RAPHAEL IN ROME, 1508

Pope Julius II. called the young Raphael to Rome in 1508, and the young fellow came on the tide of fortune. Julius had hated the dead Pope Alexander VI., one of the vilest of the Borgias. He detested to live in the same rooms that the Borgian had used at the Vatican. He determined, in the year that followed Raphael's arrival, to move to the upper room which Piero dei Franceschi and Bramantino had decorated. Julius, not approving the decorations, had set Perugino, Pinturicchio, Peruzzi, Bazzi, and Signorelli to work upon that part called the Stanze, or Library. Raphael's work so pleased Julius that he forthwith decreed that he should obliterate the work of the others and paint it again. It is to Raphael's eternal credit that at any rate he saved the work of Perugino, Peruzzi, and Bazzi from destruction, and though his entreaties could not save the series of heads by Bramantino, he had them copied by his assistants before they were destroyed.

When Raphael alighted at Rome in the summer of 1508, he was but twenty-five years of age, with a great reputation, and such master-work as the Madonna del Gran' Duca, the Madonna del Cardellino, the Ansidei Madonna, and [192] La Belle Jardinière behind him. He came to find Michelangelo at work on his great ceiling-paintings of the Sistine Chapel for Pope JuliusII.

The two men-Michelangelo being thirty-three, Raphael twenty-five-so different in character, in art, in their significance and their vision, were soon embarked upon a hot rivalry. The one with noble blood in him, a grim and overwhelming giant of a man-compelling and creative- the other a born courtier, the son of a courtier. The art of Michelangelo, so vast and sublime that little men could scarce see it, the art of the other so easy to see. With the aged Pope, Julius II., whose greybearded features are so familiar to us through the young Raphael's famous portrait of him, Raphael was early a favourite. Treated with the greatest pomp and ceremony, honours showered upon him, and orders for work flowing in upon him, the young fellow's genius expanded in the sunshine, and his skill of hand brought forth masterpieces that are an astounding achievement in one so young. He became the centre of a very court. He surrounded himself with pupils, and henceforth furnished only the cartoons for his frescoes and for many of the pictures attributed to him-his pupils carrying them out, Raphael putting the finishing touches upon them where necessary. Of these pupils, the most gifted and best-beloved was Giulio Pippi, better known as GIULIO ROMANO, who, with GIAN-FRANCESCO PENNI, painted most of the frescoes at the Vatican after Raphael's designs. Giulio Romano's work is marked by that preference for brick-red in his carnation tones which is seen also in these Raphael frescoes-a defect eagerly imitated by generations of artists who, dazzled by the fame of Raphael's reputation, fervently sought to repeat what they took to be his mastery in colour, but of which Raphael was wholly innocent !

[193] By his great patron, Pope Julius II., Raphael was employed in the decoration at the Vatican of certain rooms called the Stanze, and in the long covered gallery round the courtyard of San Damasio called the Loggie. For the Stanze he painted vast religious, historical, and allegorical compositions. His first large fresco in the Stanze was the famed Disputa del Sacramento, better described as The Triumph of the Church, a work in which he reached an astounding power of arrangement that gives a profound sense of dignity and immensity. He takes from all that has gone before, but he blends the genius of his forerunners into a masterpiece of which none had been capable. At once his skill in arrangement of masses is seen to have matured as at a stroke. Of several others in the Stanze were The School of Athens, the Parnassus, the Heliodorus driven from the Temple, the Pope Leo checking the advance of Attila, and L'Incendio del Borgo. Of these, the Parnassus, painted in 1511, is one of his earliest and finest pagan frescoes. These great frescoes have the added inestimable value of containing portraits of many of Raphael's great contemporaries and forerunners-the famed Dante portrait, Savonarola, Fra Angelico, Bramante, Leonardo da Vinci, Castiglione, Federigo Gonzaga, Bazzi il Sodoma, Raphael himself, and many others, not forgetting the Pope, Julius II.

