Thinking about the nature of creative genius with Raphael - arguably the most important painter in the arts of the West. For good or ill...
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Raphael, The Transfiguration of Jesus, 1519, oil on canvas, Vatican Museums
The last piece of the High Renaissance puzzle is the most challenging. [Click for Leonardo part 1, Leonardo part 2, and Michelangelo] We've mentioned Raphael of Urbino a few times - always in the context of a talent that seems more then human. Like techne unfiltered by a mind or hand. As with all these guys, there's way too much material to try and look into, so we'll hit the highlights and consider implications for the arts and culture of the West. This will wrap up the main High Renaissance players so we can turn to the broader culture and start moving towards Modernism again.
The problem with Raphael is that the more we look at his painting and drawing, the more inexplicable and singular he becomes. Which is fine. We'd encourage any reader interested in art to explore him - you'll keep finding plenty that we've missed. He's that deep.
Ernst Julius Hähnel, Raffael, 1877, metal, Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna
Raphael was born in 1483 in Urbino and died too soon in 1520. But his impact on the Renaissance was definitive - changing the very understanding of what art could be. It's early in the journey, but after researching and writing this post, we feel his influence on the arts of the West is unsurpassed.
19th-century Germans idolized Raphael. It's connected to the idolization of the Renaissance we saw a few posts ago. Ironically, it looks like the idolization obscured the true genius.
The first big picture thing is the matter of artistic talent. We find that deep dive posts on any topic always turn up new things - it comes from superimposing specific ideas on general patterns and observing what happens.
Aside - This would be what the kernel of truth in hoary buzzword "interdisciplinarity" means. Consistencies across domains that can be missed or fall through the cracks in the practical need to categorize knowledge. It's typical of beast system ideals in that it's perfectly reasonable on the surface - so long as you remain in truth in whatever "discipline" you're in.
This isn't just rhetoric - there's a logical problem here. It telescopes all the way out to the fundamental parting of ways implicit in Creation itself. The basic moral fork between the order of Creation - the divine, the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, Providence, or whatever one calls the willed act that initiates temporal causal reality - and the inversion. Chaos, dissolution, atavism, the ugly, oppressive, and debased.
Jan Brueghel the Younger, The Spirit of God Hovering over the Waters (Genesis 11), 17th century, oil on copper, private
Disciplines are orderings. Like any material human structure they fall short of absolute, ontologically-abstract Truth. This should be self-evident, not grounds for dismissal. What matters is how well their internal structures manage to materialize whatever abstract logic is expressed by their subject materials. A discipline that remains Logos-centered may grow down odd paths and may make errors. But it will also remain consistent with what's knowable and can continually self-correct.
Interdisciplinarity should be obviously useful - in sane contexts we call it "assembling a team". Before clusters of bodies had to "meet" for the most mundane tasks and groups paired skills to needs. Different knowledge windows onto the same reality. Like archaeologists and classics scholars working together to piece together ancient Greece.
Louis Comfort Tiffany, John the Baptist Window
Use a metaphor. In a Tiffany window, pieces of his custom glass inventions were chosen so that they looked like a picture when put together. He preferred to keep paint to a minimum and rely on glass effects as much as he could. So there is some painting but less then the glass masterpieces of other eras like the Gothic or Victorian England.
In this window, the face is painted but foliage and drapery are glass color and textures
Individually, the you can see how the piece might sort of look like something - but nothing like the finished window. The pieces form a more beautiful picture when logically ordered.
Is the picture a perfect illusion of the real thing? Of course not. But a discipline isn't really the ancient Greece, or outer space, or inner parts of a cell that it studies. It's a logically-ordered picture made of information "pieces" that represent some aspect of reality... when logically ordered.
Interdisciplinarity ought to be a logically-ordered combination of logical orders that forms a more beautiful information "picture". But the beast system also has to reject the possibility of non-relative "truth". So there can't be a common subject or reality for the different disciplines to target.
Marco Battaglini, Amore della mia vita
Consider - the implicit value of order comes from it's harmony with Creation as an act. It's how timeless Truth registers to our material, temporal minds. Logos ties it together - or it's 'do what thou wilt' from tyranny to mass death' to 'gray goo'.
Why that means... the same beast system that pushed interdisciplinarity as a path to deeper knowledge was banishing the ideas of truth and order that disciplines need to exist. Whenever reasons don't align with actions, look for the real reason. The real goal is non-disciplinarity, or...
And as always, the beauty of discourse is that it's fake, so it can be whatever is needed.
"Interdisciplinarity" was just a smokescreen for theory. And theory was squid ink over the dissolution of logical structure in intellectual culture. The postmodern academic version of gray goo that turned disciplines from systematized slices of reality to projections of beast narrative. Perversely, there is a consistency between "disciplines" - convergence onto whatever theory de jour is en rampant in the wheezing satanic calliope.
The point is that interdisciplinarity as a concept makes total sense. As always, the real utility is in the people applying it.
Looking at Leonardo made us reflect on the nature of genius - something the beast system hates. Unless it's an absurd caracature intended to debase the notion. But the working concept of epochal intellect came out of looking at intelligence, big historical patterns, good pictures of Leonardo's actual art, and whatever our integrated ontology-epistemology is.
We better understand a key tragic irony of our fallen condition - cognitive outliers have more potential for impact and a more difficult time realizing that potential than we thought.
