Pintoricchio

by Evelyn March Phillipps

The possibility of Raphael having supplied drawings and designs has been a matter of heated controversy. Morelli casts scorn on the supposition; Crowe and Cavalcaselle stand aghast and declare that, believing it, the life of Raphael would have to be re-written. Bode says it is audacious to contend that the great master and entrepreneur would adopt the designs of a young, untried painter. Vasari asks how we can suspect that the master of fifty would follow a twenty-year-old assistant: this is the general tendency of objections. While, naturally, regretting any conviction that tends to detract from the painter whose fascination I feel, and upon whose life I am engaged, having to the best of my power weighed all the rival criticisms, I cannot avoid the conviction that Schmarsow is right, and that Raphael did help with two or three at least of the frescoes, and perhaps, as he suggests, with others. The evidence that ascribes the drawings left for them to the young Urbinate appears to me too strong to resist. Raphael, to begin with, though only twenty when these drawings were executed, cannot be called unknown. He had already produced several noticeable works. Only three years later, in a contract of 1505, he is styled the best master in Perugia. The nuns of Monte Luce, wanting an altar-piece, “fere trovare el maestro el migliore, si posse consiglialo ... lo quale si chiamava Maestro Raphaello da Urbino.” Pintoricchio would have had the wit to see what a gift he was dealing with; and, as for taking the designs of an assistant, had not he himself supplied several of the figures for Perugino’s great work in the Sixtine?

The great probability of Raphael’s being in Siena in 1502, when the designs for the cartoons would be making, is proved by his picture of the “Three Graces”—two of which are copied from the mutilated Greek group, one of the best specimens of the antique then known. This group was brought from Rome by the Cardinal, to place in his costly Library. Vasari speaks of the Cardinal (not the Pope) as having brought it to the not quite finished Library, which would put the transit before September 1503. In the summer of 1502 the Cardinal made his last journey from Rome, and it was very likely then that he brought it back. An elaborate pencil sketch of it exists: opinions are divided as to which of the painters this was the work of, but Raphael’s own picture is guarantee that he must have seen and been struck by the original. It has been argued that it is not absolutely necessary that the author of the drawings should have been in Siena, but their adaptability and suitability to the walls makes this most unlikely. Four drawings for the Library exist—one each in Florence and Perugia, one at Milan, and one at Chatsworth. They are drawn with Indian ink, and the two first touched with bistre and heightened with white.

The first, which deals with the “Journey to the Council of Basel,” has a long inscription at the top. The handwriting of this, if compared with Raphael’s letter to Domenico Alfani, or that to his uncle Simone Ciarla, is no doubt Raphael’s own, and the same hand has made notes in other parts of the drawing. It is possible, but not very probable, that the assistant should have annotated the master’s design; but the connection between the inscription and the drawing, the various small changes made and accounted for as it progresses, make us almost certain that the designer of this cartoon was also the writer of the notes upon it. As each drawing has been transferred to the wall and worked out, we see gradual alterations, evidently made to add importance to the hero of the series. In the sketch Æneas wears a tight doublet and close cap. He looks, what he was, a young man going forth to seek his fortune. In the fresco he is dressed in a mantle and broad hat, to make the future Pope more imposing. The letter which he carried to Capranica has been placed in his hand. The storm from which Æneas escaped has been merely indicated in the drawing. In the fresco, lowering clouds and a rainbow are added. A dog, the greyhound of which Pintoricchio was so fond, has been introduced, standing perfectly still though in the leash of a galloping rider.

Private photo] [Gallery, Venice
STUDY FOR FRESCO I.
(By Raphael)

We gather from all these changes that the drawing did not exactly satisfy the painter who worked on it after it was transferred to the wall. It is, however, in the spirit and bearing of the whole that we see the greatest difference. In the drawing the artist has shaken off the stiff Perugian manner, has got at nature, and has found new ways of handling. The riders are strong and elastic; the page to the right is supple and natural, but in the fresco is twisted round into an ungainly attitude. The cavalcade has a life and movement that we hardly expect to find in Pintoricchio. The horses, if anything, bear witness more remarkably than the men. Up to this time very few masters could draw horses with any success. Uccello and Donatello, Verrocchio and his pupil Leonardo, all Florentines, were almost the sole exceptions. To decide if Raphael could draw horses we have only to glance at such early works of his as the two little “St. Georges” in the Louvre. It was in 1502 that Raphael first came to Florence, just at the time that Leonardo’s great cartoon of the battle of the standard was exposed to the public. We are told that Raphael spent much time in copying Leonardo. Indeed, among the so-called Venetian sketches is one, now called the “Battle of the Standard,” which is unanimously ascribed to Raphael, and which is believed to be a sketch from Leonardo’s cartoon. If we compare the horse in the drawing for the “Journey to Basel” with that horse, and if we further compare with both the horse in the sketch for the “St. George” (at St. Petersburg) we shall see numerous points of resemblance—in the broad head and tapering muzzle, the round, accentuated haunches, the shape of the foot, and the very curves of the flowing tail. The horses in the fresco look very wooden beside them, with their long, woolly tails. What we feel forcibly—what anyone must feel who is, not necessarily an artist, but a judge of a horse, is that the man who drew the sketch knew indisputably what were the points of a good horse, while if the painter of the fresco had known as much he could never have painted the horses on the wall.

There is, moreover, another point, which I do not think has been noticed before. On looking again at Raphael’s undoubted sketch of the “Battle for the Standard,” we perceive that the splendid figure of the nude man who snatches at the horse’s head has served for the model of the standard-bearer in the drawing of the “Journey to Basel”; every line is the same, the plant of the feet, the turn of the head, the uplifted arm. Now we know that if Raphael was in Siena, he came straight from Florence, while we have no indication that Pintoricchio was ever in Florence at all, and what would be more likely than that Raphael, full of his studies of Leonardo, should take the opportunity of bringing in the horses and men he had just been copying, and which we know to have made so deep an impression upon him?

The drawing at Perugia for the fresco of the “Meeting of Frederick III. and Eleanora of Portugal” has the words, “questa e la quinta della (storia) del Papa” (this is the fifth of the story of the Pope), written on it, in the same fine handwriting that we see on the “Journey to Basel.” We see here the clear rules of composition learnt from Perugino—the middle point and radiation from it—with the figures placed in pairs, as in the “Giving of the Keys”—an arrangement which had great influence over Raphael’s compositions, though it never took much hold of Pintoricchio. In the fresco, the lines of the radius are quite lost sight of; the spectators are brought in in the usual indistinct masses. It has been suggested that, as the spot on which the meeting took place is much more like in the fresco than in the drawing,—the column being evidently copied in the first and not in the last,—Raphael may have drawn the design away from Siena, and sent it marked with the inscription.