Raphael and the Cultivation of Genius

“ It is worth noting, perhaps, that when men of talent make great men of themselves, wrapping up in the cloak of genius and fronting the world mysteriously, and when this attitude [Pg 213] is tolerated by the public, there is reason to suspect that art fares ill. Since every extension lecturer knows that Raphael was part of a civilization greater than himself it seems unnecessary to treat a fashionable portrait-painter as though he were as inexplicable as an earthquake and as remote as the Matterhorn. ”

“ Lessing has asked whether Raphael would have been a less distinguished artist had he been born without hands: we might also enquire whether he might not have been as great a musician as he was painter if, instead of living during the historical high-water mark of painting, he had lived, under favourable personal influences, at the time of highly-developed and widespread musical genius. A great artist is always a great man, and if he finds the outlet for his talent closed on one side, he forces his way through on the other. ”

“ They have been the effect of power gathering strength from exercise, and warmth from its own impulse—stimulated to fresh efforts by conscious success, and by the surprise and strangeness of a new world of beauty, opening to the delighted imagination. The triumphs of art were victories over the difficulties of art; the prodigies of genius, the result of that strength which had grappled with nature. Titian copied even a plant or a piece of common drapery from the objects themselves; and Raphael is known to have made elaborate studies of the principal heads in his pictures. ”

“ Here, when he arrived in 1504, Leonardo da Vinci in his productive forties and the young Michelangelo in his revealing later twenties were at work at their famous historical cartoons, and the atmosphere of the city was deeply imbued with the Renaissance spirit. It is a little difficult now to think of Raphael as merely a young struggling artist, making his living by painting portraits for rather commonplace people, and executing his earlier Madonnas for private oratories, partly from love of his work but mainly because he needed the money, yet this constituted his occupation. ”

“ A haughty individualist like Leonardo da Vinci insists that his investigations of appearance and reality lead to that knowledge of God without which love is impossible. And the Golden Age of painting itself, though mostly based on corporate and individual pride, has also its infusion of humility. If Michelangelo represents the flowering of three generations of research, of that pride of intellect which ever ruled Florence, so equally does Raphael represent many generations of humility and teachableness in his native Umbria. ”

“ His stay in Venice lasted about a year. In the fall of 1506, he returned to Nuremberg, and there remained for the next fourteen years, engaged in the practice of his art. These years were years of success and prosperity. His name and fame had spread over the whole of Europe, and the greatest artists of the day were glad to do him homage. Raphael said of him, when contemplating some of his designs, "Truly this man would have surpassed us all, if he had the masterpieces of ancient art constantly before his eyes as we have." ”

“ It has become a disagreeable tangle of legs, a display of over-muscular arms which support nothing—a welter of histrionic gestures. The clew to the trouble is in the effective but meaningless pose of the woman at the right, which is borrowed directly from Michelangelo’s Madonna of the Doni Family. Figure 195. The landscape no longer liberates the spirit, but almost crowds the figures out of the frame. Doubtless so self-critical an artist as Raphael learned much from this failure. ”

“ Zeal and diligence, in this view, make life, short as it is, long.—Neither did Raphael, it should seem, found his historical pretensions on his incapacity to paint a good portrait. On the contrary, the latter here looks very much like the corner-stone of the historical edifice. Nature did not put him out. He was not too great a genius to copy what he saw. He probably thought that a deference to nature is the beginning of art, and that the highest eminence is scaled by single steps! ”

“ Yet, if we follow the actual growth of his powers, within their proper framework, the age of the Renaissance—an age of which we may say, summarily, that it enjoyed itself, and found perhaps its chief enjoyment in the attitude of the scholar, in the enthusiastic acquisition of knowledge for its own sake:—if we thus view Raphael and his works in their environment we shall find even his seemingly mechanical good fortune hardly distinguishable from his own patient disposal of the means at hand. ”