Leonardo da Vinci and workshop, Virgin of the Rocks, 2nd version, 1491-1499 and 1506-1508, oil on panel, National Gallery, London
To be epochal means being able to see in paradigm switching ways in a time and place where that fits. It's creative impact in general - just writ large. There has to be an applicability that is visible - all the murmured secrets about notebook formulas for limitless power are inconsequential if people can't make them. Even Leonardo - the secret notebook master - showcased paintings that instantly transformed the arts of the West forever. Not as big an impact as Newtonian physics on everyday life, but widely, publicly, lastingly visible.
By the fruits...
Raphael is a different sort of genius from Leonardo, but at least as exceptional. Perhaps moreso. Leonardo wasn't as smart as Aristotle or Newton. Consider the implications of that...
One of the bedrock components of the arts of the West is techne - and that means skill. But there's an extremity of skill that can't be taught. A mastery that is innate. But art is also episteme - Logos or Truth. And one can be blessed with manual dexterity while lacking deeper vision. Art represents their coming together in a phronesis. So beyond the extremity of skill and vision is the extremity of their interaction. The synthesis of technique and materials with visionary mind into something almost mystical. Sensory allure, intellectual beauty, divine Truth, and human accomplishment rolled into one impossible ball of culture-bursting revelation.
Center of the School of Athens - notice how all the figures harmonize into a nice even group. Lines almost radiate from the middle. But all the figures are beautifully, individually rendered. This is advancing art on almost too many levels at once to be real.
Raphael is changing how the West "sees" artistically and intellectually.
We call this genius too. And at the outermost limits you find those few creators that exhibit whatever the artistic equivalent of a epochal 200+ IQ is. A 200+ AQ? Raphael makes us consider that in a serious way.
These are individuals whose output seems almost miraculous. Too perfect even. Inhuman to some. The linguistic creativity of Shakespeare's plays times the speed at which he wrote them is a case in point. It's never happened before or since.
Note how no one is ever compared to Shakespeare overall. Some aspect perhaps, but not overall as a creator. Some people don't care for his work - subjectivity is bigger in aesthetic reactions than in most areas. But even the most slavering anti-Western critics have no critique of the quality of the work.
There may be any number of reasons why another Shakespeare hasn't come along - the beast system is hardly set up to filter and cultivate genius. But in any case, it is a literary achievement that is singular.
There isn't enough known of Shakespeare's biography to compare him to Raphael - the best match to us seems to be Mozart. Another child prodigy with a learned artistic mediocrity for a father and who kept developing through his too-short life. Both produced art of crystalline grace and beauty that seemed both effortless and technically perfect.
Raphael, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, around 1507, oil on panel, National Gallery
It's not just the fluid, graceful form that somehow is casual and elegant at once. Though that is part of it. It's when he was doing it too. Check the date. It's a medieval style theme of martyr-saint.
The facial type is based on ancient statues and Perugino. The use of shadows to give the face volume and smooth blended light and color had just been invented by Leonardo. But the way he spins it into something so elegant and casual is... just look at it.
Then look at his brush work - the marks from his paintbrush. Or try and find his brushwork. Not cracks from aging - rough marks of the brush.
The experience of looking at Raphael's drawings recalls the scene in Amadeus when Salieri flips through page after uncorrected page of flawless composition until he melts down. The range of his drawings is vast - from the quickest sketches to detailed arrangements with light and shade. And there never appear to be corrections or lines out of place. That surety and precision should not be possible with that loose ease over that range.
Some preparatory sketches in the Ashmolean Museum today show his inventive speed. A simple 15th century type figure, then rapid development of the pose with and without clothes. Down below, a quick draft of the face amid some rough cherub sketches.
We aren't sure how to put into words how how he creates such expressive figures with such simple lines.
From this into the finished sketch...
It just clicks together.
The new treatments of shadow and smooth modeling are straight out of Leonardo's new innovations. But Leonardo took painstaking efforts to sort out. Raphael seems to see it, get it, then do it.
We don't know what to call it, but it looks like an adaptive intellect.
The thing that strikes us the most is how full the drawing looks from a distance but is really simple up close. Relatively few basic lines and smudges that are insanely communicative. Whatever this mix of easy and profound is. we've not seen the like.
That smooth grace comes naturally. Probably why he could work and learn so fast.
Then there is the speed of adaptation. It appears that he absorbs any major innovation or excellence that he sees, and very quickly. But it isn't just mimicry. It's absorption. Each new idea is added to an continually expanding set of creative possibilities. It's another thing that makes him hard to talk about - there is no defining breakthroughs like Leonardo or lifelong struggle like Michelangelo. Just an endless, additive growth of an art so well-conceived and executed that it seems unreal.
Here's a big Perugino painting from around Raphael's birth year of 1483. Note the pleasant delicate colors and poses, even lighting, and overall feel of graceful tranquility. Despite the subject matter.
Pietro Perugino, Crucifixion with Mary and Saint John Evangelist, and Saint Mary Magdalene (Galitzin Triptych), 1482-1485, oil on panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington
Perugino's painting was very popular but formulaic - the two were related. He devised efficient workshop procedures to crank out paintings to meet the demand. This meant superimposing stock figures on separate backgrounds. Perugino faces also have a detached serene look that is similar in ways to classical detachment.
It's easy to see in a close-up. Clear even light, serene graceful figures, and charming backgrounds were all things that stay with Raphael.
Look at the feet. Then look at Jesus in the Transfiguration at the top of the post. There's a vast difference between assimilation and mimicry.
Before turning 20, Raphael painted a Crucifixion that is so similar to Perugino's style that experts have confused them in the past.
Raphael, The Crucified Christ with the Virgin Mary, Saints and Angels (The Mond Crucifixion), 1502-1503,
This is right before Florence and Leonardo.
