John Henry Middleton

“ A fine bronze screen, with open geometrical tracery, encloses the whole. No work of sculpture in Italy is more magnificent than this wonderful tabernacle, both in general effect and in the delicate beauty of the reliefs and statuettes with which it is so lavishly enriched. It cost the enormous sum of 96,000 gold florins. Unfortunately it is very badly placed and insufficiently lighted, so that a minute examination of its beauties is a work of difficulty.
No mention is made by Vasari of Orcagna's residence in Orvieto, where he occupied for some time the post of "capo maestro" to the duomo. ”

“ To the Florentine period belong some of his finest portraits, and it is especially in these that da Vinci's influence appears. The portraits of Angelo Doni and his wife Maddalena (Pitti) are vivid and carefully executed paintings, and the unknown lady with hard features (now in the Uflizi) is a masterpiece of noble realism and conscientious finish. The Czartoriski portrait, a graceful effeminate-looking youth with long hair and tapering hands, now moved to Cracow, is probably a work of this period; though worthy to rank with Raphael's finest portraits, its authenticity has been doubted. ”

“ The Temple of Jerusalem, a domed octagon with outer ambulatory in Perugino’s picture, is reproduced with slight alterations by Raphael, and the attitudes and grouping of the figures are almost exactly the same in both. The Connestabile Madonna is one of Raphael’s finest works, painted during his Perugian period; it is a round panel; the motive, the Virgin reading a book of hours, is a favourite one with him, as it was with his father Giovanni. This lovely picture was lost to Perugia in 1871, when Count Connestabile sold it to the emperor of Russia for £13,200. ”

“ He desired to be buried in the Pantheon, under the noble dome which he and Bramante had dreamed of rivalling. His body is laid beside an altar, which he endowed with an annual chantry, and on the wall over it is a plain slab, with an inscription written by his friend Cardinal Bembo. Happily his grave has as yet escaped the disfigurement of a pretentious monument such as those erected to Michelangelo, Dante and other great Italians ”

“ On the background is shown the facade of the old basilica of St Peter, not yet destroyed when this fresco was painted. One group on the left, in the foreground, is remarkable for its vigour and powerful drawing; the motive is taken from the burning of Troy; a fine nude figure of Æneas issues from the burning houses bearing on his back the old Anchises and leading the boy Ascanius by the hand. Some of the female figures are designed with much grace and dramatic power. Many studies for this picture exist. This is the last of the stanze frescoes on which Raphael himself worked. ”

“ As a military engineer he was as skilful as Giuliano, and carried out important works of walling and building fortresses at Arezzo, Montefiascone, Florence and Rome. His finest existing work as an architect is the church of S. Biagio at Montepulciano, in plan a Greek cross with central dome and two towers, much resembling, on a small scale, Bramante's design for St Peter's. He also built a palace in the same city, various churches and palaces at Monte Sansavino, and at Florence a range of monastic buildings for the Servite monks. ”

“ The first painting executed by Raphael in the stanze was the so-called Disputa, finished in 1509. It is very unlike the later ones in style, showing the beginning of transition from his Florentine to his “ Roman manner ”; as a decorative work it is very superior to the other frescoes; the figures are much smaller in scale, as was suited to the very moderate size of the room, and the whole is arranged mainly on one plane, without those strong effects of perspective which are so unsuited to the decorative treatment of a wall-surface. ”

“ With regard to statues of the goddess, though the Greek Hestia was frequently represented in plastic art, yet among the Romans Vesta appears to have been rarely so treated. The Athenian prytaneum contained a statue of Hestia. But there was no effigy in the Roman temple of Vesta, although one is commonly shown on reverses of coins which have a representation of the temple, and it appears to have been commonly thought in Rome that a statue of Vesta did exist inside her shrine—a mistake which Ovid corrects (Fasti, vi. 297–300) . ”

“ Lionardo or Nardo, the eldest, a painter; Matteo, a sculptor and mosaicist; and Jacopo, also a painter. They were frequently associated with Orcagna in his varied labours.
From the time of Giotto to the end of the 14th century Orcagna stands quite pre-eminent even among the many excellent artists of that time. In sculpture he was a pupil of Andrea Pisano; in painting, though indirectly, he was a disciple of Giotto. Few artists have practised with such success so many branches of the arts. Orcagna was not only a painter and sculptor, but also a worker in mosaic, an architect and a poet. ”

