Raphael

“ It would be difficult to describe the adorable expression of goodness in his pale, mild face, as pure as the most ideal creations of Raphael's pencil—for that divine artist alone could have caught the melancholy grace of those exquisite features, the serenity of that celestial look, from eyes limpid and blue as those of an archangel, or of a martyr ascended to the skies. ”

“ If the Venetian master does not soar as high as Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, those figures so vast, so mysterious, that clouds even now gather round their heads and half-veil them from our view; if he has not the divine suavity, the perfect balance, not less of spirit than of answering hand, that makes Raphael an appearance unique in art, since the palmiest days of Greece; he is wider in scope, more glowing with the life-blood of humanity, more the poet-painter of the world and the world's fairest creatures, than any one of these. ”

“ The single reproach brought against Raphael as a painter is that—according to some witnesses only, for most deny the implication—Raphael so delighted in material beauty that he became enslaved by it, till it diminished his spiritual insight. It is an incontestable truth that in Raphael, as in all the great Italian painters of his century, there was a falling away from the simple earnestness, the exceeding reverence, the endless patience, the self-abstraction, and self-devotion of the earliest Italian and Flemish painters. ”

“ But we must not fall into the grave mistake of imagining that there was any want of vigour and variety in Raphael's grace and tenderness, or that he could not in his greatest works rise into a grandeur in keeping with his subject. Tire as we may of hearing Raphael called the king of painters, as the Greeks tired of hearing Aristides called 'the just,' this fact remains: no painter has left behind him such a mass of surpassingly good work; in no other work is there the same charm of greatest beauty and harmony. ”

“ For Raphael, by a happier instinct, he reserved man, the microcosm, the symbol of powerful grace, incarnate intellect. This quaint fancy of the Milanese critic touches the truth. What distinguishes the whole work of Raphael, is its humanity in the double sense of the humane and human. Phoebus, as imagined by the Greeks, was not more radiant, more victorious by the marvel of his smile, more intolerant of things obscene or ugly. Like Apollo chasing the Eumenides from his Delphian shrine, Raphael will not suffer his eyes to fall on what is loathsome or horrific. ”

“ We stand with awe before M. Angelo, and tremble at the height to which he elevates us—we embrace Raphael, and follow him wherever he leads us. Energy, with propriety of character and modest grace poise his line and determine his correctness. Perfect human beauty he has not represented; no face of Raphael’s is perfectly beautiful; no figure of his, in the abstract, possesses the proportions that could raise it to a standard of imitation: form to him was only a vehicle of character or pathos, and to those he adapted it in a mode and with a truth which leaves all attempts at emendation hopeless. ”

“ For the youthful Raphael, on the other hand, at that moment, antiquity, as with "the dew of herbs," seemed therein "to awake and sing" out of the dust, in all its sincerity, its cheerfulness and natural charm. He has turned it into a picture; has helped to make his original only too familiar, perhaps, placing the three sisters against his own favourite, so unclassic, Umbrian background indeed, but with no trace of the Peruginesque ascetic, Gothic meagreness in themselves; emphasising rather, with a hearty acceptance, the nude, the flesh; making the limbs, in fact, a little heavy. ”

“ As Raphael in these works, no painter has ever done so much for the real excellence of the art, nor, in the principles upon which they are conducted, has placed improvement on precepts so pure, so unerring. All that [Pg 138] imagination could lend to a strictly imitative art he has added, yet has infused into its creations the warmest sensibilities of life; to nature he has given all that grace and fancy can bestow, consistent with the sweetest of all charms—leaving her nature still. On this account is Raphael, of all great names in art, the safest to adopt as the guide of taste and practice. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No painter has surpassed Raphael in the beauty of the figures which his divine pencil produced; but if this great painter had been asked what beauty was, he would probably have replied that he could not say, that he knew it by heart, and that he thought he had reproduced it whenever he had seen it, but that he did not know in what it consisted. ”

“ If his light has shone even in this dark den, what a luster will it shed in some high position, where the world can see its brightness! Raphael is so unlike all other men whom I have met with; wherever he be, he will exercise power, and that power will be exerted for good. ”

“ It is in his smaller pieces that the genuine character of Raphael's paintings is to be seen—in the figure of St Michael subduing the demon; in the beautiful tenderness of the Virgin and Child; in the unbroken harmony of the Holy Family; in the wildness and piety of the infant St John;—scenes, in which all the objects of the picture combine for the preservation of one uniform character, and where the native fineness of his mind appears undisturbed by the display of temporary passion, or the painful distraction of varied suffering. ”

“ The clear wintry sun shines on those upturned heads, and the blue unclouded sky forms a brilliant background to features of so much fire and animation, such coal-black kindling eyes, and figures of so much artistic outline and perfection, that the very originals of some of Raphael's master-pieces seem again presented to our view, and we recognise faces whose lineaments are familiar to us in the Sacrifice at Lystra, or the Preaching at Athens. ”

