In truth the reason why many modern critics and painters almost dislike Raphael is the very reason for which he was so greatly revered. Coming in the nick of time, at the close of an epoch of investigation, himself a man of wide culture and quick intellect but of no special originality or emotional power, he learned from all his predecessors what they had to teach and, choosing from the elements of their art those which were suited to his purpose, formed a perfectly balanced and noble style which was immediately accepted as the only style suitable to the expression of lofty ideas in monumental form. He became the lawgiver, the founder of classicism, the formulator of the academic ideal. Not to admire him was to confess oneself a barbarian, and even those who did not really care for his art hardly dared to say so. As long as the academic ideal retained any validity his supremacy endured, and it was only with the definitive turning of modern art into the paths of romanticism and naturalism that revolt became possible.
But when the world became tired of Raphaelism it inevitably became unjust to Raphael. It forgot that it was not he who had made his art the test of that of others—who had erected what, with him, was a spontaneous and original creation into a rigid system of laws. It confounded him with his followers and imitators, and, being bored by them, began to find the master himself a bore.
For, eclectic as he was by nature, and founder as he was of the academic régime, the "grand style" of Raphael was yet a new and personal contribution to art. He drew from many sources, but the principle of combination was his own. His originality was in that mastery of composition which no one has ever denied him, but which is very differently rated as a quality of art by different temperaments. Almost everything specifically Raphaelesque in his work is the offspring of that power of design in which he is still the unapproached master. Modern criticism is right in denying that he was a draughtsman, if by draughtsman is meant one deeply preoccupied with form and structure for its own sake. His distinction was to invest the human figure with such forms as should best fit it to play its part in a scheme of monumental composition. The "style" of his draperies, so much and so justly admired, is composition of draperies. He was not a colorist as Titian was a colorist, or a painter as Velazquez was a painter—he was just so much of a colorist and a painter as is compatible with being the greatest of decorative designers. Everything in his finest works is entirely subordinated to the beauty and expressiveness of composition, and nothing is allowed to have too great an individual interest for its predestined part in the final result. Probably he could not have drawn like Michelangelo or painted like Hals—certainly, when he once understood himself, he would not have desired to do so.
Even in his early work he showed his gifts as a composer, and some of the small pictures of his Florentine period are quite perfect in design. Nothing could be better composed within their restricted field than the "Madonna del Cardellino" or the "Belle Jardinière." Nearly at the end of the period he made his greatest failure, the "Entombment" of the Borghese Gallery. It was his most ambitious effort up to this time and he wanted to put everything that he had learned into it, to draw like Michelangelo and to express emotion like Mantegna. He made a host of studies for it, tried it this way and that, lost all spontaneity and all grasp of the ensemble. What he finally produced is a thing of fragments, falling far below his models in the qualities he was attempting to rival and redeemed by little or nothing of the quality proper to himself. But, apparently, it answered its purpose. It freed him from preoccupation with the work of others. When his great opportunity came to him, in the commission to decorate the Camera della Segnatura, his painfully acquired knowledge was sufficiently at his command to give him no further trouble. He could concentrate himself on the essential part of his problem, the creation of an entirely appropriate, dignified, and beautiful decorative design. It was the work for which he was born, and he succeeded so immediately and so admirably in it that neither he nor any one else has ever been able to fill such spaces so perfectly again.
There are fourteen important compositions in the room. The decoration of the ceiling had already been begun by Sodoma, and Sodoma's decorative framework Raphael allowed to remain; partly, perhaps, from courtesy, more probably because its general disposition was admirable and not to be improved on. If Sodoma had begun any of the larger paintings which were to fill his frames they were removed to make way for the new work. There has always been a great deal of discussion as to whether Raphael himself invented the admirable scheme of subjects by which the room was made to illustrate the Renaissance ideal of culture with its division into the four great fields of learning: divinity, philosophy (including science), poetry, and law. In reality, the question is of little importance. There seems to be at least one bit of internal evidence, to be mentioned presently, that even here the artist did not have a perfectly free hand, as we know he did not later. Whoever thought of the subjects, it was Raphael who discovered how to treat them in such a way as to make of this room the most perfectly planned piece of decoration in the world. Sodoma had left, on the vaulting, four circular medallions and four rectangular spaces which were to be filled with figure compositions. In the circles, each directly above one of the great wall spaces, Raphael placed figures personifying Theology, Philosophy, Poetry and Justice; in the rectangles he illustrated these subjects with the stories of "The Fall of Man," "Apollo and Marsyas," and "The Judgment of Solomon," and with that figure, leaning over a celestial globe, which must be meant for Science. All of these panels are on curved surfaces, and Raphael's decorative instinct led him, on this account and to preserve the supremacy of the great wall spaces below, to suppress all distance, placing his figures against a background of simulated gold mosaic and arranging them, virtually, upon one plane. There is, therefore, no possible question of "space composition" here. These panels depend for their effect entirely upon composition in two dimensions—upon the perfect balancing of filled and empty spaces, the invention of interesting shapes, and the arrangement of beautiful lines. It is the pattern that counts, and the pattern is perfect.
The "Poetry" (Pl. 11) is the most beautiful of the medallions, but they are all much alike: a draped female figure in the middle, seated to give it scale, large enough to fill the height of the circle amply but without crowding, and winged putti, bearing inscribed tablets, on either side. There are other ways of filling a circle acceptably, as Botticelli had shown and as Raphael was to show again in more than one tondo, but for their situation, marking the principal axes of the room, there is no way so adequate as this. As Mr. Blashfield has said, speaking from experience: "When a modern painter has a medallion to fill and has tried one arrangement after another, he inevitably realizes that it is Raphael who has found the best ordering that could be found; and the modern painter builds upon his lines, laid down so distinctly that the greater the practice of the artist the more complete becomes his realization of Raphael's comprehension of essentials in composition." Not only so, but the modern painter finds as inevitably that, accepting this ordering as the best, even then he cannot add another figure to these four. He may, perhaps, draw it better in detail or give more character to the head, but he cannot capture that felicity of spacing, that absoluteness of balance, that variety and vivacity combined with monumental repose. The more his nature and training have made him a designer the more certainly he feels, before that single medallion of Poetry, that he is in the presence of the inimitable master of design.
If the composition of the rectangles is less inevitable it is only because the variety of ways in which such simple rectangles may be filled is almost infinite. Composition more masterly than that of the "Judgment of Solomon" (Pl. 12), for instance, you will find nowhere; so much is told in a restricted space, yet with no confusion, the space is so admirably filled and its shape so marked by the very lines that enrich and relieve it. It is as if the design had determined the space rather than the space the design. If you had a tracing of the figures in the midst of an immensity of white paper you could not bound them by any other line than that of the actual frame. One of the most remarkable things about it is the way in which the angles, which artists usually avoid and disguise, are here sharply accented. A great part of the dignity and importance given to the king is due to the fact that his head fills one of these angles, and the opposite one contains the hand of the executioner and the foot by which the living child is held aloft, and to this point the longest lines of the picture lead. The dead child and the indifferent mother fill the lower corners. In the middle, herself only half seen and occupying little space, is the true mother, and it seems that her explosive energy, as she rushes to the rescue of her child, has forced all these other figures back to the confines of the picture. Compare this restless yet subtly balanced composition, full of oblique lines and violent movement, with the gracious, placid formality of the "Adam and Eve," and you will have some notion of the meaning of this gift of design.