By ill chance it happened that Lionardo's greatest works soon perished. His cartoon at Florence disappeared. His model for Sforza's statue was used as a target by French bowmen. His "Last Supper" remains a mere wreck in the Convent delle Grazie. Such as it is, blurred by ill-usage and neglect, more blurred by impious re-painting, that fresco must be seen by those who wish to understand Da Vinci. It has well been called the compendium of all his studies and of all his writings; and, chronologically, it is the first masterpiece of the perfected Renaissance.[[252]] Other painters had represented the Last Supper as a solemn prologue to the Passion, or as the mystical inauguration of the greatest Christian sacrament.[[253]] But none had dared to break the calm of the event by a dramatic action. The school of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Ghirlandajo, Perugino, even Signorelli, remained within the sphere of symbolical suggestion; and their work gained in dignity what it lost in intensity. Lionardo combined both. He undertook to paint a moment, to delineate the effect of a single word upon twelve men seated at a table, and to do this without sacrificing the tranquillity demanded by ideal art, and without impairing the divine majesty of Him from whose lips that word has fallen. The time has long gone by for detailed criticism or description of a painting known to everybody. It is enough to observe that the ideal representation of a dramatic moment, the life breathed into each part of the composition, the variety of the types chosen to express varieties of character, and the scientific distribution of the twelve Apostles in four groups of three around the central Christ, mark the appearance of a new spirit of power and freedom in the arts. What had hitherto been treated with religious timidity, with conventional stiffness, or with realistic want of grandeur, was now humanised and at the same time transported into a higher intellectual region; and though Lionardo discrowned the Apostles of their aureoles, he for the first time in the history of painting created a Christ not unworthy to be worshipped as the præsens Deus. We know not whether to admire most the perfection of the painter's art or his insight into spiritual things.[[254]]
If we are forced to feel that, with Da Vinci, accomplishment fell short of power and promise, the case is very different with Raphael. In him there was no perplexity, no division of interests. He was fascinated by no insoluble mystery and absorbed by no seductive problems. His faculty and his artistic purpose were exactly balanced, adequate, and mutually supporting. He saw by intuition what to do, and he did it without let or hindrance, exercising from his boyhood till his early death an unimpeded energy of pure productiveness. Like Mozart, to whom he bears in many respects a remarkable resemblance, Raphael was gifted with inexhaustible fertility and with unwearied industry. Like Mozart, again, he had a nature which converted everything to beauty. Thought, passion, emotion, became in his art living melody. We almost forget his strength in admiration of his grace; the travail of his intellect is hidden by the serenity of his style. There is nothing over-much in any portion of his work, no sense of effort, no straining of a situation, not even that element of terror needful to the true sublime. It is as though the spirit of young Greece had lived in him again, purifying his taste to perfection and restraining him from the delineation of things stern or horrible.
Raphael found in this world nothing but its joy, and communicated to his ideal the beauty of untouched virginity. Brescia might be sacked with sword and flame. The Baglioni might hew themselves to pieces in Perugia. The plains of Ravenna might flow with blood. Urbino might change masters and obey the viperous Duke Valentino. Raphael, meanwhile, working through his short May-life of less than twenty [Handwritten: 40] years, received from nature and from man a message that was harmony unspoiled by one discordant note. His very person was a symbol of his genius. Lionardo was beautiful but stately, with firm lips and penetrating glance; he conquered by the magnetism of an incalculable personality. The loveliness of Raphael was fair and flexible, fascinating not by power or mystery, but by the winning charm of open-hearted sweetness. To this physical beauty, rather delicate than strong, he united spiritual graces of the most amiable nature. He was gentle, docile, modest, ready to oblige, free from jealousy, binding all men to him by his cheerful courtesy.[[255]] In morals he was pure. Indeed, judged by the lax standard of those times, he might be called almost immaculate. His intellectual capacity, in all that concerned the art of painting, was unbounded; but we cannot place him among the many-sided heroes of the Renaissance. What he attempted in sculpture, though elegant, is comparatively insignificant; and the same may be said about his buildings. As a painter he was capable of comprehending and expressing all things without excess or sense of labour. Of no other artist do we feel that he was so instinctively, unerringly right in what he thought and did.
