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:: Raffaello Sanzio...



















RAFFAELLO Sanzio
(b. 1483, Urbino, d. 1520, Roma)

Biography
Raphael (his full name Raffaello Sanzi or Santi), Italian painter and architect of the Italian High Renaissance. Raphael is best known for his Madonnas and for his large figure compositions in the Vatican in Rome. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur.
Early years at Urbino
Raphael was the son of Giovanni Santi and Magia di Battista Ciarla; his mother died in 1491. His father was, according to the 16th-century artist and biographer Giorgio
Vasari, a painter "of no great merit." He was, however, a man of culture who was in constant contact with the advanced artistic ideas current at the court of Urbino. He gave his son his first instruction in painting, and, before his death in 1494, when Raphael was 11, he had introduced the boy to humanistic philosophy at the court.
Urbino had become a centre of culture during the rule of Duke
Federico da Montefeltro, who encouraged the arts and attracted the visits of men of outstanding talent, including Donato Bramante, Piero della Francesca, and Leon Battista Alberti, to his court. Although Raphael would be influenced by major artists in Florence and Rome, Urbino constituted the basis for all his subsequent learning. Furthermore, the cultural vitality of the city probably stimulated the exceptional precociousness of the young artist, who, even at the beginning of the 16th century, when he was scarcely 17 years old, already displayed an extraordinary talent.
Apprenticeship at Perugia
The date of Raphael's arrival in Perugia is not known, but several scholars place it in 1495. The first record of Raphael's activity as a painter is found there in a document of Dec. 10, 1500, declaring that the young painter, by then called a "master," was commissioned to help paint an altarpiece to be completed by Sept. 13, 1502. It is clear from this that Raphael had already given proof of his mastery, so much so that between 1501 and 1503 he received a rather important commission - to paint the
Coronation of the Virgin for the Oddi Chapel in the church of San Francesco, Perugia (and now in the Vatican Museum, Rome). The great Umbrian master Pietro Perugino was executing the frescoes in the Collegio del Cambio at Perugia between 1498 and 1500, enabling Raphael, as a member of his workshop, to acquire extensive professional knowledge.
In addition to this practical instruction, Perugino's calmly exquisite style also influenced Raphael. The
Giving of the Keys to St Peter, painted in 1481-82 by Perugino for the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican Palace in Rome, inspired Raphael's first major work, The Marriage of the Virgin (1504; Brera Gallery, Milan). Perugino's influence is seen in the emphasis on perspectives, in the graded relationships between the figures and the architecture, and in the lyrical sweetness of the figures. Nevertheless, even in this early painting, it is clear that Raphael's sensibility was different from his teacher's. The disposition of the figures is less rigidly related to the architecture, and the disposition of each figure in relation to the others is more informal and animated. The sweetness of the figures and the gentle relation between them surpasses anything in Perugino's work.
Three small paintings done by Raphael shortly after The Marriage of the Virgin -
Vision of a Knight, Three Graces, and St Michael - are masterful examples of narrative painting, showing, as well as youthful freshness, a maturing ability to control the elements of his own style. Although he had learned much from Perugino, Raphael by late 1504 needed other models to work from; it is clear that his desire for knowledge was driving him to look beyond Perugia.
Move to Florence
Vasari vaguely recounts that Raphael followed the Perugian painter Bernardino
Pinturicchio to Siena and then went on to Florence, drawn there by accounts of the work that Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were undertaking in that city. By the autumn of 1504 Raphael had certainly arrived in Florence. It is not known if this was his first visit to Florence, but, as his works attest, it was about 1504 that he first came into substantial contact with this artistic civilization, which reinforced all the ideas he had already acquired and also opened to him new and broader horizons. Vasari records that he studied not only the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Fra Bartolomeo, who were the masters of the High Renaissance, but also "the old things of Masaccio," a pioneer of the naturalism that marked the departure of the early Renaissance from the Gothic.
Still, his principal teachers in Florence were Leonardo and Michelangelo. Many of the works that Raphael executed in the years between 1505 and 1507, most notably a great series of Madonnas including