“ Such were the subjects which Raphael chose; faces imbued with unalterable sentiment, and figures, that stand in the eternal silence of thought. He places before you objects of everlasting interest, events of greatest magnitude, and persons in them fit for the scene and action—warriors and kings, princes and nobles, and, greater yet, poets and philosophers ”

“ As a painter and draughtsman Raphael is perhaps outclassed by Bouguereau, Cabanel or Lefevre of our own time, and as a composer of either decorative or pictorial design he has had superiors. But the work of Raphael possesses the loving unction of real conviction and nothing to which he put his well trained hand failed of the baptism of genius. Through this mark, therefore, it will live forever. Nor should any work require more than this for continuous life. Each age should be distinctive. ”

“ The vast mass of Raphael's works is by itself astounding. The accuracy of their design and the perfection of their execution are literally overwhelming to the imagination, that attempts to realise the conditions of his short life. There is nothing, or but very little, of rhetoric in all this world of pictures. The brain has guided the hand throughout, and the result is sterling poetry. The knowledge, again, expressed in many of his frescoes is so thorough that we wonder whether in his body lived again the soul of some accomplished sage. ”

“ And as she saw Raphael’s dark face gazing into her own and read the words that told of the Erzerum tragedy of more than twenty years ago and that spoke of Raphael as a hero, ready to avenge, she felt care slip from her shoulders just as years before she had felt quick relief upon the setting down of her great bundle on some friendly doorstep. ”

“ Interspersed with him at the Pitti hang the stronger and the weaker in splendid abundance. Raphael is there, strong in portraiture--easy, various, bountiful genius that he was--and (strong here isn't the word, but) happy beyond the common dream in his beautiful "Madonna of the Chair." The general instinct of posterity seems to have been to treat this lovely picture as a semi-sacred, an almost miraculous, manifestation. People stand in a worshipful silence before it, as they would before a taper- studded shrine. ”

“ It is the same union in kind with what you may observe in his portrait, where masculine character is so blended and tempered with feminine grace and flexibility. Raphael is the clear, deep, beautiful eye, in which and through which is seen the undoubted heaven. ”

“ The inspiration of Raphael was of the noblest order. His genius, his kindling enthusiasm, his ecstasy of religious devotion, have left an imperishable heritage to art. By his transcendent gifts he represents the highest manifestation of the art of painting in the Renaissance. For the true note in art lies in spiritual perception. ”

“ Raphael departed in a hard, bitter rage. He was resolved to fight like a man against his strange fate. He would follow the example of the former owner of the magic skin, and give himself up to study and meditation, and live his life in the tranquil acquisition of knowledge, undisturbed by passion and desire, and lust for power, and dominion and glory. ”

“ Raphael never attained in any other of his works such solemn depth of colour, such majesty of character, as in this triumph of his art. “Never was sorrow like unto the sorrow” he has depicted in the Virgin’s countenance and attitude; never was the expression of a sublime and God-like calm in the midst of acute suffering conveyed more closely home to the human heart than in the face of Christ. ”

“ True, we discover no mixed modes of nature, such as impede her energies and cloud her beauties in ordinary life; yet the tranquil loveliness—the sinless beauty—the noble feeling of the representation—has nothing of the cold and merely imaginative. This, indeed, constitutes the great charm of Raphael's grace, that neither in form nor expression is it abstract; its power of moving is acquired directly from human sympathy. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Who was that old man over there, sitting beside a dancing-girl that Raphael had seen at Taillefer's? The owner of the curiosity shop! He had at last fallen in love, as Raphael had jestingly desired. No doubt the magic skin had shrunk under that wish before Raphael had measured it. A beautiful woman entered the theatre with a peer of France at her side. A murmur of admiration arose as she took her seat. She smiled at Raphael. In spite of the distorted image on his opera-glass, Raphael knew her. ”

“ SEWARD.
And, sir, when Raphael has told the Rebellion and Fall of the Angels, Adam, with a natural movement of curiosity, asks of this "Divine Interpreter" how this frame of things began?
NORTH.
And Raphael answers by declaring at large the Purpose and the Manner. The Mission of Raphael is to strengthen, if it be practicable, the Human Pair in their obedience. To this end, how apt his discourse, showing how dear they are to the Universal Maker, how eminent in his Universe! ”

“ If he approached genius in any part of art, it was in colour. His colour went beyond his age, and as far excelled in truth and breadth and handling the oil colour of Raphael, as Raphael excels him in every other quality. ”

“ On Milton's tuneful ear have died?
Think ye that Raphael's angel throng
Has vanished from his side?
O no!--We live our life again
Or warmly touched, or coldly dim,
The pictures of the Past remain,--
Man's works shall follow him! ”

“ If Raphael's favorite ideals were drawn from youth and womanhood, it was not because he did not understand the purely masculine. The Æneas of the Borgo fresco, the Paul of the Cecilia altar-piece, and the Sixtus of the Sistine Madonna show, in three ages, what is best and most distinctive in ideal manhood.
Raphael's type of beauty is not such as calls forth immediate or extravagant admiration: it is satisfying rather than amazing, and its qualities dawn slowly though steadily upon the imagination. Raphael holds always to the golden mean ”