The differences are already visible in the way the figures are organized into a 3D spatial arrangement rather then looking pasted onto a background. Jesus' anatomy and face are better rendered. And the body is given the appearance of mass with light and shade.
Put them together and it's easier to see.
Here's the advance in spatial arangement. It appears Raphael was proceeding along the same lines as Leonardo independently. It's not systematic in the same way. Intuitive realism comes from observing the appearance of the real world and trying to simulate the effects in paint.
The difference in the body and face is clear in close-up too. We didn't see anyone claim he dissected bodies like Leonardo and Michelangelo but his interest in anatomy and shading are pretty obvious.
That's the starting point. An enhanced version of the late-15th century state of the art. Seeing him dust Perugino so easily so young it's not surprising he was drawn to the news from Florence. He was accepted as an independent guild master at 17 - an unheard-of age and before his full majority!
A quick note on his background. Raphael's father was a court painter and poet in Urbino - the ideal Renaissance court immortalized in Castiglione's Book of the Courtier. So he grew up in one of the hotbeds of Renaissance humanist culture - even purer and more isolated than Michelangelo's Medici Florence. His impeccable manners and grace would have been instilled here. And as the prodigy son of a court artist, he had the attention of the ruling family right away.
Raphael, Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, 1514–1515, oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris
Castiglione and Raphael were very good friends. Both were part of Leo X's inner circle in Rome.
Raphael was orphaned at 11 - his mother had died earlier and his father remarried, leaving the boy and his widowed stepmother. They appear to have been close and Raphael takes on much of the responsibility for his household. This early maturity is something else that likely helped his continual success.
The real miracle of adaptation is his reaction to Leonardo. Doing Perugino better than Perugino is one thing - but in the last few posts we saw Leonardo apply epochal genius and sublime talent to completely rethink Western art. It's not that he was unappreciated - his art made him a celebrity and seemed to solve the problem of applying Classical ideals to paintings. It's that contemporaries couldn't fully grasp how he did it.
Leonardo, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist (The Burlington House Cartoon), 1499-1500, charcoal with white chalk on paper, mounted on canvas, National Gallery, London
Probably too many pieces. Leonardo spent a big chunk of his life carefully working out how light and shadow work, refining perspective, studying anatomy, harmonizing composition, and developing all the drawing techniques they entailed. The result was a new concept of art from the ground up. Imitators were superficial for the most part - three-quarter portraits with dark backgrounds and exaggerated shading.
Raphael was different. He seemed to pick up on the deeper rethinking - the conceptual frameworks of the new art - upon exposure. That's a slight exaggeration - it takes him a few years to fully absorb Leonardo's revolution. But he is onto it instantly. And working it out involved expanding the unified technical and conceptual innovations in multiple directions beyond Leonardo's imaginings.
First there's the techne. Start with Raphael before Florence. Watch the dates.
Raphael, St. Sebastian, 1501–1502, oil on wood, Accademia Carrara, Bergamo
It's a really good Perugino-style face. Smooth, sort of bland, and evenly lit. The flawless brushwork is already there - Raphael was a Mozart-esque child prodigy, and the techne aspects of his art were always incomparable. Even when the rest of the painting seems medieval.
Raphael, Head and shoulders of a young woman, 1502-1503, drawing, British Museum
Raphael's drawings are whole separate thing. We've never seen anything like the range, speed, control, and flawlessness ever. The same inhuman skill with the paintbrush carries to the pencil.
This one's really early - Perugino era. You can already see the natural efficiency. Look closely at how few lines he uses for a pretty good face.
Then he sees the Mona Lisa. Both versions.
He's in Florence on and off for a few years starting in 1504. This includes time around Leonardo and his studio. There is no record that we could find of their time together. But the encounter between the epochal mind that had just reinvented art and the absurd prodigy that intuitively got it must have been electrifying. Everything Leonardo had worked out, Raphael simply got and made his own. An intellect like Leonardo would have been utterly fascinated by a certain kind of mental process that he couldn't emulate.
Here are the Mona Lisas - the Islesworth version and the famous Louve one - both started around 1503-1504. Leonardo was working on them both when Raphael was around.
Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503-1506, maybe to 1517, oil on panel, Louvre, Paris; Isleworth Mona Lisa, from 1504, oil on canvas, private
Look what happens to Raphael's drawing.
Raphael, Young Woman on a Balcony, 1504-1505, drawing.
Suddenly shadows. Three-quarter portrait pose. 3D modeling. All in a quick sketch with no corrections or errors that looks like it took 10 minutes.
Note where the shadows are. Around the eyes and mouth. The same places Leonardo introduced them for expressive purposes.
A couple of years later and we're here. It's the same highly efficient use of minimal lines for maximum expression. It gives a spontaneity that Leonardo could never attain.
Painting is more difficult because the Perugino style is so different from Leonardo's smoky, dark palette and suggestive lighting. Introducing color brings way more than just light and shadow. Here's a transitional painting where you can see him bring the two together. Leonardo three-quarter pose, flowing gold hair, shadowed eyes and mouth, and Islesworth Madonna columns. Perugino's bright colors and lighting, clarity, and graceful air. Leonardo's atmospheric perspective, Perugino's pleasant landscape.
Raphael, Young Woman with Unicorn, 1505-1506, oil on panel; now on canvas, Galleria Borghese, Rome
The round flat face is a carry-over from Perugino, but he's added the wider range of blended tones and expressive shadow from Leonardo. This one is more interesting than breathtaking.