“ While still in the pay of Lorenzo, Giuliano visited Naples, and worked there for the king, who sent him back to Florence with many handsome presents of money, plate and antique sculpture, the last of which Giuliano presented to his patron Lorenzo. After Lorenzo's death in 1492, Giuliano visited Loreto, and built the dome of the church of the Madonna, in spite of serious difficulties arising from its defective piers, which were already built. In order to gain strength by means of a strong cement, Giuliano built his dome with pozzolana brought from Rome. ”

“ Though Raphael lost his father at the age of eleven, yet to him he certainly owed a great part of that early training which enabled him to produce paintings of apparently mature beauty when he was scarcely twenty years of age. The altarpiece painted by Giovanni for the church of Gradara, and a fresco, now preserved in the Santi house [3] at Urbino, are clearly prototypes of some of Raphael’s most graceful paintings of the Madonna and Child. ”

“ The progress of St Peterls was, however, too slow for him to leave much mark on its design. Another work of Bramante's completed, by Raphael, was the graceful Cortile di S. Damaso in the Vatican, including the loggie, which were decorated with stucco-reliefs and paintings of sacred subjects by his pupils under his own supervision, but only very partially from his designs? The Palazzo dell Aquila, built for Giovanni Battista Branconio, and destroyed in the 17th century during the extension of St Peter's, was one of Raphael's chief works as an architect. ”

“ This fire, the central hearth of the village (focus publicus) , became a sacred symbol of home and family life. The form of the primitive house in which the fire was preserved, probably a round hut made of wattled osiers daubed with clay, appears to have survived both in the circular prytaneum of the Greeks and in the Aedes Vestae (Temple of Vesta) in Rome. To Watch this fire would naturally be the duty of unmarried women, and hence may have arisen the Roman order of virgin priestesses, the vestals, whose chief duty it was to tend the sacred fire. ”

“ The other great picture in this room (No. 13) , the “Coronation of Charlemagne” (a portrait of Francis I. of France) , is so very inferior in composition that it is difficult to believe that Raphael even made a sketch for it. The enormous fresco of the “Defeat of Maxentius by Constantine” (room D, No. 17) was painted by Giulio Romano, soon after Raphael's death, from a sketch by the latter; it is even more harsh and disagreeable in colour than most of Giulio Romano's early frescoes. ”

“ The strong similarity both in design and methods of execution which runs through the works of this later Perugian school is very striking; paintings by Perugino, Pinturicchio, Lo Spagna and Raphael (in his first manner) may often be mistaken one for the other. In most cases, especially in the execution of large frescoes, pupils and assistants had a large share in the work, either in enlarging the master's sketch to the full-sized cartoon, in transferring the cartoon to the wall, or in painting backgrounds, drapery and other accessories. ”

“ The present dome and the drum on which it stands, masterpieces of graceful line and harmonious proportion, were very important alterations from the earlier scheme. As a scientific engineer and practical architect Wren was perhaps more remarkable than as an artistic designer. The construction of the wooden external dome, and the support of the stone lantern by an inner cone of brickwork, quite independent of either the external or internal dome, are wonderful examples of his constructive ingenuity. The first stone of the new St Paul's was laid on the 21st of June 1675 ”

“ The designs are reversed, and the colours far more brilliant than those of the cartoons, much gold and silver being introduced. The noble figure of Christ in the Delivery of the Keys to St Peter is in the tapestry much disfigured by the addition of a. number of large gold stars all over the drapery, which spoil the simple dignity of the folds. The rich framework round each picture, designed by Raphael's pupils, probably by Penni and Giovanni da Udine, exists in the tapestries and adds greatly to their decorative effect. ”

“ For him Raphael painted, in 1513–14, the very beautiful fresco of the Triumph of Galatea in his new palace by the Tiber bank, the Villa Farnesina, and also made a large series of magnificent designs from Apuleius's romance of Cupid and Psyche, which were carried out by a number of his pupils. [25] These cover the vault and lunettes of a large loggia (now closed in for protection) ; in colouring they are mostly harsh and gaudy, [26] as is usually the case with the works of his pupils, a great contrast to the fresco of the Galatea, the greater part of which is certainly the master's own work. ”

“ The most striking of all Pinturicchio’s frescoes, both for brilliance of colour and their wonderful state of preservation, are those in the cathedral library at Siena, a large room built in 1495 by Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini, afterwards Pius III. In 1502 the cardinal contracted with Pinturicchio to decorate the whole room with arabesques on the vault, and on the walls ten scenes from the life of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Pius II., the uncle of Cardinal Francesco. ”

