RAPHAEL
1483 - 1520

On the Low Sunday or 1483, which fell on the 6th of April, there was born in the Umbrian town of Urbino, to one Giovanni Santi, poet and painter of no mean gifts at the Court of Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino, and to Magia Ciarla, his wife, a man-child whom they christened RAPHAEL SANTI, or Raffaelle Sanzio, who was to reach to mighty immortality as RAPHAEL.

The father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter of considerable gifts, as is proved by his Madonna and Child at the National Gallery in London ; but he died when his son was only eleven years old-the lad's mother having died when he was eight.

The boy Raphael was no infant wonder ; however, he was eager to learn, whensoever and wheresoever he could find the chance, and showed a keen desire to absorb all that came into his way from the very beginning ; also he was endowed with a prodigious industry, a dogged and persistent will, and gave himself up to heavy and laborious training. He had little confidence in his own powers, even when well set into youth. It is little likely that a boy of eleven, of no precocious habit, should have learnt much from his courtier father. It is said that his mother had that spiritual beauty which the boy wrought about his Madonnas ; but a boy of eight would visualise little of such subtleties. His bent towards an artistic career, however, was likely enough due to his father's habits ; and he may have acquired some little of his early training from him. He is said to have been much influenced by the [186] work of Piero della Francesca, but to what degree it would be idle to say to-day ; certainly not by the artist himself, since, though Francesca had been the guest of Raphael's father at Urbino in 1469, it was fourteen years before Raphael was born. His work, and that of many others, no doubt was a part of Raphael's eager "eclectic" borrowing; but an eleven-year-old boy's borrowings must have been of the vaguest.

The year after his father died-in 1495, the boy Raphael being then twelve, Timoteo Viti, his five years of service to Francia at Bologna done, came back to Urbino, steeped in the artistry, and seeing with the vision, of Francia. To him the boy was apprenticed ; and the eager lad leaped to borrow his craftsmanship from the revelation of Francia that Timoteo Viti brought into Umbria. From him he learned to draw the rounded and opulent forms, and to paint the rich and sensuous colour, so utterly alien to the Florentine spirit. At sixteen or seventeen Raphael went to Perugia and entered the studio of Perugino, some say as pupil, more likely as assistant in the workshop. The little St. Michael at the Louvre, painted for the Duke Guidobaldo on the back of a chessboard, must also be early work. When Raphael went to Perugino's workshop at Perugia, that master, overwhelmed with orders, was at Florence, and Pinturicchio was the foreman of his Perugian studio ; from whom and from Perugino the sensitive and borrowing youth almost wholly drew his art for the four years that he wrought with persistent address in the great Umbrian workshop. Pictures were painted by him during these years from the cartoons and studies of both masters ; and, by consequence, his art whilst he painted in Perugia was a blend of the styles created by Francia and Perugino, not untouched by the colour faculty of Pinturicchio-his first [187] revelation of his habit of taking all that was best from others and creating a composite style out of them. The Solly Madonna and a Crucifixion were painted between 1500 and 1502, his seventeenth and eighteenth years; his Vision of a Knight and Coronation of the Virgin for the Oddi family between 1502 and 1504, his nineteenth and twenty-first years, together with the Diatalevi Madonna, the Madonna with SS. Francis and Jerome. And with what rapid strides his industry and catholic taste urged forward his hand's skill, you may see in the exquisite little painting of The Vision of a Knight, wrought by the youth when seventeen, and now at the National Gallery in London. It was at Perugia that he painted the small Conestabile Madonna now at St. Petersburg, once belonging to the Conestabile-Staffa family ; and at the end of his four years thereat, in 1504, he painted, and for the first time signed and dated his work, in the Sposalizio or Betrothal of the Virgin, now at the Brera in Milan. He has not yet wholly found himself -he is forming his style, out of the various styles of others.

It was in the October of 1504, in his twenty-first year, already famous at the edge of manhood, that Raphael, bearing a letter of introduction from the Duchess della Rovere, sister of the art-loving Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino, to the Gonfaloniere Pietro Soderini, took his way to Florence, and for the next four years, advancing from success to success, and rapidly rising to increased fame, he wrought the beautiful Madonnas that are the talk of the wide world.

Raphael painted in Florence, shortly after his arrival, the famous Madonna del Gran' Duca, which is one of the treasures of the Pitti Palace in that city of treasures. It came by its name and to its present home in quaint fashion. Towards the end of the sixteen-hundreds it was in the [188] possession of an old woman, from whom a dealer bought it for four pounds, and was sold by him to the Grand Duke of Tuscany-hence its name. The beautiful Madonna del Cardellino of the Uffizi Gallery was painted some couple of years thereafter, by Raphael for his friend Lorenzo Nasi, as a wedding-present to his bride-this is the painting in which the boy John the Baptist offers a goldfinch (cardellino) to the infant Christ, the goldfinch being a symbol of the Divine Sacrifice from the blood-red marks upon it. Like all of Raphael's Madonna pictures, except the Sistine Madonna and the Madonna of the Tower, this Madonna del Cardellino was painted on wood, and was broken to pieces in the earthquake of 1547 ; but the pieces were put together again by Nasi's son with such skill and care that the breaks are only to be found by keen scrutiny.