The Madonna of the Goldfinch (c. 1505; Uffizi Gallery, Florence), the Madonna del Prato (c. 1505; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), the Esterházy Madonna (c. 1505-07; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest), and La Belle Jardinière (c. 1507; Louvre Museum, Paris), are marked by the influence of Leonardo, who since 1480 had been making great innovations in painting. Raphael was particularly influenced by Leonardo's Madonna and Child with St. Anne pictures, which are marked by an intimacy and simplicity of setting uncommon in 15th-century art. Raphael learned the Florentine method of building up his composition in depth with pyramidal figure masses; the figures are grouped as a single unit, but each retains its own individuality and shape. A new unity of composition and suppression of inessentials distinguishes the works he painted in Florence. Raphael also owed much to Leonardo's lighting techniques; he made moderate use of Leonardo's chiaroscuro (i.e., strong contrast between light and dark), and he was especially influenced by his sfumato (i.e., use of extremely fine, soft shading instead of line to delineate forms and features). Raphael went beyond Leonardo, however, in creating new figure types whose round, gentle faces reveal uncomplicated and typically human sentiments but raised to a sublime perfection and serenity.
In 1507 Raphael was commissioned to paint the
Deposition of Christ that is now in the Borghese Gallery in Rome. In this work, it is obvious that Raphael set himself deliberately to learn from Michelangelo the expressive possibilities of human anatomy. But Raphael differed from Leonardo and Michelangelo, who were both painters of dark intensity and excitement, in that he wished to develop a calmer and more extroverted style that would serve as a popular, universally accessible form of visual communication.
Last years in Rome
Raphael was called to Rome toward the end of 1508 by
Pope Julius II at the suggestion of the architect Donato Bramante. At this time Raphael was little known in Rome, but the young man soon made a deep impression on the volatile Julius and the papal court, and his authority as a master grew day by day. Raphael was endowed with a handsome appearance and great personal charm in addition to his prodigious artistic talents, and he eventually became so popular that he was called "the prince of painters."
Raphael spent the last 12 years of his short life in Rome. They were years of feverish activity and successive masterpieces. His first task in the city was to paint a cycle of frescoes in a suite of medium-sized rooms in the Vatican papal apartments in which Julius himself lived and worked; these rooms are known simply as
the Stanze. The Stanza della Segnatura (1508-11) and Stanza d'Eliodoro (1512-14) were decorated practically entirely by Raphael himself; the murals in the Stanza dell'Incendio (1514-17), though designed by Raphael, were largely executed by his numerous assistants and pupils.
The decoration of the Stanza della Segnatura was perhaps Raphael's greatest work. Julius II was a highly cultured man who surrounded himself with the most illustrious personalities of the Renaissance. He entrusted Bramante with the construction of a new basilica of St. Peter to replace the original 4th-century church; he called upon Michelangelo to execute his tomb and compelled him against his will to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; and, sensing the genius of Raphael, he committed into his hands the interpretation of the philosophical scheme of the frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura. This theme was the historical justification of the power of the Roman Catholic church through Neoplatonic philosophy.
The four main fresco walls in the Stanza della Segnatura are occupied by the
Disputa and the School of Athens on the larger walls and the Parnassus and Cardinal Virtues on the smaller walls. The two most important of these frescoes are the Disputa and the School of Athens. The Disputa, showing a celestial vision of God and his prophets and apostles above a gathering of representatives, past and present, of the Roman Catholic church, equates through its iconography the triumph of the church and the triumph of truth. The School of Athens is a complex allegory of secular knowledge, or philosophy, showing Plato and Aristotle surrounded by philosophers, past and present, in a splendid architectural setting; it illustrates the historical continuity of Platonic thought. The School of Athens is perhaps the most famous of all Raphael's frescoes, and one of the culminating artworks of the High Renaissance. Here Raphael fills an ordered and stable space with figures in a rich variety of poses and gestures, which he controls in order to make one group of figures lead to the next in an interweaving and interlocking pattern, bringing the eye to the central figures of Plato and Aristotle at the converging point of the perspectival space. The space in which the philosophers congregate is defined by the pilasters and barrel vaults of a great basilica that is based on Bramante's design for the new St Peter's in Rome. The general effect of the fresco is one of majestic calm, clarity, and equilibrium.
About the same time, probably in 1511, Raphael painted a more secular subject, the
