The Madonna "of the Chair," one of the most characteristic and deservedly popular of Raphael's numerous versions of the Virgin and Child motif, belongs to the master's full maturity, and was painted during his sojourn in Rome, at the time when he was occupied with the stupendous task of decorating the Stanze of the Vatican. It would be difficult to find in the whole history of art a more pleasing solution of the problem presented by a figure composition in the round. The picture is now in the Pitti Palace, Florence.
Just as Timoteo Viti, Perugino, Fra Bartolommeo, Lionardo da Vinci, Masaccio, Michelangelo, and Sebastiano del Piombo (who imparted to him something of the glow of Venetian colouring), had been the sources from which Raphael drew his knowledge of technique, colour, composition, and all the elements of pictorial style, so the humanists had paved his way as regards the intellectual aspect of his art. His marvellous faculty of rapid assimilation enabled him, on the one hand, to appropriate whatever he found worthy of imitation in his precursors and contemporaries, and thus to complete his technical equipment at an age at which it was given to few to have achieved mastery; whilst, on the other hand, his clear intellect, aided by the not entirely unmercenary desire to please his patrons, helped him to carry out with triumphant success the ideas evolved by the keenest thinkers of his time. To doubt that the general idea, and perhaps a good many of the details, of such a stupendous work as the fresco decoration of the Stanze at the Vatican, had originated in Raphael's head, is not to detract from his greatness. He was a boy in his early teens when he entered his first master's bottega. He was a youth of twenty-five when he started on his great task; and the intervening years had been so completely filled with the study of his craft and with the execution of important commissions, that it is impossible to believe he could have found much leisure for book-learning. And such learning was indispensable for the conception of that elaborate scheme with all its historical allusions and allegorical imagery. The wonder is that Raphael could so completely enter into the suggestions made to him from various sources, and to weave them into a tissue of immortal beauty.
[II]
At the end of the fifteenth century the rule of the Duke Federigo of Montefeltre, an enlightened prince who devoted the best of his energy and such time as he could spare from his duties on the battlefield to the patronage of the arts, to the adornment of his noble palace, and to the collecting of priceless manuscripts, paintings, antiques, and works of art of every description, had raised the old city of Urbino to one of the centres of culture and learning, and made the ducal court a gathering-place for the distinguished painters, architects, poets, and humanists who were attracted by the wealth and liberality of this great patron. Among the less distinguished satellites attracted by the sun of Montefeltre was one Giovanni Santi, who had come to Urbino in the middle of the fifteenth century. Though a painter of considerable skill, trained perhaps by Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, he found it necessary in the early days of his sojourn at Urbino to supplement his modest income by trading in oil and corn and other commodities, as his father had done before him. But his varied accomplishments soon brought him into prominence and secured him a position as court painter and poet. More important than any of the pictures that have come to us from his brush is his famous rhyming chronicle of 23,000 verses in Dantesque measure, in which he glorifies the virtues and exploits of his patron. He was a special favourite of Elisabetta Gonzaga, the youthful spouse of Federigo's son Guidobaldo, whose high esteem for Giovanni is expressed in a letter in which she informs her sister-in-law of the court painter's death.
To this Giovanni Santi and to his wife Magia Ciarla was born on Good Friday, the 28th of March[1] 1483, a son who was destined in the comparatively short span of his life to rise to fame such as has been the share of few mortals. An elder brother and sister of Raphael had died in infancy, and his mother followed them to the grave before he had reached his eighth year. Her place in the paternal home was taken by Bernardina Parte, a goldsmith's daughter, whom Giovanni wedded soon after his first wife's death. From Giovanni Santi's great poem it would appear that he was on terms of friendship and intimacy with some of the greatest masters of the time, such as Melozzo da Forli, Mantegna, Pier dei Franceschi, and Verrocchio; and it is reasonable to assume that Raphael's earliest art education under his father's guidance tended towards the development of that peculiar faculty which enabled him later on to seize and assimilate the excellences in the style of the various masters with whom he came in contact.
[1] The wording of Raphael's epitaph, which states that he died on the same day (of the year) on which he was born, has led some writers to the assumption that he was born on April 6, whereas it is merely meant to signify that he was born and died on Good Friday.
The ease with which his precocious talent absorbed the teaching of his masters became evident when, soon after his father's death, in 1494, from fever contracted in the malarial air of the Mantuan marshland, whither he had gone in the service of Elisabetta Gonzaga, he entered the bottega of Francia's pupil Timoteo Viti (or della Vite), who settled at Urbino in 1495, and whose eminent position among the painters of that city must have suggested to Raphael's guardian—his maternal uncle Simone Ciarla—the desirability of placing the youth under such competent tuition. And so thoroughly did Raphael acquire not only his first master's style, but even such of his mannerisms as the broad shape of hands and feet and the languid turn of the heads, that from such internal evidence Morelli, the originator of the modern method of criticism, was able after more than three centuries of error to disprove Vasari's assertion that Raphael passed straight from his father's workshop into that of Perugino. Timoteo's influence is apparent even in works painted by Raphael at a time when he had come under the spell of the more powerful personality of Perugino, like the "Sposalizio" or "Betrothal of the Virgin," of 1504, in the Brera Gallery in Milan; but it is unmistakably in evidence in the three earliest pictures that bear Raphael's name: the "Vision of a Knight," at the National Gallery, the "St. Michael," at the Louvre, and the "Three Graces," at Chantilly. Not only the features which connect this group of pictures with the style of Timoteo Viti, but the timid meticulous execution and the naïve stiffness of the figures, mark them as works of Raphael's immature youth. The turn of the century, as we shall see, found Raphael at Perugia, so that the three pictures mentioned must have been painted before he had attained the age of seventeen. The panel of the "Three Graces," which, by the way, was obviously inspired by an antique cameo, was bought in 1885 by the Duc d'Aumale from Lord Dudley's collection for £25,000—surely a price without parallel for a work painted by a lad of sixteen! A portrait in chalk of the marvellously gifted, winsome boy by the hand of his first master is preserved at the University Galleries in Oxford.
The records of a lawsuit between some members of his family prove that Raphael was still at Urbino in 1499, since in the summer of this year he appeared as a witness in court. When the verdict was given in the following year, he had already left for Perugia to continue his studies as an assistant of Perugino. Again we find him before long assimilating the style of his new master so successfully and completely that, to use Vasari's words, "His copies cannot be distinguished from the original works of the master, nor can the difference between the performances of Raphael and those of Pietro be discerned with any certainty." Plagiarism in those days did not trouble the artistic conscience, and it is easy to trace in Raphael's pictures of that period entire groups that are borrowed from the elder master. Thus the "Crucifixion," painted about 1501 for a church in Città di Castello, and now in the collection of Dr. Ludwig Mond, is obviously based on Perugino's version of the same subject at St. Augustine's, Siena, whilst the whole upper part of the Vatican "Coronation of the Virgin" is "lifted" from an "Assumption" by Pietro. But this almost literal imitation was only a passing phase, whilst the great lesson of space-composition and the typically Umbrian gift of almost religious fervour in stating the peaceful glory of the Umbrian hill-land, which had been imparted to Raphael at Perugia, remained permanent acquisitions to his art.
