Tiziano Vecelli Titian
(1477-1576)
The general progress of Raphael’s manner may be traced with sufficient certainty. He appears at first as little more than the ablest pupil of Pietro; inspired by all the warmth and tenderness of the Perugian school, but embarrassed by all his master’s timidity and littleness. When he had become acquainted with the bolder spirit and the better mechanism of the Florentines, we see how his genius gradually extricated itself, and how, though still guided by the devotional temper of his youthful models, he attained greater freedom both in handling and invention. In his earliest works at Rome he struggles to emerge into a sphere wider than either of these: his idealism is not lost, but it is strengthened by a more intimate acquaintance with life and nature; and both his fancy and his power of observation are rendered gradually more efficient by an improved technical skill, by greater ease and strength of drawing, by greater mastery of colour as well as of light and shade, and by rapid approaches towards that unity of conception and that breadth of design, which ennoble his finest works.
Till we find Raphael in Rome, we must be contented to trace his progress by his altar-pieces, and two or three portraits. Of genuine pictures belonging to this youthful period, and still in Italy, several possess very high merit; and one of these,—the Borghese Entombment,—painted after the artist had nearly emancipated himself from the Umbrian trammels, is equal to the best of his works both in expression and composition.
His great frescoes cover the walls and part of the roofs, in four of the state-rooms belonging to the old Vatican palace. The first chamber, called that of the Segnatura, was finished in 1511; and under the reign of the same pope, Julius II, the next apartment, named, from its main subject, that of the Heliodorus, was partly painted. After the accession of Leo X, the artist completed that chamber, and proceeded to the third, that of the Incendio, which he finished in 1517. For the fourth, the hall of Constantine, he left the designs, which were painted by his surviving pupils. Under Leo he also designed the small frescoes in the arcade called Raphael’s Loggie; and in the same pontificate he produced the celebrated Cartoons.[h]
With this brief summary, and with no more than a mere mention of the great Venetian painters, Titian and Tintoretti, and that other great contemporary painter Correggio, we must turn from the art of the period to catch the barest glimpse of the two or three literary figures of the time, before we turn back to the sweep of political events. Michelangelo himself was a poet, but we shall not attempt to deal here with this side of the multiform genius of that extraordinary man. Instead we shall turn to the central literary figure of the epoch, Ariosto.[a]
Ariosto
Lodovico Ariosto was born on the 8th of September, 1474, at Reggio, of which place his father was governor, for the duke of Ferrara. He was intended for the study of jurisprudence, and, like many other distinguished poets, he experienced a long struggle between the will of his father, who was anxious that he should pursue a profession, and his own feelings, which prompted him to the indulgence of his genius. After five years of unprofitable study, his father at length consented to his devoting himself solely to literature.
The Orlando Furioso of Ariosto is a poem universally known. It has been translated into all the modern tongues; and by the sole charm of its adventures, independently of its poetry, has long been the delight of the youth of all countries. It may therefore be taken for granted, that all the world is aware that Ariosto undertook to sing the Paladins and their amours at the court of Charlemagne, during the fabulous wars of this monarch against the Moors. If it were required to assign an historical epoch to the events contained in this poem, we must place them before the year 778, when Orlando was slain at the battle of Roncesvalles, in an expedition which Charlemagne made, before he was emperor, to defend the frontiers of Spain. But it may be conjectured, that the romance writers have confounded the wars of Charles Martel against Abd el Rahman, with those of Charlemagne; and have thus given rise to the traditions of the invasion of France by the Saracens, and of those unheard-of perils, from which the west of Europe was saved by the valour of the Paladins. Every reader knows that Orlando, of all the heroes of Ariosto the most renowned for his valour, became mad, through love for Angelica; and that his madness, which is only an episode in this long poem, has given its name to the whole of the composition, although it is not until the twenty-third canto that Orlando is deprived of his senses.