Doesn't take long to figure it out. This is only a year or two later...
By his Roman maturity the synthesis is perfect.
Raphael, Portrait of Bindo Altoviti, 15
Now he's better at Leonardo than Leonardo.
Leonardo came to stay at the Vatican when Raphael was there, before finishing out his life in the service of the King of France. We're just guessing, but anyone doubt that the opportunity to observe Raphael was a big draw? Leonardo more than anyone was able to appreciate just what was happening.
Raphael makes Leonardo's new art accessible and shows it's versatility and range. He also provides a roadmap for growth and experimentation within a Classical tradition by continually growing and changing while essentially inventing the Classical tradition in Western painting. Raphael is the main conduit for Leonardo's innovations into to become the arts of the post-medieval West. And the honorary equivalent to Classical sculpture and architecture in painting.
Raphael's famous Madonnas weren't just good income at the start of his career. Each variation was an opportunity to master Leonardo's new way of harmonizing complex individuated figures into simple idealized groups.
His School of Athens was painted around 1509 - between the St. Catherine and the Bindo Altoviti and after the lessons of the Madonnas. It's a huge scene that represents ancient philosophy with a crowd of thinkers centered on Plato and Aristotle. The painting is based on Leonardo's revolutionary Last Supper - a group of realistically individuated that come together into a higher unity. Raphael's is much bigger and more complex, but the coeection s easy to see when put togetherr.
We'd seen these pictures a lot of times but never noticed how close they were conceptually until we put them together. Plato and Aristotle even combine into Jesus' color scheme. This makes sense, because the philosophers are marching towards the symbol of theology on the opposite wall - the Disputa. Where the Truth hinted at by the ancients is revealed in its full glory.
These were the first two wall paintings in the first of a series of papal apartment rooms Raphael painted in the Vatican. They're probably the finest two paintings - mainly because he wasn't running the huge workshop and overseeing papal artistic and antiquarian works at the same time. This meant he did most of the actual painting himself rather than directing teams. So he's only entering his maturity creatively, but the work is pure.
His drawing may perhaps exceed his painting. Everything from the roughest figure concepts to careful renderings to full drafts of paintings...
Then there are things like this - an exquisitely harmonized group of figures, with each subtly individually characterized. With what appears to be minimal effort.
Raphael, Eight Seated Bishops, red chalk, circa 1516, Museum Kunstpalast, Dusseldorf
How about some prophet studies from after seeing Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel and other works in Rome?
Raphael, The Prophets Hosea and Jonah, 1510, pen and brown ink with brown wash over black chalk, heightened with white, National Gallery, London
One thing we keep seeing is how he only spends time on parts that need it. The rest is just cursorily sketched out to maintain spacing. The way he angles and adjusts figures is crazy.
We've been struggling with how to account for this in a practical way. How does he do it? What is going on? Ultimately, we don't know. We've never seen anything like it.
There have been other technicians with comparable control of the brush - Bouguereau comes to mind as that sort of historical outlier. His finished canvases are uncanny and close examination shows the same type of tiny, smooth brush marks. We weren't surprised to learn that Raphael and early photography's arrangements and coloring were his big influences.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, At The Fountain, 1897, oil on canvas, private
The style is different - late 19th century academic realism as opposed to Renaissance classicism. But he's the only painter we can think of whose brushwork is comparably precise and perfect.
Bouguereau painted from photos and emulated their effects. Note the sharp difference in focus between the subjects and all the background. No gradual recession into atmospheric perspective. It's jarring to see photographic optics and realism in what is obviously a painting. It gives Bouguereau an uncanny quality.
But technical painting skill is the only place Bouguereau even sniffs Raphael's career. There's none of the compositional genius on every scale or the preposterous range of magical drawing ability. He doesn't paint the huge ambitious subjects and is an inferior colorist despite better paints. And all he could paint was oil on canvas. Raphael's most impressive works are in fresco, he designed sculpture and mosaic, wrote poetry and was a professional architect, including the architect of St. Peter's. On the side, he oversaw antiquities and cultural activity for the papacy and literally became the first culture and heritage conservation overseer ever. It's hopelessly one-sided to the point of being pointless. Raphael seems like different species from Bouguereau in terms of imaginative scope, vision, compositional invention and versitility, range of talent in virtually every activity, and overall artistic ability.
Comparing Bouguereau to Raphael on anything other than technical skill with the brush is either cruelty or retardation.
None of that is to criticize Bouguereau as an artist. He was capable of staggering beauty and jaw-dropping techne. It's just that when you lay out the comparison across lives point by point you see what the AQ equivalent of Aristotle looks like.
Others have things they're matchless at - the masters of moonlight and water come to mind.
John Atkinson Grimshaw, A Lane In Headingley, Leeds, 1880s, oil on canvas, private; Ivan Aivazovsky Ship among the Stormy Seas, 1887, oil on canvas, private
Bierstadt's sublime light...
Albert Bierstadt, Sierra Nevada, 1871–1873, Reynolds House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Incidentally, note how much awesome painting was being produced in the late 19th century. These guys, Bouguereau, and many others. Painting was peaking right when Modernism hit. The crime is incalculable.
Caravaggio isn't from the Renaissance or the 19th century, but his chiaroscuro painting with it's intense light and dark and surface realism is another singular master.
Caravaggio, Saint Jerome Writing, 1605–06, oil on canvas, Galleria Borghese, Rome
We could go on but the point is made. The arts of the West are an indescribable wealth of talents spanning the history of our culture. Centuries of absolute masters enriching us with the unique things they're matchless at. But in every other way they - like Bouguereau - come up short.