Among his mental faculties the power of assimilation seems to have been developed to an extraordinary degree. He learned the rudiments of his art in the house of his father Santi at Urbino, where a Madonna is still shown—the portrait of his mother, with a child, perhaps the infant Raphael, upon her lap. Starting, soon after his father's death, as a pupil of Perugino, he speedily acquired that master's manner so perfectly that his earliest works are only to be distinguished from Perugino's by their greater delicacy, spontaneity, and inventiveness. Though he absorbed all that was excellent in the Peruginesque style, he avoided its affectations, and seemed to take departure for a higher flight from the most exquisite among his teacher's early paintings. Later on, while still a lad, he escaped from Umbrian conventionality by learning all that was valuable in the art of Masaccio and Fra Bartolommeo. To the latter master, himself educated by the influence of Lionardo, Raphael owed more, perhaps, than to any other of his teachers. The method of combining figures in masses, needful to the general composition, while they preserve a subordinate completeness of their own, had been applied with almost mathematical precision by the Frate in his fresco at S. Maria Nuova.[[256]] It reappears in all Raphael's work subsequent to his first visit to Florence[[257]] (1504-1506). So great, indeed, is the resemblance of treatment between the two painters that we know not well which owed the other most. Many groups of women and children in the Stanze, for example—especially in the "Miracle of Bolsena" and the "Heliodorus"—seem almost identical with Fra Bartolommeo's "Madonna della Misericordia" at Lucca. Finally, when Raphael settled in Rome, he laid himself open to the influence of Michael Angelo, and drank in the classic spirit from the newly discovered antiques. Here at last it seemed as though his native genius might suffer from contact with the potent style of his great rival; and there are many students of art who feel that Raphael's later manner was a declension from the divine purity of his early pictures. There is, in fact, a something savouring of overbloom in the Farnesina frescoes, as though the painter's faculty had been strained beyond its natural force. Muscles are exaggerated to give the appearance of strength, and open mouths are multiplied to indicate astonishment and action. These faults may be found even in the Cartoons. Yet who shall say that Raphael's power was on the decline, or that his noble style was passing into mannerism, after studying both the picture of the "Transfiguration" and the careful drawings from the nude prepared for this last work?
So delicate was the assimilative tendency in Raphael, that what he learned from all his teachers, from Perugino, Fra Bartolommeo, Masaccio, Da Vinci, Michael Angelo, and the antique, was mingled with his own style without sacrifice of individuality. Inferior masters imitated him, and passed their pictures off upon posterity as Raphael's; but to mistake a genuine piece of his painting for the performance of another is almost impossible. Each successive step he made was but a liberation of his genius, a stride toward the full expression of the beautiful he saw and served. He was never an eclectic. The masterpieces of other artists taught him how to comprehend his own ideal.
Raphael is not merely a man, but a school. Just as in his genius he absorbed and comprehended many diverse styles, so are many worthy craftsmen included in his single name. Fresco-painters, masters of the easel, workmen in mosaic and marquetrie, sculptors, builders, arras-weavers, engravers, decorators of ceilings and of floors, all laboured under his eye, receiving designs from, his hand, and executing what was called thereafter by his name.[[258]] It was thus partly by his facility and energy, partly by the use he made of other men, that Raphael was able to achieve so much. In the Vatican he covered the walls and ceilings of the Stanze with historical and symbolical frescoes that embrace the whole of human knowledge. The cramping limits of ecclesiastical tradition are transcended. The synod of the antique sages finds a place beside the synod of the Fathers and the company of Saints. Parnassus and the allegory of the virtues front each other. The legend of Marsyas and the mythus of the Fall are companion pictures. A new catholicity, a new orthodoxy of the beautiful, appears. The Renaissance in all its breadth and liberality of judgment takes ideal form. Nor is there any sense of discord; for the genius of Raphael views both revelations, Christian and pagan, from a point of view of art above them. To his pure and unimpeded faculty the task of translating motives so diverse into mutually concordant shapes was easy. On the domed ceilings of the Loggie he painted sacred history in a series of exquisitely simple compositions, known as Raphael's Bible. The walls and pilasters were adorned with arabesques that anticipated the discovery of Pompeii, and surpassed the best of Roman frescoes in variety and freedom. With his own hands he coloured the incomparable "Triumph of Galatea" in Agostino Chigi's villa on the Tiber, while his pupils traced the legend of Cupid and Psyche from his drawings on the roof of the great banquet hall. Remaining within the circuit of Rome, we may turn from the sibyls of S. Maria della Pace to the genii of the planets in S. Maria del Popolo, from the "Violin-player" of the Sciarra palace to the "Transfiguration" in the Vatican: wherever we go, we find the masterpieces of this youth, so various in conception, so equal in performance. And then, to think that the palaces and picture-galleries of Europe are crowded with his easel-pictures, that his original drawings display a boundless store of prodigal inventive creativeness, that the Cartoons, of which England is proud, are alone enough to found a mighty master's fame!
