Famous European Artists

by Sarah Knowles Bolton

The eyes of the Virgin look at you, but they do not see you. The eyes are thinking—looking back into her past with its mysteries; looking forward perchance into a veiled but significant future. These eyes, once seen, are never forgotten, and you go again and again to look at them.

Raphael's "Christ Bearing the Cross" (Lo Spasimo) is considered a masterpiece, from its drawing and expression. Some think it equal to "The Transfiguration." The ship which was carrying it to Palermo was lost with all on board. Nothing was recovered save this picture, which, uninjured, floated in a box into the harbor of Genoa. It is now in Madrid.

Another well-known work of Raphael is "St. Cecilia," listening to the singing of six angels, her eyes raised to heaven in ecstasy. A musical instrument is slipping from her hand while she listens, entranced, to playing so much more wonderful than her own. On her right are St. Paul and St. John; on her left Mary Magdalene, with St. Augustine. Cecilia was a rich and noble Roman lady who lived in the reign of Alexander Severus. She was married at sixteen to Valerian, who, with his brother Tiburtius, was converted to Christianity by her prayers. Both these men were beheaded because they refused to sacrifice to idols, and Cecilia was shortly after condemned to death by Almachius, Prefect of Rome. She was shut up in her own bath-room, and blazing fires kindled that the hot vapor might destroy her; but she was kept alive, says the legend, "for God sent a cooling shower which tempered the heat of the fire."

The prefect then sent a man to her palace, to behead her, but he left her only half killed. The Christians found her bathed in her blood, and during three days she still preached and taught, like a doctor of the church, with such sweetness and eloquence that four hundred pagans were converted. On the third day she was visited by Pope Urban I., to whose care she tenderly committed the poor whom she nourished, and to him she bequeathed the palace in which she had lived, that it might be consecrated as a temple to the Saviour. She died in the third century.

This masterpiece of color was sent to Bologna, having been ordered by a noble Bolognese lady, Elena Duglioni, for a chapel which she built to St. Cecilia. Raphael sent the picture to his artist friend Francesco Francia, asking that he "make any correction he pleased, if he noticed any defect." It is stated that Francia was so overcome at the sight of this picture that he died from excessive grief because he felt that he could never equal it.

Shelley wrote concerning this work, "Standing before the picture of St. Cecilia, you forget that it is a picture as you look at it, and yet it is most unlike any of those things which we call reality. It is of the inspired and ideal kind, and seems to have been conceived and executed in a similar state of feeling to that which produced among the ancients those perfect specimens of poetry and sculpture which are the baffling models of succeeding generations. There is a unity and a perfection in it of an incommunicable kind. The central figure, St. Cecilia, seems wrapt in such inspiration as produced her image in the painter's mind; her deep, dark, eloquent eyes lifted up, her chestnut hair flung back from her forehead: she holds an organ in her hands; her countenance, as it were, calmed by the depth of her passion and rapture, and penetrated throughout with the warm and radiant light of life. She is listening to the music of heaven, and, as I imagine, has just ceased to sing, for the four figures that surround her evidently point, by their attitudes, towards her, particularly St. John, who, with a tender, yet impassioned gesture, bends his countenance towards her, languid with the depth of his emotion. At her feet lie various instruments of music, broken and unstrung. Of the coloring I do not speak; it eclipses Nature, yet it has all her truth and softness."

Raphael was now loaded with honors. Henry VIII. urged him to visit England and become attached to his court. Francis I. was eager to make him court painter of France. Often the artist shut himself up in his palace, and applied himself so closely to his books and pictures that people said he was melancholy. He was so deeply interested in history that he thought of writing some historical works. He had planned and partially completed a book on ancient Rome, which should reproduce to the world the city in its former grandeur. He left a manuscript on art and artists, which Vasari found most valuable in his biographies. He sent artists into all the neighboring countries to collect studies from the antique. He loved poetry and philosophy.

Several artists lived in his home, for whom he provided as though they were his children. Among others in his house lived Fabius of Ravenna, concerning whom Calcagnini, the pope's secretary, wrote, "He is an old man of stoical probity, and of whom it would be difficult to say whether his learning or affability is the greater. Through him Hippocrates speaks Latin, and has laid aside his ancient defective expressions. This most holy man has this peculiar and very uncommon quality of despising money so much as to refuse it when offered to him, unless forced to accept it by the most urgent necessity. However, he receives from the pope an annual pension, which he divides amongst his friends and relations. He himself lives on herbs and lettuces, like the Pythagoreans, and dwells in a hole which might justly be named the tub of Diogenes. He would far rather die than not pursue his studies....

"He is cared for as a child by the very rich Raphael da Urbino, who is so much esteemed by the pope; he is a young man of the greatest kindness and of an admirable mind. He is distinguished by the highest qualities. Thus he is, perhaps, the first of all painters, as well in theory as in practice; moreover, he is an architect of such rare talent that he invents and executes things which men of the greatest genius deemed impossible. I make an exception only in Vitruvius, whose principles he does not teach, but whom he defends or attacks with the surest proofs, and with so much grace that not even the slightest envy mingles in his criticism.

"At present he is occupied with a wonderful work, which will be scarcely credited by posterity (I do not allude to the basilica of the Vatican, where he directs the works): it is the town of Rome, which he is restoring in almost its ancient grandeur; for, by removing the highest accumulations of earth, digging down to the lowest foundations, and restoring everything according to the descriptions of ancient authors, he has so carried Pope Leo and the Romans along with him as to induce every one to look on him as a god sent from heaven to restore to the ancient city her ancient majesty.