE PLATES .K '""J PHILIP HALE ) Pln'ng. B. L. PRATT Modeling Mrs. WM. STONE Decorative Design E. W. EMERSON Anatomy A. K. 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