“ In a word, these invaluable remains of antiquity are precisely like casts taken from life. The ideal is not the preference of that which exists only in the mind, to that which exists in nature; but the preference of that which is fine in nature to that which is less so. There is nothing fine in art but what is taken almost immediately, and, as it were, in the mass, from what is finer in nature. Where there have been the finest models in nature, there have been the finest works of art.
As the Greek statues were copied from Greek forms, so Raphael’s expressions were taken from Italian faces ”

“ As an artist, we can not believe that he can be surpassed. He unites in his wondrous individuality the two master faculties, which are, so to speak, the poles of human nature, whose combination in the same individual creates the sovereign greatness of the Tuscan school,—invention and judgment,—a vast and fiery imagination, directed by a method precise, firm, and safe." Raphael lacks the grandeur and the many-sided capacity of the great master by whom he was much influenced. Raphael "had a nature which converted every thing to beauty." ”

“ But if we estimate a man's artistry by the same standard, whatever the form of art in which it expresses itself, rating him by his power of co-ordinating and composing notes or forms or colors into a harmonious and beautiful unity, then must we place Raphael pretty near where he used to be placed, admitting but a choice few of the very greatest to any equality with him. ”

“ This is the secret of the greatness of Raphael as a pictorial poet, that he could do all manner of new things merely by holding all the old means in his grasp. This is the secret of those wonderful inventions of his, which do not take our breath away like Michelangelo's or Rembrandt's, but seem at the moment the one and only right rendering of the subject: the Liberation of St. ”

“ However that be, Raphael in the glorious years from 1500 to 1512 resumes and perfects every gentle, orderly, and reasonable strain in Italian painting. Whether in portraiture or narrative, in mythology or symbolism, in pictures of the Madonna or in pure decoration, he gave to Italian painting its final stamp. He achieved a grandeur of space composition akin to the movement of a symphony, a hidden structure more appealing than any separate hue or form. His best work rests on a great humility, and his later pride went far towards undoing him as an artist. ”

“ Raphael was the first of the moderns to idealise beauty, or, in other words, to represent nature in the form she is striving, in her infinite progression, to attain, but which as yet she only indicates here and there in those hints and parts that prophetic genius combines and moulds into a whole. He softened the harsh outlines, mellowed the glaring colours, and harmonised the awkward proportions of mediæval art. ”

“ Faultless, pure, gracious, and beautiful as some fair and virgin bride was the noble production of genius that met his astonished gaze. With wonder and admiration he recognised the work of a pencil that revived the glories of ancient art. A profound study of Raphael was manifest in the noble elevation of the attitudes; there was a something Correggian in the skilful handling and careful finish. But there was no servile imitation of any painter; the artist had sought and found in his own soul the divine spark that gave life to his creation. ”

“ They are not Italians whom he paints, but women raised above what is national. Leonardo's, Correggio's, Titian's, Murillo's, and Rubens's Madonnas are all in some respects affected by their masters' nationality; a faint suggestion of Italian or Spanish or Flemish nature pervades their forms. Raphael alone could give to his Madonnas that universal human loveliness, and that beauty which is a possession common to the European nations compared with other races. ”

“ Raphael has been called the most marvellous union of all the qualities which make the others severally great: design, color, power of chiaroscuro, perspective effect, imagination, style; above all, expression, and that grace which is the beautiful of beauties. Not only were his first essays, when still a faithful disciple of the Umbrian school, works of faith; but also those which he wrought in his zenith, such as the Attila, Heliodorus, and the miracle of Bolsena. His delight was in symbolic subjects, theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, poetry, representing ideas in his figures. ”

“ Raphael, while he felt all the greatness of the Florentine, conceived that there might be something more like nature—something that should be harmonious, sweet, and flowing—that should convey the idea of intellectual rather than of external majesty. Without yielding any of the correctness of science, he avoided harshness, and imitated antiquity in uniting grace and elegance with a strict observation of science and of the rules of art. ”

“ Far too much has been written about Raphael in general, but not half enough about Raphael as a portrait-painter; for by the side of the eclectic idealist, who combined and balanced beauty almost into insipidity, is the most terribly, inflexibly veracious portrait-painter that ever was. Compared with those sternly straightforward portraits of his Florentine and Roman time, where ugliness and baseness are never attenuated by one tittle, and alloyed nobility or amiability, as with his finer models, like the two Donis, husband and wife, and Bibbiena, is never purified of its troubling element ”