The vast mass of Raphael's works is by itself astounding. The accuracy of their design and the perfection of their execution are literally overwhelming to the imagination, that attempts to realise the conditions of his short life. There is nothing, or but very little, of rhetoric in all this world of pictures. The brain has guided the hand throughout, and the result is sterling poetry. The knowledge, again, expressed in many of his frescoes is so thorough that we wonder whether in his body lived again the soul of some accomplished sage. How, for example, did he appropriate the history of philosophy, set forth so luminously in the "School of Athens," that each head, each gesture, is the epitome of some system? Fabio Calvi may, indeed, have supplied him with serviceable notes on Greek philosophy. But to Raphael alone belongs the triumph of having personified the dry elements of learning in appropriate living forms. The same is true of the "Parnassus," and, in a less degree, of the "Disputa." To the physiognomist these frescoes will always be invaluable. The "Heliodorus," the "Miracle of Bolsena," and the Cartoons, display a like faculty applied with more dramatic purpose. Passion and action take the place of representative ideas; but the capacity for translating into perfect human form what has first been intellectually apprehended by the artist, is the same.
If, after estimating the range of thought revealed in this portion of Raphael's work, we next consider the labour of the mind involved in the distribution of so many multitudes of beautiful and august human figures, in the modelling of their drapery, the study of their expression, and their grouping into balanced compositions, we may form some notion of the magnitude of Raphael's performance. It is, indeed, probable that all attempts at reflective analysis of this kind do injustice to the spontaneity of the painter's method. Yet, even supposing that the "Miraculous Draught of Fishes" or the "School of Athens" were seen by him as in a vision, this presumption will increase our wonder at the imagination which could hold so rich a store of details ready for immediate use. That Raphael paid the most minute attention to the details of his work, is shown by the studies made for these two subjects, and by the drawings for the "Transfiguration." A young man bent on putting forth his power the first time in a single picture that should prove his mastery, could not have laboured with more diligence than Raphael at the height of his fame and in full possession of his matured faculty.
When, furthermore, we take into account the variety of Raphael's work, we arrive at a new point of wonder. The drawing of "Alexander's Marriage with Roxana," the "Temptation of Adam by Eve," and the "Massacre of the Innocents," engraved by Marc Antonio, are unsurpassed not only as compositions, but also as studies of the nude in chosen attitudes, powerfully felt and nobly executed. In these designs, which he never used for painting, the same high style is successively applied to a pageant, an idyll, and a drama.[[259]] The rapture of Greek art in its most youthful moment has never been recaptured by a modern painter with more force and fire of fancy than in the "Galatea." The tenderness of Christian feeling has found no more exalted expression than in the multitudes of the Madonnas, one more lovely than another, like roses on a tree in June, from the maidenly "Madonna del Gran' Duca" to the celestial vision of the San Sisto, that sublimest lyric of the art of Catholicity.[[260]] It is only by hurrying through a list like this that we can appreciate the many-sided perfection of Raphael's accomplishment. How, lastly, was it possible that this young painter should have found the time to superintend the building of S. Peter's, and to form a plan for excavating Rome in its twelve ancient regions?[[261]]