Triumph of Galatea in the Villa Farnesina in Rome; this work was perhaps the High Renaissance's most successful evocation of the living spirit of classical antiquity. Meanwhile, Raphael's decoration of the papal apartments continued after the death of Julius in 1513 and into the succeeding pontificate of Leo X until 1517. In contrast to the generalized allegories in the Stanza della Segnatura, the decorations in the second room, the Stanza d'Eliodoro, portray specific miraculous events in the history of the Christian church. The four principal subjects are The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple, The Miracle at Bolsena, The Liberation of St Peter, and Leo I Halting Attila. These frescoes are deeper and richer in colour than are those in the earlier room, and they display a new boldness on Raphael's part in both their dramatic subjects and their unusual effects of light. The Liberation of St Peter, for example, is a night scene and contains three separate lighting effects - moonlight, the torch carried by a soldier, and the supernatural light emanating from an angel. Raphael delegated his assistants to decorate the third room, the Stanze dell'Incendio, with the exception of one fresco, the Fire in the Borgo, in which his pursuit of more dramatic pictorial incidents and his continuing study of the male nude are plainly apparent.
The Madonnas that Raphael painted in Rome show him turning away from the serenity and gentleness of his earlier works in order to emphasize qualities of energetic movement and grandeur. His
Alba Madonna (1508; National Gallery, Washington) epitomizes the serene sweetness of the Florentine Madonnas but shows a new maturity of emotional expression and supreme technical sophistication in the poses of the figures. It was followed by the Madonna di Foligno (1510; Vatican Museum) and the Sistine Madonna (1513; Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), which show both the richness of colour and new boldness in compositional invention typical of Raphael's Roman period. Some of his other late Madonnas, such as the Madonna of Francis I (Louvre), are remarkable for their polished elegance. Besides his other accomplishments, Raphael became the most important portraitist in Rome during the first two decades of the 16th century. He introduced new types of presentation and new psychological situations for his sitters, as seen in the portrait of Leo X with Two Cardinals (1517-19; Uffizi, Florence). Raphael's finest work in the genre is perhaps the Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (1516; Louvre), a brilliant and arresting character study.
Leo X commissioned Raphael to design
10 large tapestries to hang on the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Seven of the ten cartoons (full-size preparatory drawings) were completed by 1516, and the tapestries woven after them were hung in place in the chapel by 1519. The tapestries themselves are still in the Vatican, while seven of Raphael's original cartoons are in the British royal collection and are on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. These cartoons represent Christ's Charge to Peter, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, The Death of Ananias, The Healing of the Lame Man, The Blinding of Elymas, The Sacrifice at Lystra, and St Paul Preaching at Athens. In these pictures Raphael created prototypes that would influence the European tradition of narrative history painting for centuries to come. The cartoons display Raphael's keen sense of drama, his use of gestures and facial expressions to portray emotion, and his incorporation of credible physical settings from both the natural world and that of ancient Roman architecture.
While he was at work in the Stanza della Segnatura, Raphael also did his first architectural work, designing the church of Sant' Eligio degli Orefici. In 1513 the banker Agostino Chigi, whose
Villa Farnesina Raphael had already decorated, commissioned him to design and decorate his funerary chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo. In 1514 Leo X chose him to work on the basilica of St Peter's alongside Bramante; and when Bramante died later that year, Raphael assumed the direction of the work, transforming the plans of the church from a Greek, or radial, to a Latin, or longitudinal, design.
Raphael was also a keen student of archaeology and of ancient Greco-Roman sculpture, echoes of which are apparent in his paintings of the human figure during the Roman period. In 1515 Leo X put him in charge of the supervision of the preservation of marbles bearing valuable Latin inscriptions; two years later he was appointed commissioner of antiquities for the city, and he drew up an archaeological map of Rome. Raphael had by this time been put in charge of virtually all of the papacy's various artistic projects in Rome, involving architecture, paintings and decoration, and the preservation of antiquities.
Raphael's last masterpiece is the
Transfiguration (commissioned in 1517), an enormous altarpiece that was unfinished at his death and completed by his assistant Giulio Romano. It now hangs in the Vatican Museum. The Transfiguration is a complex work that combines extreme formal polish and elegance of execution with an atmosphere of tension and violence communicated by the agitated gestures of closely crowded groups of figures. It shows a new sensibility that is like the prevision of a new world, turbulent and dynamic; in its feeling and composition it inaugurated the Mannerist movement and tends toward an expression that may even be called Baroque.
Raphael died on his 37th birthday. His funeral mass was celebrated at the Vatican, his Transfiguration was placed at the head of the bier, and his body was buried in the Pantheon in Rome.