A couple of years in Florence, with its vast artistic achievement, were not lost upon the eager ken of the impressionable Raphael-from Masaccio's frescoes in the Carmine, and Donatello's sculptured marble, and Luca and Andrea della Robbia's modelled terra-cottas, to Michelangelo's colossal statue of David (which was set up in 1504) and his Holy Family in the Uffizi, to the paintings of Domenico Ghirlandaio and of Leonardo da Vinci and Fra Bartolommeo, which were in the full freshness of their splendour, he took all that he could weld into his Umbrian vision-selected, annexed, dissolved, and re-wrought into his own personal concept, without losing that personal vision or abjectly surrendering it; and by consequence of his wide gleanings he became enslaved by none. Master of a new sense of modelling and of grouping, he now evolved a marked style, which is seen in his world-famous Madonna degli Ansidei or Ansidei Madonna, one of the great treasures of the National Gallery in London, and taking its [189] name from the family chapel of Filippo di Simoni Ansidei, in the insignificant little church of San Fiorenzo at Perugia. The Ansidei Madonna was given to the third Duke of Marlborough by his brother, Lord Robert Spencer, at the end of the seventeen-hundreds ; and on its becoming known, in 1884, that the eighth duke was to sell his collection, and the Director of the National Gallery, Sir Frederick Burton, valuing the picture to the Treasury at 110,000 guineas, Gladstone, being Chancellor of the Exchequer, offered the Duke £70,000 from the nation, to whom, by Special Act of Parliament, then passed, in splendid condition, one of Raphael's highest achievements. Its predella, as the frieze is called that runs along the foot of an altarpiece, had been kept by Lord Robert Spencer-of its three panels two have disappeared, but the third, St. John the Baptist Preaching, is in the collection of the Marquess of Lansdowne at Bowood. Other early Madonnas are his Madonna of the Palm Tree, the Madonna of the Meadow, now in Vienna, the Madonna Canigiani, the Madonna della Casa Tempi, the Orleans Madonna, the two Cowper Madonnas at Panshanger, and the Madonna del Baldacchino at the Pitti. To his period in Florence also belong his charming portrait of himself at the Uffizi, the St. George and the Apollo and Marsyas, all three painted in 1506.

Close on the completion of the Ansidei Madonna was painted, in 1507, the Entombment at the Borghese Palace in Rome, in which, in spite of its pathos and beauty of handling, Raphael reveals his laborious efforts to blend the styles of Perugino, Mantegna, and Michelangelo, not without weakness and the crowding of its composition.

About the time he painted the Entombment, he was at work upon the large Madonna di Sani' Antonio, bought by Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan. Painted for the nuns of [190] Sant' Antonio of Padua for their convent in Perugia, they sold it in 1677 for a small sum-the five panels of its great centre picture had shrunk apart, leaving fissures, and the colour was beginning to flake off-Antonio Bagazzini, the nobleman of Perugia who bought it, promising a copy as substitute. The nuns of St. Anthony had already sold the five little panel pictures of its predella in 1663 to Queen Christina of Sweden. Thence the Madonna passed to Prince Colonna-thence in 1825 to Francis I., King of the Two Sicilies-thence to Francis II., King of Naples, whose bedroom it adorned, until the Revolution of 1860 sent him flying, and the picture with him, into his Spanish exile. In 1867 the Director of the National Gallery, Sir William Boxali, was in treaty for it for the State, but Disraeli had to abandon the intention owing to its going to Paris to be offered to France instead, where it lay, packed in a case, during the war with Germany of 1870. It was again offered to England-then, after purchase by Colnaghi the dealer, from whom it went to M. Sedelmeyer of Paris, it came to Mr. Pierpont Morgan for £ 100,000 in 1901. The five panels of its predella are now, two of them, St. Francis of Assisi and St. Anthony of Padua, in the Dulwich College Gallery ; the third, The Agony in the Garden, belongs to Mr. Burdett-Coutts ; the fourth, Christ bearing the Cross, belongs to the Earl of Plymouth ; and the fifth, the Pietà, is in Mrs. J. L. Gardiner's collection at Fenway Court in Boston in the United States. Of the picture of the Madonna itself, it must be remembered that it has undergone much restoration, from which it has suffered considerably, but it was probably never as fine a work as the Ansidei Madonna.

Shortly afterwards Raphael was at work on the celebrated La Belle Jardinière, now at the Louvre, which was [191] bought by Francis I. of France. The name is founded on a legend that a "gardener's daughter" sat as model for the Madonna, but it is as likely that the gardener's daughter was invented to fit the title. At any rate it is but a legend, which would easily spring up about the Madonna, who sits on a hillock, flowers at her feet. Raphael was painting the panel when he was called to Rome in 1508, and forthwith obeyed the summons, leaving the blue drapery of the Madonna to be finished by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, the son of the famous Ghirlandaio.