A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

Fig. 182. Raphael. Maddalena Doni.—Pitti.

Imagine a youngster of twenty-one who has diligently mastered a pictorial style only to learn that it is already obsolete. That is Raphael taking the manner of Perugino to a Florence agog over the battle cartoons of Leonardo and Michelangelo. The coolness with which young Raphael faced this emergency is characteristic. In four years he made himself over into a realistic draughtsman. Abandoning the readymade faces and figures of Perugino, he wisely held to Perugino’s sweetness and spacious compositional patterns. Young Raphael achieves an extraordinary act of criticism. He takes from the reformers just what he needs and no more—from Leonardo his incisiveness and psychology as a draughtsman and his dense and rich compositional patterns, from Fra Bartolommeo his dignity and monumentality, from Michelangelo very little as yet; and, withal, he retains whatever still seemed valuable from his Umbrian experience. Thus with resolute and unperturbed intelligence within four years he completely reconstructed his style, and put himself on a parity with older contemporaries who had been experimenting for a score of years.

The steps of this re-education are most interesting. In 1505 he did the portraits of Agnolo Doni and his wife Maddalena, Figure [182]. The posture of the woman is that of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. The draughtsmanship and characterization are severe, the hint of Umbrian landscape is a survival. In later portraits we shall see the elimination of accessories, the line yielding to the most refined modelling in light and dark, the effect concentrated without insistency. A comparison of the Doni portraits with those of ten years later, the Julius II and the Fornarina, will tell better than words of the tendency of Raphael’s portraiture towards its ultimate mastery.

In 1505 Raphael returned for a time to Perugino to paint the fresco of the Trinity at the Convent of San Severo. In the splendid geometrical pattern he has already improved on the flat groupings of Perugino. The consistory of Saints bends back in depth after the fashion of a semi-dome. Raphael borrows the new motive from Fra Bartolommeo’s fresco of the Last Judgment painted in 1499 for the Florentine Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. Sixteen years later Perugino added the languid saints at the base of the Trinity, a touching reversal of the natural relations of master and pupil. As for Raphael, in a single experiment he has mastered the sort of symmetrical composition in depth which should suffice within five years for his masterpiece, the Disputa.

Fig. 183. Raphael. Madonna del Granduca.—Pitti.

Fig. 184. Raphael. La Belle Jardinière.—Louvre.

The matronly sweetness of Raphael’s early madonnas has won them affection from the first. With increasing dignity, they retain a hint of the girlish refinement of their predecessors of the Early Renaissance. But they are less assertively fastidious, more normal and natural. All these obvious reasons for liking them are sound, and these pictures afford as well an insight into Raphael’s consciously directed studies. The effect is ever towards richer and more complicated composition, and towards more interesting and stylistic dispositions of the figures. The naturalness is that of taste and calculation. Near the beginning of the series we have the lovely Madonna of the Grand Duke, 1505, Figure [183]. The upright, frontal position and form and serene oval of the face recall Perugino. But reality has supervened,—Perugino never painted such a Bambino,—and for the sake of concentration the background is kept plain. We see in the Madonna of the Tempi Family, at Munich, the Madonna turned in three-quarters position, the pose energized, the body swaying in a slight counterpoise. Then he tries seated poses which offer the triangular pattern of Leonardo. Perhaps the earliest of this series is the lovely Cowper Madonna, now in the Widener Collection. Soon he adds figures, constructs the pyramids more ornately and restores the background of landscape. At the head of this line is the Madonna of the Finch in the Pitti. It illustrates that gracious formality which Leonardo established in the Madonna of the Rocks. Finding the balance of the two standing nude children a little too obvious, Raphael carries the motive to its perfection in the Belle Jardinière of the Louvre. Figure [184]. Here, to break the rigid symmetry, the St. John kneels, and superfluous trees have been cleared away from the background. He seeks further to enrich the pyramid, and in the Madonna of the Canigiani family, at Munich, Figure [185], finished in 1507, we have at once the densest of symmetries and the stylistic handling of all the figures in active and counterpoised attitudes. In two years the process is complete. Later, in the Madonna of the Fish and of the Pearl, executed by students, Raphael will adopt diagonal arrangements, he will take up the old Circular form in the Madonna of the Chair, and will amplify the simple patterns of Perugino in the Sistine Madonna and the Madonna of Foligno. The forms and faces will become graver, nobler, more mature, but the whole course is fully anticipated in the joyous and lucid years of experiment from 1505 to 1507.