RAPHAEL
645
RAPHAEL
Raphael's genius rarely manifested itself so freely of the Roman Campagna. The ceiling was painted
or with such happiness in so beautiful a story. This
happiness, the joy of creating, ease, and fertility
are the beneficent characteristics of all the later
works of Raphael's life. It is evident that the artist
profoundly enjoj'ed the beauty of his inventions and
the feeling is communicated to the spectator, lifting
from 1513 to 1519, but Raphael had not time
to make it his own handiwork, executing only the
designs, and those of the last three cupolas are not at all
worthy of him. Here he delineates sacred history
from the Creation to the Last Supper. The first
"scenes" illustrate the same subject from Genesis
him above himself. Once more antiquity and Chris- which Michelangelo had just painted on the ceiling
tianity, the profane and the sacred, were mingled
but in a new and properly "historic" form. To
revive the Temple with its twisted columns (two of
which are preserved at St. Peter's and which Bernini
imitated in the baldacchino in the following century),
to reproduce according to a bas-relief a scene of
sacrifice (Sacrifice of Lystra) to imagine an agora,
of the Sixtine Chapel. But Raphael does not out-
shine his rival, being only spiriluel and charming
where the latter is magnificent. In the succeeding
compositions often occurs a reflection of the lovely
pictures which Pietro Cavallini had painted about
1280 in the basilica of S. Lorenzo, reproduced in a
MS. of the Vatican still e.xtant. But the pastoral
a sort of Athenian forum, surrounded by porticoes scenes are wholly original with Raphael, especially
and temples in which all antiquity lived again, and those in which landscape figures largely. Nothing
to set in this scene the "Preaching of St. Paul" could be more nobly graceful than the "Angels re-
was to Raphael an uninterrupted pleasure. ceived by Abraham", the "Meeting of Jacob and
Such works have remained the unsurpassable Rachel", or "Moses saved from the waters". "Ra-
Tabi.
models of historic com
position, each of them
begetting for more
than two centuries a
lengthy posterity and
stirring many echoes
in art. The "Death
of Ananias " inaugu-
rated the series of lurid
miracles. Without
such examples as the
"Sacrifice of Lystra"
and the "Preaching of
St. Paul" Poussin's
art would hardly be
understood. The
"Conversion of St.
Paul" is a marvel of
noble and luminous
composition in a sub-
ject which seven-
teenth-century art
often treated with
vulgarity. But the
finest examples of
this splendid series
are the first two scenes which form the evangelical
prelude or prologue to the "Acts"; the "Calling
of the Apostles" and the "Pasce Oves" are works
in which the Umbrian soul, the serene and poetic
sensibility of Raphael could not be surpassed. Here
the artist has given us the true colour of things,
the pastoral charm and original atmosphere of the
preaching of Christ. The idyllic and confident sense
of life as it is expressed in the catacombs or on the
tomb of Galla Placidia, in the type of the Good
Shepherd, the moral perfume so long vanished or
evaporated were successfully revived by the wonderful
divination and tact of a great artist. Raphael's
genius would seem to have been bestowed by Provi-
dence to restore lost feelings to Christianity.
This same poetry as of a higher kind of eclogue characterizes the second of the great works under- taken by Raphael at the command of Leo X, the decoration of the Loggie, known as the Loggie of the Vatican. This was a story added by Raphael to the two stories of the facade built by Bramante. It comprised three arcades and as many little cupolas, each of which received four small pictures. In the decoration of this gallery Raphael's idea was to rival the ThernvE of Titus, the recent discovery of which had stirred artistic and literary Rome. The walls were covered with charming stuccoes by John of LMine; trellises painted so as to deceive the eye framed the pictures on the vaulted ceilings. Nothing equals the gaiety and grace of this aerial portico,
O.N- Raph.\el's To.mb, r.v the Pantheon, Rome, with
Cardinal Bembo's Elegiac Couplet Ille est hie Raphael timuit q Rerum magna parens et
sospite vinci
phael's Bible", as it
is often called, is a
series of epic minia-
tures, the clearness
of interpretation of
which rivals their
simplicity, perfect
equilibrium of ar-
rangement, charm of
motifs, and grace of
style.
But the service of Leo X did not stop here. The artist had to respond to the most unforeseen whims; now it was the deco- ration of the theatre which he had to plan, again his holiness desired the life-size portrait of an elephant and again there were the baths of Cardinal Bibbiena to be deco- rated. But neither these nor many other tasks exhausted the activity of Raphael. In 1512 the desire to compete with Michelangelo caused him to consent to paint at S. Agostino for the Luxemburger John Goritz a figure of Isaias which is almost a plagiarism, and in 1514 for the Sienese banker, Agostino Chigi, the four celebrated "Sibyls" of S. Maria della Pace. By their divine elegance the latter recall the sublime qualities of the Camera dclla Segnatura. For Chigi were also painted in 1516 the cartoons for the mosaics which were to adorn Santa Maria dclla Popolo, his funeral chapel, but only the figures of God the Father and the planets were finished. Finally this Maecenas conceived the ostentatious idea of having the pope's favourite painter decorate the villa which he was building in the Trastevere and which in the seven- teenth century was called the Farnesina. This delightful summer palace, one of Peruzzi's most charming creations, is a perfect type of a country house, a patrician dwelling of the Renaissance period, and was decorated by the most popular masters of the age. Sodoma decorated the first story with subjects from the "Marriage of Alexander" which form an heroic and voluptuous epithalamium. Raphael had to decorate the large gallery on the ground floor. The first fresco was the "Triumph of Galatea". Raphael took as his theme the celebrated verses from Politian's "Giostra" which had already inspired Botticelli. But what is the mythology of this charm- ing artist beside the resurrection of an immortal and
flooded with sunlight and completed by the horizon chaste paganism? Zeuxis and Apelles did not do