When Raphael comes to Rome to work for Pope Julius II in 1509 he is exposed to the legacy of antiquity and the latest work from Michelangelo. The Sistine Chapel is underway just down the hall from the apartments with the School of Athens.
Raphael, Parnassus, 1510-11, fresco
The wall dedicated to Poetry and the Arts had a picture that's over 21' wide of Apollo - mythic patron of the arts - and the Nine Muses flanked by great poets of the past. The picture is between philosophy and theology - note the subtle inclination towards the left - theology - side. Poetic inspiration isn't prophecy, but Renaissance humanists believed that artistic talent and the wisdom it communicates came from God.
You can see it in the way the scenes relate to each other. Homer's blind inspiration inclines towards the Disputa. Dante is the one figure to appear in the poetry and theology walls, so he doesn't have to look that way. He's already there. Instead, his repeated form carries the message out from Theology into the more allusive world of poetic wisdom.
The last wall has the theme of Jurisprudence. There was a door right in the middle, so the scenes are broken into three. The lower two cover civil and canon law with the Delivery of the Pandects to the Emperor Justinian (on the left) and the Delivery of the Decretals to Pope Gregory IX. Up above are the other Virtues
You can see the whole Neoclassical traditions to come in the design of virtues up above. Since the Jurisprudence symbolizes Justice, the other six are here. Three female personifications stand for the other three Cardinal Virtues - Fortitude, Prudence, and Temperance. Three of the little putti attending them symbolize the Theological Virtues of Charity, Hope, and Faith.
Finally, the ceiling - a cosmic diagram connecting it all together with scenes and more personifications. Each wall has a figure that stands for the subject - Theology, Philosophy, Justice, Poetry - in a circle right above. In-between them are scenes that reflect the overlapping of the two subjects in some way. So that the pendentives that art part of the physical vaulted ceiling become symbolically transitional too. Here's the overall picture.
This shows how it all connects looking up from the Virtues with the School of Athens on the left and the Disputa on the right. Philosophy, Justice, and Poetry from left to right.
In between Justice and Theology - the Fall of Adam and Eve. Between Justice and Philosophy - the Judgment of Solomon.
A unique representation of Aristotle's Prime Mover with Urania - muse of Astronomy - is found in-between Poetry and Religion. Astronomy was part of natural philosophy and Urania one of the Nine Muses on Parnassus. It's clear to see the impact of Michelangelo's complex figures in the Sistine Chapel.
The Stanza della Segnatura took around 3-4 years and cemented Raphael's reputation. He took the innovations of his greatest contemporaries and fashioned them into perhaps the purest statement of Renaissance Christian humanism imaginable. Timeless perfection is obviously impossible in the material world. But for a second it looked possible.
Then around 30 he moves past the clear classicism he derived from Leonardo into more dramatic lighting and arrangements. Here's a wall from the second room Julius has him paint.
The Liberation of St. Peter would be impressive in oil. But to get this kind of brightness and contrast in fresco wasn't thought possible. Raphael had to rethink his coloring to get the intense light.
In an oil painting he'd lay down a light base and let it shine through layers of translucent paint like inner light. But you can't do that in fresco. So he lays a haze of yellow to white over the top.
It's typical of how he just keeps adding and developing skills and techniques while solving problems intuitively.
To really appreciate the change in color and light look at these two painted some six years apart. The first is a small picture that shows Leonardo's integrated arrangement of figures and space and Perugino's bright even light and color. It doesn't look ancient, but it shows "classical" principles of logos, clarity and order plus Raphael's unique graceful beauty. It's one of few Raphaels outside Europe.
Raphael, Saint George and the Dragon, 1505-1506, oil on panel, National Gallery
The dragon is small to a fantasy fan, but evil isn't supposed to be a challenge to God's servants. But look how structured it is - around a basic X-shape. The setting is old fashion, but the armor is brilliant. The picture was a gift to Henry VII of England from Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino and Raphael's friend and patron. Henry had named the Duke to the Order of the Garter, so the image of Christian chivalry pas perfect.
As his career skyrockets he does less and less painting himself - mostly overseeing and designing big workshop projects. He's really rich and a fixture in the papal court, but the quality of "his" execution slips. It's inevitable when a great master switches from painting to more design and supervision.
These figures were part of a larger project for a Roman chapel. The idea of divinely inspired sibyls - pagan seers - is that same Christian Humanism that brought Plato and Hermes where they didn't belong.
Raphael and workshop, Sibyls, 1512-1513, detail of a fresco in S. Maria della Pace, Rome
The workshop did the painting but the concept was Raphael's. The figures are much more fluid and dramatic in concept. But look at the lighting. The clarity of St. George or The School of Athens has been replaced with colorful chiaroscuro.
Color and energy are just the start of Raphael's unrivaled expressive range. We can't cover it all, but we can hit some highlights.
Start with the rooms. After Julius shuffles on, Leo X Medici keeps the project going. The difference is Raphael has little time to paint himself. The designs are his and the drawings are exquisite at times. But the work is a little uneven - there was real talent in his workshop, but they aren't all equal. And none of them were him. If you want to explore, the Vatican Museum site is a good start.
Raphael, Room of Heliodorus, 1511-1514
Julius dies in 1513 with this one unfinished. Leo has Raphael complete and continue. The symbolism changes here. The first room is more conceptual in it's choices. Abstracts like Theology and Poetry. This one is more overtly political. Historic scenes reinterpreted to comment on Julius' anti-French policy.
