Although the genius of Michelangelo has exercised a vast and widely diffused influence over all subsequent art, yet this master, unlike Raphael, formed no school of his own immediate followers. It must be admitted that Raphael owes him much, for he never found his full strength until he had seen Michelangelo’s works at Rome, when his style underwent immediate improvement. None of those who worked under Michelangelo dared to walk directly in his steps; there is in his style, as there was in the character of the man himself, a certain stern individuality which gives the impression of solitary and unapproachable greatness. Of his assistants, the most eminent was Sebastiano del Piombo.
RAFFAELLO SANZIO,
Always called Raphael, was born at Urbino in 1483. His father died when he was eleven years old, and the boy was placed by his uncles, who became his guardians, with Perugino. His handiwork at this time is no doubt to be traced in many of Perugino’s pictures and frescoes; and, as may be seen, he was an important coadjutor with Pinturicchio at Siena. The earliest picture known to be painted entirely by himself is a “Crucifixion,” in the collection of Lord Dudley, done at the age of seventeen, which closely resembles the style of Perugino. In 1504 he first visited Florence, where he enjoyed the friendship of Francia and Fra Bartholommeo, and made acquaintance with the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo—new influences which considerably affected his style. With the exception of short visits to Perugia, Bologna, and Urbino, he was resident in Florence until 1508. In that year he went to Rome at the invitation of Pope Julius II., and was for the rest of his life continually in the employment of that pontiff and his successor, Leo X. Raphael died on his birthday, the 6th of April, 1520, aged exactly thirty-seven years.
Raphael’s manner as a painter is divided into three styles, corresponding with the broad divisions of his life’s history. Unlike Michelangelo, whose genius and individuality is stamped on the earliest works from his hand, Raphael gained, as his experience of what had been done by his contemporaries was enlarged, a deeper and further insight into his own powers. His first, or Peruginesque style, characterizes those works which he produced while still the companion of his master, before his first visit to Florence; of these pictures the most important are the “Sposalizio” (or “Marriage of the Virgin,”) at Milan, and the “Coronation of the Virgin,” in the Vatican. His second, or Florentine, style covers the four years from his arrival in Florence in 1504, to his departure for Rome in 1508; here the manner of Fra Bartholommeo had great influence upon him; to this period belong the “Madonna del Cardellino” (“of the Goldfinch,”) in the Uffizi, “La Belle Jardinière,” of the Louvre, the “Madonna del Baldacchino,” in the Pitti (which was left incomplete by Raphael, and finished by another hand), and the “Entombment” in the Borghese Gallery, at Rome, his first attempt at a great historical composition. It is in his third, or Roman, style that Raphael fully asserts that sovereignty in art which has earned him the name of Prince of painters, and appears as the head of his own school, which, generally called the Roman School, might perhaps, as he collected round him followers from all parts of Italy, more fitly be termed the Raphaelesque. This third period includes all his great frescoes in the Vatican, with a host of easel pictures; for, short as Raphael’s life was, his works are wondrously numerous, and our space permits mention of only a few of even the most celebrated.
It has been questioned whether Raphael’s art gained by what he learnt from Michelangelo, some critics affirming that his earlier style is his best. This, however, must be considered to be entirely a matter of taste. Most painters—unless, like Fra Angelico, so entirely absorbed in the mystical side of their art as never to change their style—as they gain in power of expression, lose something of their youthful emotional fervor; and it is possible to assert that in the magnificent design of the “Incendio del Borgo” the dramatic element is more in evidence than in the “Disputa.” But what is lost on the emotional and religious side is compensated for by the gain in power of representation; and it is difficult to stand before the cartoon of “The Miraculous Draught of Fishes,” and not to confess that Giotto himself could not have imparted a more implicit trustfulness and childlike belief in the power of the Redeemer to the look and gesture of St. Peter; and while the magnificent simplicity of the youths drawing the net is conceived in an equal spirit of truthfulness to nature, the grandeur of style and the knowledge displayed in the drawing is so much pure gain on his earlier manner.
The Loggie, or open corridors of the Vatican, were also adorned by Raphael’s scholars with a series of fifty-two paintings of Biblical subjects from his designs; the whole series was known as “Raphael’s Bible.”
In 1515 he was commissioned to design tapestries for the Sistine Chapel; of the ten cartoons (distemper paintings on paper) for these tapestries three have been lost; the other seven after many dangers and vicissitudes came into the possession of Charles I. of England. They are perhaps the most remarkable art treasures belonging to England, and are at present exhibited, by permission of Her Majesty, in the South Kensington Museum.
Among the greatest oil pictures of Raphael’s third period may be enumerated the “Madonna di Foligno” in the Vatican; the “Madonna della Sedia” in the Pitti Palace at Florence; the “Saint Cecilia” at Bologna; the “Madonna of the Fish,” and the picture of “Christ Bearing His Cross,” known as the “Spasimo,” in the splendid collection at Madrid; the “Madonna di San Sisto” at Dresden, which obtained for the artist the name of “the Divine;” and finally the “Transfiguration” at the Vatican, the sublime picture on which his last working hours were spent, and which was carried at his funeral before its colors were dry.
TIZIANO VECELLIO,
Commonly called by the anglicised form of his Christian name, Titian, was born at Cadore, near Venice, in 1477. His studies in art began at the age of ten, under a painter named Zuccato, from whose studio he passed to Gentile Bellini’s, and from his again to that of his brother Giovanni. Space forbids us to do more than indicate the chief landmarks in Titian’s long, eventful, and illustrious life. When his reputation as a great artist was new, before he was thirty years old, he visited the court of Ferrara, and executed for the duke two of his earliest masterpieces, the “Tribute Money,” now at Dresden, and the “Bacchus and Ariadne,” in the National Gallery of London. In 1516 he painted his great altarpiece, the “Assumption,” now removed from its church to the Accademia at Venice, and was at once placed by this incomparable work in the highest rank of painters. The “Entombment” of the Louvre was painted about 1523; and in 1528 he executed another magnificent altarpiece, the “Death of St. Peter Martyr,” in the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, which was destroyed in the fire of 1867. In 1530 Titian was invited to Bologna, to paint the portrait of the Emperor Charles V.; and he is supposed by some writers to have accompanied the emperor shortly afterward to Spain. Owing to the patronage which Charles V. and his son Philip II. liberally conferred on the artist, Madrid possesses a collection of his works second in number and importance only to the treasures of Venice. The “Presentation in the Temple,” in the Accademia at Venice, dates from about 1539, and the “Christ at Emmaus,” in the Louvre, from about 1546. In 1545 he painted at Rome the celebrated portrait of “Pope Paul III.,” in the Naples Museum. Titian continued active in his art even up to the time of his death, which occurred in 1576, at the great age of ninety-nine. His style, as is to be expected, changed considerably in the course of his long life, and the pictures painted in his last years, though full of color, are infirm in drawing and execution; in the full vigor of his powers he was a draughtsman second to none, though never aiming at the select beauty of form attained by the Florentine school, and by Raphael. It was this that led Michelangelo to say that, with a better mode of study, “This man might have been as eminent in design as he is true to nature and masterly in counterfeiting the life, and then, nothing could be desired better or more perfect;” adding, “for he has an exquisite perception, and a delightful spirit and manner.”