After Raphael's years of fruitful student work in the Hill Country so dear to students of Italian culture for its four periods of great art, there came his Florentine period, which represents a new and wonderful evolution of his artistic genius. Here, when he arrived in 1504, Leonardo da Vinci in his productive forties and the young Michelangelo in his revealing later twenties were at work at their famous historical cartoons, and the atmosphere of the city was deeply imbued with the Renaissance spirit. It is a little difficult now to think of Raphael as merely a young struggling artist, making his living by painting portraits for rather commonplace people, and executing his earlier Madonnas for private oratories, partly from love of his work but mainly because he needed the money, yet this constituted his occupation. [Footnote 1]
[Footnote 1: As pointed out by Grimm in his "Life of Michelangelo" the patrons of the Renaissance painters at the beginning of that period, and indeed until after the climax of its development had been reached, were either of the middle class or consisted of the religious orders and ecclesiastical authorities intent on the decoration of churches. The town folk ordered pictures for their homes or for the decoration of churches. The artist was a craftsman, like the goldsmith or any other. When artists became the favorites of princes and kings and rulers, when they came to occupy positions at courts, it was not long before decadence began. Lives at court were not calculated to bring out what was best nor to encourage profound thinking nor provide the leisure which is necessary for great art, and truth lost its attraction in jealous rivalry and the desire to please a patron.]
His Madonnas soon made him famous. At the end of his first year in Florence came one of his masterpieces, the "Madonna of the Grand Duke," still to be seen at the Pitti. At this [{6}] time Raphael was under the influence of the great Dominican painter Fra Bartolommeo, though undoubtedly the specimens of Fra Angelico's work so frequent in Florence had their power over him. The sweetness and mystical beauty which, added to the human tenderness of his lovely mothers, make his Madonnas so charming are the fruit of Raphael's studies in Florence. Under the influence of the two Dominican painters such great pictures as "La Belle Jardinière," of the Louvre, the "Madonna of the Goldfinch" now in the Uffizi, Florence, and the "Madonna of the Meadow," one of the treasures of the Vienna collection, were produced.
Just before he left Florence he painted for Atlanta Baglioni an "Entombment" which is his first attempt at an historic picture. The critics declare that it was spoiled somewhat by overwork at it and overanxiety to rival some of the great paintings of this kind from Leonardo and Michelangelo which Raphael had so much admired. However that may be, it is undoubtedly one of the world's greatest pictures, especially when the age of the artist, twenty-five, is taken into account. Just after he finished it he was summoned to Rome by that discerning patron of genius Pope Julius II. His great opportunity had arrived. Only a little more than ten years of life lay ahead of him, but in that ten years the art of the world was to receive almost its greatest treasures. In their "Italian Cities" the Blashfields have told the story of his Roman career:--
"Raphael's conquest of his surroundings was almost magical: he arrived a youth, well spoken of as to skill, yet by reputation hardly even par inter pares; in ten short years--how long if we count them in art history--he died, having painted the Vatican, the Farnesina, world-famous altar-pieces, having planned the restoration of the entire urbs, having reconciled enemies and stimulated friends, and having succeeded without being hated.
"He achieved this success by his great and manifold capacity, but, most of all, because in art he was the greatest assimilator and composer who ever lived. The two words are each other's complements; he received impressions, and he put them together; his temperament was exactly suited to this marvellous forcing house of Rome, for a Roman school never really existed, it was simply the Tusco-Umbrian school throned upon seven hills and growing grander and freer in the contemplation of Antiquity.
"To this contemplation, Raphael brought not only a brilliant endowment but an astonishing mental accumulation; the mild eyes of the Uffizi portrait were piercing when they looked upon nature or upon art, and behind them was an alembic in which the things that entered through those eyes fused, precipitated, or crystallized as he willed."
Pope Julius II, himself one of the great geniuses of history, with a dream of a united Italy long before there was any possibility of its accomplishment, and with an appreciation of genius that alone would have given him a commanding place among the world's great rulers, had summoned to Rome for the decoration of the apartments of the Vatican some of the greatest painters of the time. Even from distant Flanders came Reuisch and then there were Perugino, Raphael's old master, now advanced in years, and Signorelli, quite as old, and Lotto and Sodoma and Peruzzi and others. It was beside these that Raphael had to do his work. Within a year of Raphael's coming he, the youngest of them all, not yet twenty-six years of age, was selected by the Pope--how well advised he was--as the one to whom all the important decorations should be entrusted. Then came the opportunity to do the Camera della Segnatura, that triumph of decorative art. "This chamber of the Vatican" became, as Raphael's biographer in the Catholic Encyclopaedia says, "a sort of mirror of the tendencies of the human mind, a summary of all its ideal history, a sort of pantheon of spiritual grandeurs. Thereby the representation of ideas acquired a dramatic value, being no longer as in the Middle Ages the immovable exposition of an unchangeable truth but the impassioned search for knowledge in all its branches, the moral life of humanity."