Fig. 193. Raphael. The Sistine Madonna.—Dresden.
Raphael’s final work for the Vatican was the decoration of an open, vaulted Loggia. He invented fifty-two little Bible stories, leaving most of the painting to his assistant, Penni, and he drew about the arches, pilasters and window frames the most delicious arabesques. From study of similar decoration in the Baths of Titus he worked out a style, crisp, formal and sophisticated, and as various as Gothic ornament itself. Geometrical, animal, and plant forms meet and blend audaciously. There is interplay of spiral and angular motives, the whole effect is highly playful and ingenious. The style has had vogue to our own day and still speaks to us charmingly of the unserious side of Raphael.
Fig. 194. Raphael. The Transfiguration.—Vatican.
Perhaps in the harassed, competitive years we have been describing, Raphael turned occasionally upon his own ingenuity, and refreshed himself by renewing these simple and gracious modes in which he had been bred. Such a theory would account for the Sistine Madonna, Figure [193], and in part for his last picture, the Transfiguration. The most memorable of Raphael’s Madonnas is based on the lucid symmetry of Perugino. Although, for greater concentration, the background is merely a sky, the hovering figures are easily spaced in the usual triangle. The effect is ineffably grand and gentle. A quiet silvery cloudland is created and filled by the devotion of the attendant saints and the inspired glance of the Virgin and her Son. With all the resources of the Renaissance, Raphael has expressed an emotion as intense and reverent as that of Fra Angelico. It is an amazing act of the sympathetic intelligence, for there is no reason to suppose that the painter was ever a deeply religious spirit.
Almost as traditional was the unfinished picture before which in springtime of 1520 Raphael’s body lay in state. The Transfiguration, Figure [194], repeats the method of the Disputa. The celestial group of Christ and Moses and Elijah is disposed as Perugino would have counselled, in a swaying triangular group set before the gulf of the firmament. Raphael painted this part with his own hand. The lower part, which was left to Giulio Romano to finish, rests on the maxims and practice of Leonardo. An energetic variety compelled into a close balance is the ideal, a formal order which contains and softens otherwise extravagant expressions and gestures. There is perhaps intended not merely an illustration of the Gospel text, but also the contrast between that life of contemplation towards which the soul aspires, and that world of suffering of mind and body which presses closely upon our rare moments of spiritual escape.
Even that world of facts had been very kind to Raphael. It was fitting then that in his last days he should forget the haunting spectre of Michelangelo’s sublimity, and should use his last forces in an imitation which was a sort of gratitude to those two great masters who had set him on the right way. One would like to believe that the Sistine Madonna and the Transfiguration are the sign that Raphael when overtaken by an untimely death was purging himself of an unfruitful rivalry, and becoming once more master of his own soul. Yet since even Michelangelo shipwrecked on the Michelangelesque, it is an open question whether Raphael could ever have permanently recovered his natural equipoise. However that be, Raphael in the glorious years from 1500 to 1512 resumes and perfects every gentle, orderly, and reasonable strain in Italian painting. Whether in portraiture or narrative, in mythology or symbolism, in pictures of the Madonna or in pure decoration, he gave to Italian painting its final stamp. He achieved a grandeur of space composition akin to the movement of a symphony, a hidden structure more appealing than any separate hue or form. His best work rests on a great humility, and his later pride went far towards undoing him as an artist. Such pride was the breath of life and the source of strength to his rival Michelangelo, the fulfiller and perfector of everything that had been insurgent, unbounded and not quite reasonable in the art of Florence.
By a peculiar irony all that was valuable in such truculent and self-sufficing predecessors as Donatello and Bertoldo, Andrea del Castagno, Antonio Pollaiuolo and Luca Signorelli was finally concentrated in the small and ill-favored body of a neurasthenic. There is the tragedy of Michelangelo[[69]] in its simplest terms. A Titan in capacity to feel and work, he lived in an atmosphere of suspicion and fear. Thrice he ran away from physical danger, once was virtually a military deserter. To unworthy dependent relatives he gave lavishly, scolding and fretting as he gave. He deliberately affronted two of the most courteous and accomplished colleagues, Leonardo da Vinci and Perugino. He suspected the worst of his gracious and generous rival, Raphael. From a Roman studio as unkempt and filthy as its owner, he snarled at the world and himself like a dog from a kennel.
Yet, note the paradox, this snarling is embodied in fine poetry, and this haggard and more than untidy artist is the friend of such elect spirits as Tommaso Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna. Transient solaces. Near the end of his long life he writes:—
“Alas! Alas! again and once again