The figures of the three Disciples on the Mount, especially the foreshortened one, are treated with that spirited facility and confident decision which always mark the pen of Raffaello. Those of the Saviour and the collateral prophets, though drawn with less precision and contours here and there, by repeated strokes, corrected, still exhibit on the whole the same spirit, facility, and confidence of hand. Of the actors below, the figure of John, with hands crossed on his breast, and the three next to him have the same Raffaellesque characteristics, and so the whole of the females kneeling on the foreground; but of the adjoining apostle, with the book in his hand, the projected leg and foot are absolutely out of drawing; whilst the Demoniac and his father, with all the remaining figures, drawn by mere practice, without a symptom of the master spirit, give palpable proofs of a different hand.
It appears no improbable conjecture that Raffaello, after settling the plan and fully arranging the figures of his picture, drew the nudities of this design as the bases of his draperies: for this reason only, the principal parts of the forms, and those muscles that would act most visibly on the draperies, are designed correctly, and finished with decision; whilst the heads, and what was either to be naked in the picture or did not act immediately on the drapery, remained in careless and superficial lines.
That Raffaello suffered parts of his Transfiguration, and in my opinion some of the most important parts, to receive all but the last finish from a pupil, if tradition had not told us, there is ocular demonstration in the picture itself. The proportions of the Demoniac's father are neglected as a whole, in relation of limb to limb, and the figure is sacrificed to place. The face of Christ himself, as it was seen in the Louvre, is unworthy of Raffaello's hand and conception.[98]
The reason why some of the figures are drawn in the true spirit of the artist, and others in a bald and insignificant manner, may be, that after slightly sketching the whole, he gave his own finish in the design to those parts only which he intended to execute with his own hand in the picture; and less solicitous for the rest, left them to the hand of some inferior pupil.
The height of this extraordinary design is one foot eight inches four lines; its breadth one foot two inches five lines; it is without injury.
Taddeo and Federigo Zuccari, the first declared mannerists of this school, sons of Ottaviano Zuccari, a mediocre painter of S. Angiolo in Vado, came to Rome successively, formed a school, and filled towns and states with an immense farrago of good, tolerable, and bad pictures. From the instructions of Pompeo da Fano and Giacomone da Faenza, but chiefly from an obstinate study of Raffaello's works, Taddeo, at no protracted period, gathered enough to diffuse over his own, an air, though not reality, of style, and to anticipate by contrivance and facility the rewards which time owes to invention and genius. Courting the senses of the multitude, he became the hero of the day; they saw their portraits in his faces, their limbs in his forms, their action in his attitudes; his draperies, hair, beards, had a cut of fashion. The simplicity of his disposition is often contrasted by half figures emerging from his foregrounds; perhaps less from a principle of imitating his more remote predecessors, than to invigorate the effect of his chiaroscuro, a method not unknown to Parmegiano.
Rome possesses vast works in fresco of Taddeo; among the best of these are some Gospel stories at the Consolazione. He seldom painted in oil, and less commendably in large than small: some of these are cabinet pictures of exquisite finish,—such a one, (formerly in the collection of the Duke of Urbino, but more recently at Osimo in the Palace Leopardi,) is the Nativity of the Saviour, and in Taddeo's very best style. But the work on which his fame chiefly rests, are the paintings of the Palazzo Farnese, at Caprarola (engraved in a moderate volume, by Prenner, 1748). They represent the Feats of the Farnese Family, in peace and war; to which are joined other stories, both sacred and profane; but what attracts attention most, is the celebrated "Stanza del Sonno," an apartment dedicated to Sleep, replete with a great variety of allegoric imagery, suggested to him by Annibale Caro, in a long, quaint letter, printed among his familiar ones, and reproduced among the "Lettere Pittoriche," t. iii. l. 99.
Dissimilar in the pursuits of life, Taddeo resembled Raffaello in death; he completed thirty-seven years, and obtained a monument close to Sanzio, in the "Rotonda."
His brother and pupil Federigo, inferior in design, resembles him in taste, though more mannered, more capricious in conceit, more crowded in composition. He completed what death had prevented Taddeo from finishing in the Sala Regia, that of Farnese, the Trinità de' Monti, and elsewhere, with the airs of heir-at-law to his brother's talents. Thus he raised an opinion of capacity for greater enterprise, and was invited by Francis I. to paint the great Cupola of the metropolitan church at Florence, which death alone had saved from Vasari's hands. There Federigo painted more than three hundred figures of fifty feet in height each, besides that of Lucifer, "so enormous," to use his own phrase, "that it makes the other figures appear infants;[99]—figures," he adds, "larger than the world ever witnessed before in Art." So little, however, hugeness excepted, is there to admire in this work, that at the time of Pier da Cortona, a painting of that master would have been substituted for it, had it not been feared that he would not live long enough to terminate the whole. After the Cupola, every work of consequence at Rome appeared his due, and he was recalled by Gregorio to paint the ceiling of the Paolina, and give a successor to Michael Angelo. It was at that period, that, on a charge preferred against him by some courtiers or domestics of Gregorio, he painted and exhibited the picture of Calumny, and his accusers with asses-ears, which raised a clamour that obliged him to fly from Rome. During his exile, which lasted some years, he visited Flanders, Holland, England; had a call even from Venice to paint a subject in the Ducal Palace, was everywhere caressed and remunerated, and, the Pope being mitigated, returned to reassume his interrupted labours in the Capella; the best work perhaps which, without the assistance of his brother, he has produced at Rome, though the larger altar-piece of S. Lorenzo in Damaso, and that of the Angioli at Gesù, with some others dispersed in other churches, may claim their share of merit. He built a house on Monte Pincio, rapidly and with the assistance of his scholars furnished with family portraits, conversations, and other whims in fresco, and left to prove him a trifler in Art, and the leader of decay.