“ Here we at length discover the real and abiding superiority of Raphael. It is not that he pre-eminently surpasses in one of the faculties of genius, [Pg 144] but he has embodied in his labours more of the requisites of perfection than any other of the modern masters. In grandeur of invention and form, he is inferior to Michael Angelo. Titian surpasses him in coloring, Corregio in gradation of tone. This superiority, however, becomes visible only where each of the qualities becomes the ruling sentiment of the work. ”

“ Leonardo had more depth, Michael Angelo more grandeur, Correggio more sweetness; but none of them approached Raphael as an exponent of beauty whether in young or old, in mortals or immortals, in earthly or divine beings.
"Raphael was in truth the greatest of artists, because the most comprehensive, blending as he did the opposing tendencies of the mystics and the naturalists into a perfect whole by reverent study of nature and of the antique. ”

“ He lived at a time when artists were fiercely jealous of each other, and yet wherever he went harmony, like a good angel, walked unseen beside him, making whatever assembly he entered the abode of peace and good-will. It is a beautiful thing that such a strong, lovable man should have had for his name that of the chief of the archangels, Raphael, a name beautiful of sound and ever suggestive of beauty and loveliness. ”

“ Often in examining the lives of great men we are compelled to pass over some events which, to say the least, are not creditable. Of Raphael this was not true. He was gifted with all admirable qualities, and so many-sided was his genius that, while we think of him first as a painter, we must not forget that he also carved statues, wrote poems, played musical instruments, and planned great buildings. ”

“ This letter has been declared a monument to the industry and the archaeological learning of the artist. Ordinarily in the modern time we are likely to think that the artist devotes himself to his painting and leaves to the professional scholar such work as this. We do not look for many-sidedness in the artist. Raphael, however, like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, evidently had a magnificent breadth of intellect that would have given the most precious fruits of the spirit in many lines besides painting, had he only lived to anything like the years of so many of his great contemporaries. ”

“ His remaining nine years added certain remarkable portraits, the Castiglione, the Leo X, Figure 190, the Fornarina and the young Cardinal at Madrid, one sublime altar-piece, in the Sistine Madonna; a dramatic masterpiece in the Transfiguration, and a few frescoes. But in the main these are years of retrogression. His popularity had got beyond his power to utilize it. Michelangelo in 1512 had unveiled the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Raphael, with all Rome, felt qualities of energy and grandeur which he himself lacked, and, with less than his usual intelligence, began a fruitless emulation. ”

“ It is this which gives to Raphael, who yields to Titian in color, such acknowledged eminence. His soul was brimming with sympathies, which his cunning hand kept alive in immortal pictures. Eye, mouth, countenance, the whole composition, has life,—not the life of mere imitation, copied from common Nature, but elevated, softened, refined, idealized. Beholding his works, we forget the colors in which they are robed; we gaze at living forms, and look behind the painted screen of flesh into living souls. A genius so largely endowed with the Promethean fire has been not unaptly called Divine. ”

“ RAPHAEL OF URBINO.
"In the history of Italian art Raphael stands alone, like Shakespeare in the history of our literature; and he takes the same kind of rank—a superiority not merely of degree, but of quality.... His works have been an inexhaustible storehouse of ideas to painters and to poets. Everywhere in art we find his traces. Everywhere we recognize his forms and lines, borrowed or stolen, reproduced, varied, imitated,—never improved. ”

“ His art directorship proves the genius of the man. His workshop at Rome gradually took on the character of a school of art. In this designs were prepared not only for fresco but for mosaic work, for tapestry, for the carving of wood and stone and even for engraving and other phases of art. Vasari mentions fifty scholars who were employed as pupils and assistants in this workshop. In the meantime Raphael's interest in art history and his passion for classical art led him to dispatch artists to Naples and Athens, to make drawings of noteworthy antiquities that had been discovered. ”