For the Loggie he designed a series of frescoes of scenes from sacred history, generally known as Raphael's Bible, and directed a profusion of elaborate decorations founded on the paintings of ancient Rome. Living a life of pleasure, with a retinue worthy of a prince, the lover of a lady of whom he has left a fine portrait, the Donna Velata, at the Pitti Palace, in twelve years he wrought this stupendous work which alone might have filled the full life of any industrious man ; he found time, besides, to paint Madonna pieces that [194] would make the reputation of the greatest masters, and to paint portraits of superb achievement. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he wrought the Madonna of Foligno, now at the Vatican, the Garvagh, Diadem and Casa d'Abba Madonnas, and the Madonna of the Tower, so called from the small tower seen in the landscape of the background, a picture lately given to the National Gallery in London by a member of the family of Mr. R. J. Mackintosh, who bought it at the sale of Samuel Rogers, the poet, who bought it from Mr. Henry Hope's sale, who had it from the Orleans collection-its possession by Rogers accounting for its long-time name of the Rogers Madonna, and it will sometimes be found under the name of the Madonna with the Standing Child. It has suffered much restoration and over-cleaning-indeed this, one of the only two Madonnas painted on canvas by Raphael, is challenged as being the work of Raphael's hands ; and even the cartoon for it, in the Print Room of the British Museum, is set down to Brescianino, Fra Bartolommeo, and Andrea del Sarto, as well as to Raphael, by the doubters. The drawing and modelling may have been rendered weak by the many over-cleanings ; but if by Raphael, this picture reveals his colour-sense profoundly enhanced by the Venetian achievement ; for in it he displays a faculty for colour which he never again approached.

The death of Julius II. in 1513, and the election of Pope Leo X., saw the labours of Raphael largely extended in Rome ; and the death of Bramante, the architect of St. Peter's, the following year, saw Raphael appointed in his stead. The year that followed he was made Inspector of the Antiquities and Monuments of Rome, with the supervision of the excavation of Rome, which had grown into a keen pursuit. This year of 1515, Raphael, [195] at thirty-two, painted the great portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, once the property of Charles I. of England, but now at the Louvre. It was on his coming to Rome that Raphael began to work on his superb portraits ; and this one reveals him at the height of his powers.

About this time also he made his famous Cartoons : broadly drawn in chalk on stout sheets of paper, and highly ] coloured in distemper, as cartoons for the weavers of tapestries at Arras, designed to be hung in the Sistine Chapel, and which were woven and placed therein in 1519; the cartoons were left at Arras where the tapestries were wrought, and lay there long forgotten, until Rubens found them-and it was on his shrewd advice that Charles the First of England bought them. Each of the cartoons had been cut up ; and they were joined together and restored, but in spite of their mutilation they retain their broad and simple grandeur of design and arrangement, and display consummate draughtsmanship. Of these Raphael Cartoons, seven are to-day amongst the supreme treasures of the British Crown, and are to be seen at the South Kensington Museum, whither they were taken from Hampton Court some years ago.

It was in the next year, 1516, that Raphael painted a very popular picture of the Madonna, his charming Madonna della Sedia (the Madonna of the Chair). Here again, though the hand of the restorer has done its work, the comely peasant-girl is painted with rare charm, and the colour-faculty is considerable ; and, as usual with Raphael, both the sturdy child in her arms and the Madonna herself are rather a straightforward picture of a countrywoman folding her boy in her arms than the Divine Infant in the care of the appointed Mother of God-the range of the imagination is of the most limited kind. But [196] it is just that simple, homely appeal, which has sent the crude reproductions of this masterpiece broadcast into thousands of homes.

Of the great Madonna pieces on which Raphael's wide popularity is built, the supreme masterpiece of the world-famed Sistine Madonna, now at Dresden-and sometimes known as the Dresden Madonna-was painted a couple of years afterwards, about 1518-and, contrary to Raphael's habit, upon canvas. Painted for the monks of the monastery of San Sisto at Piacenza, to be set above the high altar of their church there, where it stood until 1715, it was sold, under the temptation of the then huge bribe of £9000, to the Elector Augustus II. of Saxony. This was to be but the beginning of its dramatic adventures. It became part of Napoleon's splendid loot, and hung in the Louvre until 1814, when, on the fall of the Corsican, it was sent back to Dresden, where it now is. What need to describe the masterpiece which engravings and colour-prints and the photograph have made familiar to every civilised being ! In painting the Virgin in Glory, standing in the heavens, her Infant Son held in her arms, Pope Sixtus II., Saint Barbara, and the two famous little cherubim adoring, Raphael created a work which is infused with dignity and majesty in spite of its poverty of skill in arrangement, in spite of its stupid curtains in the high heavens, in spite of the clumsy arrangement of the two saints, and the scattered and broken interest-and in nothing is this innate dignity seen more fully than when, as is usual in reproductions, the central figures of the Virgin and Child are torn from their surroundings and are seen in the full splendour of their achievement, withdrawn from all conflicting elements.