:: Tapestries and their cartoons...

















Tapestries and their cartoons
by RAFFAELLO
The Sistine Chapel was the official private chapel of the popes, where the Conclave, the body which elected a new pope, also met. The rebuilding of St Peter's made it necessary for other high-level ceremonies to be held in the Chapel. Pope Sixtus IV della Rovere, the uncle of Julius II, had had the Sistine Chapel built, and had commissioned the leading artists in Florence in the late 15th century to adorn it with episodes from the lives of Christ and Moses. He also had imitation tapestries showing the della Rovere coat-of arms painted.
On important Church feast days venerable wall-hangings were hung in front of these simulated tapestries. The hangings depicted scenes of Christ's Passion, and, according to one legend, they came originally from Jerusalem. In Leo X's opinion these had become too worn and unsightly and had therefore to be replaced. The timing was clearly excellent, for this replacement gave Leo an opportunity to leave behind a visible sign of his own papacy in the most important chapel in Christendom. The coat-of arms of Leo X, commissioned from Raphael, unmistakably adorns the borders of the new tapestries.
Initially a scholar was presumably commissioned to provide a program for the cycle of tapestries, and instructed to select the scenes that would accord with the key features of the new pope's ecclesiastical policy while remaining in keeping with the decoration already there. Leo expected Raphael to interpret these themes artistically. Presumably, Raphael was commissioned to do this in late 1514 or early 1515; by June 1515 he had received an advance payment. The designs were completed by late 1516, since we have documentary evidence that the final payment was made on 20 December.
The tapestries were woven in the finest tapestry workshop of the day, that of Pieter van Aelst in Brussels. One tapestry was completed by 1517, and seven tapestries were ready to be hung in the Sistine Chapel for the Christmas festivities of 1519. Three others must have arrived shortly before Leo's death in 1521, for the inventory made just after his death lists a total of ten tapestries. During the Sack of Rome in 1527, these works were stolen, and were not returned until the 1550s. Seven of the cartoons - designs drawn to scale - are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The tapestries themselves, all woven by Pieter van Aelst, are now in the Vatican Museums.
The tapestries recount stories from the Acts of the Apostles. Four scenes depict scenes from the life of St Peter. These are
The Handing-over of the Keys; The Miraculous Draught of Fishes; The Healing of the Lame Man; and The Death of Ananias. The other six tapestries illustrate scenes from the life of St Paul. They are: The Stoning of St Stephen, which depicts an event St Paul ordered; The Conversion of St Paul; The Blinding of the Sorcerer, Elymas; The Sacrifices in Lystra; St Paul in Prison; and St Paul Preaching in Athens. St Peter and St Paul were both martyred in Rome, a fact that substantiated and legitimated the choice of this city as the seat of the papacy. Leo X was using the program of the tapestries to demonstrate this, and thus to assert that ecclesiastically his immediate predecessors had been right to return to Rome after the so-called Babylonian Captivity in Avignon.
In the task he had set himself Raphael was facing a double challenge. First, he was well aware how important this project was to Leo X. Secondly, he felt overshadowed by Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, by which he knew he would be measured as an artiSt Michelangelo had achieved impressive and in some cases extreme colour effects.
Raphael remembered his own pictorial effects, as demonstrated in the frescoes of the Stanza di Eliodoro. In his designs he staked everything on the atmospheric effects of the light and colour, enlivened by contrasts and delicate nuances. In this respect, however, the final outcome was a failure, in that he had over-estimated the technical potential of tapestry weaving. All the same, the tapestries were an enormous success when shown in the Sistine Chapel in 1519.


Early paintings (up to 1504)
Paintings during the stay in Florence (1505-09)
Paintings during trips to Umbria (1505-08)
Decoration of the Stanze in the Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican
Paintings in Rome (1510-20)
Tapestries and their cartoons
Drawings

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:: Stanza di Constantino...