“ A sober criticism of Raphael's architectural works must force one to refuse him a high position in this branch of art. In the church of S. Eligio and the Chigi chapel he is merely a copyist of Bramante, and his more original works show but little power of invention or even mastery of-the first principles of architectural design. ”

“ Pupils of Orcagna named by Vasari are Bernardo Nello, a Pisan, Tommaso di Marco, a Florentine, and, chief of all, Francesco Traini, whose grand painting on panel of St Thomas Aquinas enthroned with the arch-heretics at his feet still hangs in the church for which it was painted—Sta Caterina at Pisa. Orcagna had, in addition to the two daughters mentioned above, a son named Cione, who was a painter of but little eminence. Some sonnets attributed to Orcagna exist in MS. in the Strozzi and Magliabecchian libraries in Florence. ”

“ In this and the succeeding frescoes all notion of decorative treatment is thrown aside, and Raphael has simply painted a magnificent series of paintings, treated as easel pictures might have been, with but little reference to their architectural surroundings.” The subject of this noble fresco, in contrast to that opposite, is “ Earthly Knowledge, ” represented by an assembly of the great philosophers, poets and men of science of ancient Greece. ”

“ Several of Raphael's most important compositions are known to us only by these early engravings, e.g. the Massacre of the Innocents (engraved by Raimondi) , which is one of his finest works, both for skilful composition and for masterly drawing of the nude. Another magnificent design is the judgment of Paris, containing a large number of figures; the nude figure of Minerva is a work of especial force and beauty. A standing figure of Lucretia [28] about to stab herself is also one of his most lovely figures. Many of Raphael's studies for Marcantonio's engravings still exist. ”

“ The so-called Sketch Book of Raphael in the academy of Venice contains studies apparently from the cartoons of some of Perugino’s Sistine frescoes, possibly done as practice in drawing.
This celebrated collection of thirty drawings, now framed or preserve din portfolios, bears signs of having once formed a bound book, and has been supposed to be a sketch-book filled by Raphael during his Perugian apprenticeship. Many points, however, make this tempting hypothesis very improbable ”

“ The latest of these, known as Lo Spasimo, from the church at Palermo, for which it was painted, is one of Raphael's finest compositions, representing Christ bearing His Cross. It bears signs of Giulio Romano's hand in its heavy colouring with unpleasant purple tones. The Madonna called Della Perla has much changed from the darkening of the pigments; in design it recalls Leonardo da Vinci.4 The small Madonna della Rosa is the most perfect in colour of all the master's pictures in the Madrid Gallery, and is usually rather undervalued ”

“ From Roman times till the end of the 16th century the art of working in niello seems to have been constantly practised in some part at least of Europe, while in Russia and India it has survived to the present day. From the 6th to the 12th century a large number of massive and splendid works in the precious metals were produced at Byzantium or under Byzantine influence, many of which were largely decorated with niello ”

“ Many interesting portraits are introduced-Bramante as the aged Archimedes, stooping over a geometrical diagram; a beautiful, fair-haired youth on the left is Francesco Maria della Rovere, duke of Urbino; and on the extreme right figures of Raphael himself and Sodoma are introduced (see fig. 5, below) . The stately building in which these groups are arranged is taken with modifications from Bramante's first design for St Peter's. ”

“ Perugino, who outlived his wonderful pupil, completed in 1 521 Raphael's San Severo fresco in a style differing but little from his paintings executed in the previous century. In versatility of power Raphael (as a painter) remains almost without a rival; whether painting an altar-piece for a church, a large historical fresco, a portrait or decorative scenes from classical mythology, he seems to excel equally in each ”

“ His importance in the history of Italian art rests not merely on his numerous and beautiful productions, but also on his widespread influence, transmitted to his successors through a large and carefully-trained school of pupils. ”

“ V. Antonio di Sangallo, the younger (1485?-1546) , another nephew of Giuliano, went while very young to Rome, and became a pupil of Bramante, of whose style he was afterwards a close follower. He lived and worked in Rome during the greater part of his life, and was much employed by several of the popes. His most perfect existing work is the brick and travertine church of S. Maria di Loreto, close by Trajan's column, a building remarkable for the great beauty of its proportions, and its noble effect produced with much simplicity. The lower order is square in plan, the next octagonal ”