Raphael, Portrait of Pope Leo X and his cousins, cardinals Giulio de' Medici and Luigi de' Rossi, 1518-1519, oil on panel, Uffizi
A portrait of nepotism and cynical corruption - ladies and gentlemen, spiritual leadership! It is a nice rendering of the luxe materials and the fine items from the pope's collections.
Raphael, Room of the Fire in the Borgo, 1514-1517
Leo's first complete room. The political focus shifts to general papal authority. Leo is hedonistic and weak. Politically, he loses Julius' gains. Then the Reformation happens.
The pictures show scenes of God favoring the papacy. The Fire in the Borgo - the scene at the bottom - was quoted and referenced by artists for centuries. One of the sneakily super-influential pictures in the arts of the West. Like many of Michelangelo's works, it became a model of forms and arrangements.
Raphael and workshop, Room of Constantine, 1517-1524
Raphael dies in 1520 with this one barely underway. The workshop does most of it. The style is very different - in design as well as execution. It appears Raphael was heading off in another direction.
More than one actually.
The rooms are like a backbeat - they're unfolding the whole time Raphael is in Rome. But he was constantly doing other things too. Here's a few of them to give further range of his talents and activities. You'll see why the Bouguereau comparisons are comical...
Raphael, Galatea, around 1512, fresco, Villa Farnasina, Rome
An image of fresh vitality and classical perfection that set the course for the Neoclassical and the Baroque.
The story is a tragic one from Ovid. Galatea is a sea nymph whose lover is killed by the jealous cyclops Polyphemus of Odyssey fame. But the scene is nothing but harmonious energy.
Galatea is really lovely. The St. Catherine translated into an antique vision. Note the mastery of the fresco technique - watercolor on wet plaster - requires different skills but he has the same easy effect. This photo is a bit washed out but look at the eyes and hair...
Within a year, perhaps the finest of his Madonnas - the stately Sistine Madonna that hung over Pope Julius II when he lay in state. The famous little angels are saddened at the loss of the great patron of the arts. Little did they know that a Medici papacy was right around the corner.
Raphael, Sistine Madonna, 1513-14, oil on canvas, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
Perfect classical balance of opposites opening to a vision of holiness. There's a lot here. The infant Jesus looks wise an worried - prefiguring his Pasison and death. St. Sixtus is a portrait of Pope Julius - ragged and worn from his massive efforts. Raphael's mistress was the model for the Madonna, perhaps explaining that hint of earthly allure.
Note the feet. It's the same Perugino pose that he never loses!
The angels have had quite the afterlife of their own...
Then for something completely different - and maybe more influential - turn to a project ordered by Pope Leo X. He was one of Lorenzo the Magnificent's children and Michelangelo classmate from Florence who turned the papacy into a splendid Renaissance court. Raphael and Leo hit it off splendidly and the last years of the painter's life were at the center of Roman art and culture.
Leo was way less interested in grand classical visions than Julius, being more aesthete than force of nature. But he did want to continue work on the Sistine Chapel and had Raphael design tapestries to go below the old 15th-century paintings. Including works by Perugino!
The actual tapestries had a long and convoluted history. They're normally kept in the Vatican museum, but were recently hung in the Sistine Chapel as intended. Click for an account of the showing. Considering that the old side frescos relate to each other, we wonder if the tapestry stories were designed to relate to them.
Cartoons were colored drawings that weavers, printmakers, or other secondary image makers could work from. They were full sized, but done on paper and not finished up like an oil painting. Click this link for a fantastic account of the cartoons - the whole story from the people involved to where the tapestries and cartoons wound up. It's really interesting, with history, technique, and stylistic stuff all rolled together. Good slideshows of the creative processes too and high-res pictures of the cartoons.
Compare the designs to the Galatea or Sistine Madonna to see Raphael in his harder classical mode.
Raphael, The Sacrifice at Lystra (Acts 14: 8 – 18); Christ's Charge to Peter (Matthew 16: 18 – 19 & John 21: 15 – 17), cartoon for tapestries, about 1515-1516, V&A Museum, London
The simplifying was partly by necessity - Raphael had to make designs that could be woven. But the aesthetic is the precursor to the entire Academic classical tradition from Poussin to Ingres. Things like the stern expressions, ideal figure types, and forceful if stagey gestures. The classical architecture and attempts to get costume details correct. The sense of solidity and timelessness in the vertically and horizontally-dominant arrangements. The overall air of of gravity.
More absorption - now it's the Roman experience. The arrangements of figures pressed up against the foreground derive from sculpted friezes in ancient art. The architecture, costumes, and other details come from his work with antiquities and archaeology. And the more muscular, physically-imposing figures are from Michelangelo and ancient statues.
Weaving is like printmaking in that it reverses the cartoon image. These were woven in Flanders, which was the tapestry center of Europe.
Here's the The Sacrifice at Lystra cartoon and tapestry as seen in the Sistine Chapel.
Classicism is more than just a stylistic attitude. It's a harmony between things within the painting and its theme and mood. In The Death of Ananias, note the contrast between the straight, vertical, upright Apostles and the twisted, ugly, contorted pose of the sinner. Stylistic choice reflects the seriousness and moral contrast. But the whole things is harmonized by the figures reacting to the death and the flow of their poses around into the Apostles. Moral opposites but all connected. Same as it ever was.
Raphael, The Death of Ananias (Acts 5: 1 – 5), cartoon for a tapestry, 1515-1516, V&A Museum
It's a simplified, more formally idealized version of The School of Athens. Look how tightly Peter and Paul are designed together. The stern expressions add to the air of gravity.
