قراءة كتاب Raphael

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Raphael

Raphael

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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only ideal to the roof of heaven. All that it uses, whether the forms of the natural landscape, or of grand architecture, or even of the human figure, it reduces to be its ministrants in conveying a sense of untrammelled, but not chaotic spaciousness. In such pictures, how freely one breathes—as if a load had just been lifted from one's breast; how refreshed, how noble, how potent one feels; again, how soothed; and still again, how wafted forth to abodes of far-away bliss!"

This sense of space and depth is achieved by methods which have nothing in common with our modern art of creating the illusion of what is called "atmosphere"—not by the "losing and finding" of contours, not by the application of optical theories, such as the zone of interchanging rays which dissolves all hard outlines, nor by the blurring and fogging of the distance. Space-composition in the sense in which it was practised by Raphael is closely akin to the art of architecture in its appeal to our emotions.

As an illustrator, again, Raphael was unequalled as regards clear, direct, measured statement of all that is essential to the immediate grasping of the idea or incident depicted. The first glance at one of Raphael's works, whether it be a small panel picture or a monumental fresco, reveals its whole purport, and that in a manner so complete and lucid and convincing as could not be achieved by any other method of expression. With infallible sureness he invariably found the shortest way for the harmonious statement of idea, form, and emotion, which in his work are always found in perfect balance and so completely permeated by each other as to constitute an indissoluble trinity.

Another reason for Raphael's powerful appeal—and in this he is perhaps the most typical child of his period—is that his art unites in one majestic current the two greatest movements of thought which have ever fired the imagination of civilised Europe; classic antiquity and Christian faith, when treated by Raphael's brush, cease to be incompatible and live side by side in that measured harmony which is the hall-mark of his art. Christianity is presented to us in the glorious classic garb of the old world, and the myth and philosophy of the ancients are brought into intimate relationship with Christian teaching. He infuses new blood and life into the stones of ancient Greece and Rome—unlike Mantegna who had remained cold and classic in his relief-like reconstructions of antiquity; just as he accentuates the human emotional side of the Madonna and Child motif by discarding all hieroglyphic symbolism and setting before our eyes the intimate link of love that connects mother and babe. Almost imperceptibly his cupids are transformed into child angels, and the Jehovah of his "Vision of Ezekiel" has more in common with Olympian Jove than with the mediæval conception of the Lord of Heaven.


PLATE III.—THE MADONNA DELLA SEDIA

(In the Pitti Palace, Florence)

The Madonna "of the Chair," one of the most characteristic and deservedly popular of Raphael's numerous versions of the Virgin and Child motif, belongs to the master's full maturity, and was painted during his sojourn in Rome, at the time when he was occupied with the stupendous task of decorating the Stanze of the Vatican. It would be difficult to find in the whole history of art a more pleasing solution of the problem presented by a figure composition in the round. The picture is now in the Pitti Palace, Florence.

Just as Timoteo Viti, Perugino, Fra Bartolommeo, Lionardo da Vinci, Masaccio, Michelangelo, and Sebastiano del Piombo (who imparted to him something of the glow of Venetian colouring), had been the sources from which Raphael drew his knowledge of technique, colour, composition, and all the elements of pictorial style, so the humanists had paved his way as regards the intellectual aspect of his art. His marvellous faculty of rapid assimilation enabled him, on the one hand, to appropriate whatever he found worthy of imitation in his precursors and contemporaries, and thus to complete his technical equipment at an age at which it was given to few to have achieved mastery; whilst, on the other hand, his clear intellect, aided by the not entirely unmercenary desire to please his patrons, helped him to carry out with triumphant success the ideas evolved by the keenest thinkers of his time. To doubt that the general idea, and perhaps a good many of the details, of such a stupendous work as the fresco decoration of the Stanze at the Vatican, had originated in Raphael's head, is not to detract from his greatness. He was a boy in his early teens when he entered his first master's bottega. He was a youth of twenty-five when he started on his great task; and the intervening years had been so completely filled with the study of his craft and with the execution of important commissions, that it is impossible to believe he could have found much leisure for book-learning. And such learning was indispensable for the conception of that elaborate scheme with all its historical allusions and allegorical imagery. The wonder is that Raphael could so completely enter into the suggestions made to him from various sources, and to weave them into a tissue of immortal beauty.


II

At the end of the fifteenth century the rule of the Duke Federigo of Montefeltre, an enlightened prince who devoted the best of his energy and such time as he could spare from his duties on the battlefield to the patronage of the arts, to the adornment of his noble palace, and to the collecting of priceless manuscripts, paintings, antiques, and works of art of every description, had raised the old city of Urbino to one of the centres of culture and learning, and made the ducal court a gathering-place for the distinguished painters, architects, poets, and humanists who were attracted by the wealth and liberality of this great patron. Among the less distinguished satellites attracted by the sun of Montefeltre was one Giovanni Santi, who had come to Urbino in the middle of the fifteenth century. Though a painter of considerable skill, trained perhaps by Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, he found it necessary in the early days of his sojourn at Urbino to supplement his modest income by trading in oil and corn and other commodities, as his father had done before him. But his varied accomplishments soon brought him into prominence and secured him a position as court painter and poet. More important than any of the pictures that have come to us from his brush is his famous rhyming chronicle of 23,000 verses in Dantesque measure, in which he glorifies the virtues and exploits of his patron. He was a special favourite of Elisabetta Gonzaga, the youthful spouse of Federigo's son Guidobaldo, whose high esteem for Giovanni is expressed in a letter in which she informs her sister-in-law of the court painter's death.

To this Giovanni Santi and to his wife Magia Ciarla was born on Good Friday, the 28th of March[1] 1483, a son who was destined in the comparatively short span of his life to rise to fame such as has been the share of few mortals. An elder brother and sister of Raphael had died in infancy, and his mother followed

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