Stanza di Constantino
by RAFFAELLO's workshop
The frescoes in the Stanza di Constantino were executed by Raphael's pupils after his death. The work was coordinated by Giulio Romano who also painted the main scenes: The Vision of the Cross, The Battle at Pons Milvius, and the Donation of Rome. The room is named after the subjects of the frescoes.
After the death of Raphael, Michelangelo had applied to Leo X through Sebastiano, del Piombo, an artist with whom Michelangelo was on friendly terms, to decorate the Stanza di Constantino. However, despite the great success of his work in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo was rejected on the grounds that Raphael's pupil already had their master's designs, and it was these that would be painted.
The theme of the Sala di Costantino is the Church's rightful possession of lands supposedly donated to it by the Emperor Constantine in submission to the will of God. Since the deed of the Donation of Constantine had been proved to be a forgery dating from AD 750, Pope Leo X was here attempting to re-establish the Church's rightful claim.

:: Stanza dell'Incendio di Borgo...











Stanza dell'Incendio di Borgo
by RAFFAELLO
In the room of the Fire in the Borgo Raphael's workshop from 1514 to 1517 illustrated historical episodes in which the protagonists are the Popes who took the name of Leo. This room contains episodes like the
Fire in the Borgo, in which a miracle performed by Pope Leo IV caused a fire raging in Rome in 847 to be extinguished; the Battle of Ostia, in which the Saracens were lost in a storm at sea, presumably because of the presence of Leo IV, and the Coronation of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day, 799. Here the illustration of themes drawn from the past mixes with the celebration of the political projects of the present Pope, in this case Leo X's reconciliation with France. The fourth subject, the Oath of Leo III, anticipates the numerous representations of popes and bishops in assizes which became common during the Counter Reformation in the late 16th century.



:: Stanza di Eliodoro
























Stanza di Eliodoro
by RAFFAELLO
After the completion of the Stanza della Segnatura, Raphael began the decoration of the adjacent room, afterwards called the Stanza di Eliodoro, after the subject of one of the works painted there. The cycle was painted between September 1511 and June 1514. Julius II died during this period and his successor, Leo X (Giovanni de' Medici, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent) caused the last scenes to be completed.
The program for this room was not a traditional one: the subjects were developed specifically for this room and for Julius II personally. The general theme is that of God's intervention in human destiny and it is presented through four stories, two from the Acts of Apostles and the Apocrypha (The
Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple; The Liberation of St Peter) and two from Church history (The Meeting between Leo the Great and Attila; The Mass at Bolsena). The vaults of the ceiling represent episodes of divine intervention in the history of Israel (the Burning Bush, the Announcement of the Flood to Noah, Jacob's Dream, the Sacrifice of Isaac).
The cycle is mainly descriptive. Raphael develops it with those characteristics of dignity and grandiosity which were by then his trademarks. He enhances his compositions by breaking up the symmetry and the enclosed rhythm of the Stanza della Segnatura with more lively and colourful effects.
The pope intended to use this room as a private audience chamber. Accordingly, the frescoes were meant to illustrate the power of the Church and its representatives.



:: Stanza della Segnatura...








Stanza della Segnatura
by RAFFAELLO
The first of Pope Julius II's rooms in the papal appartments to be decorated with Raphael's frescoes was the study in which the "Signatura gratiae" tribunal was originally located (Stanza della Segnatura). The artist's concept brings into harmony the spirits of Antiquity and Christianity.
The humanist quadripartition of culture - theology, philosophy, poetry and justice - has a parallel in the four elements making up the universe: air, water, fire and earth. Each of these is represented by an allegorical painting on the walls of this room: the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament, the School of Athens, the Parnassus and the Virtues (Fortitude, Prudence, Temperance), respectively.
The first composition Raphael executed in 1509 is the so-called
Disputa or Disputation of the Holy Sacrament, the traditional name for what is really an Adoration of the Sacrament. Toward the end of 1509, Raphael began work on the wall opposite the Disputa. This second fresco, entitled the School of Athens, represents the truth acquired through reason. Raphael began the third composition at the end of 1509 or the beginning of 1510. It represents Parnassus, the dwelling place of Apollo and the Muses and the home of poetry, according to classical myth. The two scenes on the fourth wall, executed by the workshop, and the lunette above it, containing the Cardinal Virtues, were painted in 1511.

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