Signs of antiquarian interest peak with the Loggetta of Cardinal Bibbiena - a small space in the Vatical Palace decorated for one of the humanist-prelates in Leo and Raphael's circle. The decorations are inspired by the real ancient Roman wall painting Raphael had seen in the Golden House of Nero, Palace of Augustus, and other places.
The Loggetta of Cardinal Bibbiena, 1516-17, fresco, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican
Here's a bit of painting from Nero's actual Golden House. It was buried in the 1st century AD but rediscovered in the Renaissance. Raphael was lowered in by rope with a lantern to explore.
And here are some details by Raphael's workshop. The ornament and overall feel is excellent and the little figures superior.
It's clear that we're going to have to do another post on the Renaissance in Rome. These artist dives take up a ton of space and we barely touched on the cultural history. It comes from following a few threads at once - the development of the arts of the West is related to but different from the rest of the culture. This post will finish mapping out why Raphael is important art-wise so we'll have covered all the big 3. A post on the historical impact can follow without having to deal with the artists.
Here's a prelude that shows how art and cultural history come together. It's a building we looked at earlier in the post, but it's where another super-influential late Raphael project appears. It's also a glimpse at the lives of the cats who hired Raphael and brought him into the highest elite circles. Once there - unlike Michelangelo or even Leonardo - his innate charm and personal magnetism did the rest.
The Villa Farnesina was a surburban - at the time - villa built by architect Baldassare Peruzzi between 1506 and 1510. According to Infogalactic, Giuliano da Sangallo - Raphael's model for Aristotle - might have assisted.
It was built for Agostino Chigi, one of the richest men in Christendom and banker to Julius II. It was a small circle. For that matter, Peruzzi was a student of Bramante. Villas, like their ancient Roman inspiration, were relaxation homes.
The villa was a private residence used for relaxation and socializing. The ties to ancient Rome and the verdant setting were a natural fit with humanist poetry about Arcadia and other idyllic subjects. An open loggia connects the house to the garden - in Raphael's day, the garden ran clear to the river.
Raphael comes aboard to paint the Galatea in 1512. Julius would have had to grant permission since he was employed in the Vatican, but Chigi was his banker. Money talks. Here's the Galatea room and it's place in the house. The ceiling was painted by architect Peruzzi.
The Galatea on the wall. Next to it is the Polyphemus - the murderous cyclops - painted by Sebastiano del Piombo, a Venetian painter who has a good career in Rome.
The ceiling is a look at that humanistic culture of ancient learning, fine art, and big money that we keep running into in occult and historical Renaissance posts. It's astrological - symbols of planets and zodiac around the star chart when Chigi was born.
You can see that optimism of first wave secular transecendence - that heady rush of thinking the secrets of the universe were unfolding before finite fallen eyes. They weren't, but holy crow the artistic culture is amazing. Lay down a marker:
The idea of Renaissance "rebirth" may be ridiculous across culture and history. But it's the birth of the arts of the West.
This was the argument at the start of this Renaissance exploration. We thought that the art had such an impact that it helped delude people into thinking that there was a broader cultural rebirth. Something for the narrative engineers to spin and the Flatlanders to pretend is a path to human godhood.
Anyhow, here's Chigi's ceiling.
Check out one more room for a sense of the artistic aristocratic culture of the High Renaissance. Peruzzi's Perspective Room applied one-point perspective to male it seem that the walls opened to the outside. It is the sort of thing that Renaissance culturati used to entertain and impress. The decor is classical or course, with extra opulence.
It's a sharp effect. Because it's perspective it needs to be lined up properly to work. The top and bottom left show the illusion working. The bottom right shows it off-line.
Raphael and his workshop come back to the Farnesina in 1518 to fresco the ceiling of the Loggia of Psyche - the ground-floor loggia that opens onto the garden. The subject was the story of Cupid and Psyche taken from the Roman poet Ovid. The mythological love story is the ideal subject for an elite humanistic villa - antique, cultured, light, with erotic themes.
Raphael designs the project and the workshop handled the execution. Here's the room and the ceiling.
The while thing is full of playful artifice. The illusion of a pergola supporting tapestries with mythic beings flying around them. The colors are bright but cool - vital but ideal and distant like Galatea in the other room.
The figures tell the story - Cupid's love for the mortal Psyche, the opposition of her mother Venus, their trials and adventures, and the happy marriage in Olympus.
Mythic love stories were often defended as "allegories of salvation".
The center panels - the "tapestries" show the big resolution scenes. The bottom is The Feast of the Gods after the wedding where they welcome Psyche to immortality and Olympus. The other is The Council of the Gods - where Cupid makes his case to Jupiter and the other Olympians to marry and divinize a human girl.
Chigi had this painted for his own wedding to a much younger girl of lower social class. His money allowed him social license that others didn't have. The project answers criticisms of his own choice of spouse while flattering the couple as immortals - humanist rhetoric at it's best. And when the couple and all guests ever after - including Pope Leo - could dine in the loggia, looking over garden and river under their own divine images.
The small figures were painted to Raphael's design. Here are Venus and Jupiter, Cupid and the Three Grace, and Mercury bringing Psyche to Heaven.
There's something about them. They're lively and energetic, but sculptural - like living statues. Antiquity come to life. The classical ideal.
The figures bring the world of myth into the present day but don't let you forget that they're mythic. Past and present come together while retaining their differences. Same way that the illusion isn't totally real. You see both at once.
It's clear we need to think about the role of the arts of the West in
defining and shaping the experience of reality.
Why are we sure the statuesque figures are intentional? Because Raphael and his workshop could do realism when they wanted to. Here a close-up of the painted vegetation. In fresco...
That should make the argument for the importance of the arts of the West to the development of the culture. They aren't just reflections, they're shapers. They collapse worlds and train people to see. This feels like we've gotten somewhere.
Time to wrap up - so one more direction in this singular creative range. Near the end of his life, Raphael was experimenting with really intense light - a departure from the even coloring of his classical mode and chiaroscuro he adds in Rome. If we had to guess, we'd say he was starting to adapt Venetian lighting - a totally different painting tradition that we will give a post.
Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516-1518, oil on panel, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice
Venetian painters adopted oil paint first and had a different aesthetic philosophy. Light and color rather than classical harmony and careful drawing. The stereotype is emotion vs. logic and there is an element of truth to that. Design and color work a little better.
Titian was the undisputed master of Venetian Renaissance painting after he unveiled this 22' high wonder. We don't know if there is record of Raphael seeing it, but he must have at least heard about it or saw sketches. The impact on him is immediate.
Raphael, Ezekiel's Vision, 1518, oil on panel, Palazzo Pitti, Florence
We aren't sure what the story is on this little painting. We found it on the internet. But the light really looks like Titian. Raphael always did the little angel faces in the clouds, but the blazing radiance is new.
It's way smaller than Titian's - only 16" x 12". What you would expect from an experimental study piece. Now look at the idealized anatomy and perfect harmonious weave of the figures. It looks like he's adapting...
He dies before his last work is finished, so we don't know where he would have gone next. He was only 38. But that last piece gives us an idea - a full altarpiece with blinding luminescence and chiaroscuro and one of the most complex designs of his career. That's The Transfiguration.
It hung over his body when he lay in state.
The painting shows two scenes from the Gospels at once - the Transfiguration of Jesus atop Mount Tabor and the rest of the Apostles' failure to heal the possessed boy. QUOTES. The picture isn't perfect - the two halves don't perfectly cohere despite the brilliant interplay of lines and gestures. But Venetian-style light and dark was built on totally alien aesthetic principles than Raphael's Tuscan and Roman background. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Perugino, and the rest all practiced a humanistic, design-based art. Titian splattered oil on canvas like an Expressionist. Integrating these would have seemed inconceivable to anyone else at the time.
Those old Perugino figures are still echoing. But the radiant bright ground shining through the picture is something new to Roman painting.
And The Transfiguration was Raphael's first real effort...
One other thing, because we have a lot more than art to think about right now. For all the insane artistic gifts, what comes through out cursory scan of the history is a normal-seeming guy. He wasn't a polymathic genius like Leonardo. He was clearly very intelligent from his life story, but within the bounds of conventional smart people. He didn't excel in all the arts but sink into brooding depression and rage like Michelangelo. He had a sideline as an architect, but it was a minor part of his life. Otherwise, it was drawing, painting, and some printmaking - the pictorial and graphic arts.
Raphael's architecture seems more influential than famous. Not much survives, but from what we could see, his designs had a lot of impact.
His take on a villa was only half built - it was supposed to be symmetrical. Here is the rendering and a picture of the grotto and garden. As far as we can see, this is the first application of classical architectural principles to a Pliny-style villa. Influential.
He seems happy and well-adjusted - a potential life coach compared to his peers. Rich, influential. connected at the highest levels. The torment in his life seems to consist of being overworked and waiting to be made a cardinal so he can settle down with his mistress and not be pressured into a social marriage. This actually is stability in Renaissance high culture world.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Raphael with his Mistress, Margharita Luti, 1840, oil on canvas, Columbus Museum of Art
French Academic master Ingres idolized Raphael and painted him many times. Luti really was Raphael's model and muse, and the intensity of their affair was such that a rumor spread that he died from overexertion in the bedroom.
That's impossible to verify.
It is known that Raphael had been something of a womanizer while younger but seems to have fallen deeply in love with Luti. His status in the papal court meant he couldn't marry her for social reasons - she was a baker's daughter. But he appears to have become monogamous and provided for her in his will. Since high Church appointments were largely patronage positions in the Renaissance and Raphael was close friends with the Medici Pope Leo X, the cardinalship was a matter of time. And since a cardinal can't marry, the position
a) solves his personal problem by allowing him to live as if married to his mistress without social consequenceb) shows us what a corrupt princely court the Renaissance papacy was. If having a Pope Leo X Medici didn't give it away.
The point is that other than the art, he's not that exceptional an individual. He was good at most things he did, but the art is a truly singular thing. Not just technically either, though we've never seen anyone draw like him. Conceptually. The way he runs with Leonardo's new ideas, adds in the grandeur of Rome, keeps evolving are all signs of an artistic mind as good as his hand. The way he transforms how the West sees? A prodigy's prodigy.
Raphael's tomb is in the Pantheon. Nothing else we can add will clarify his cultural impact.
And this is a chance to think about a different kind of genius. Even if we can't really grasp it, we can look at what it does and what impact it has.
Maybe no one made the High Renaissance dream look so possible. A man with the name of an angel who painted like no one else in history and died on Good Friday. The reality was that the Renaissance brought the rejection of Logos as the foundation and nature of objective Truth in a fallen world. But Raphael - maybe more than anyone else - shows us a frozen moment where it seemed like a golden age fantasy of Christian humanism could come true.
Raphael, Study for the Phrygian Sibyl, 1511, red chalk on paper, The British Museum, London.