RAFFAELLO SANZIO (FORMA ORIGINALE SANTI, FAMIGLIA ORIUNDA DA COLBORDOLI)

RAPHAEL SANZIO (originally SANTI, a family originally from Colbordoli). — Painter and architect, born in Urbino on 6 April 1483 (probable date), son of Giovanni Santi, a modest painter and poet (d. 1494), and Magia Ciarla. He died in Rome on 6 April 1520 at the age of 37 and was buried in the Pantheon, where his tomb, adorned with a Latin distich attributed to Tebaldeo, can still be seen.

Having learned the rudiments of art from his father (a pupil and friend of Melozzo da Forlì), Raphael was soon placed in the workshop of Pietro Vannucci (known as Perugino) in Perugia, quickly becoming the best collaborator of that then highly sought-after artist (frescoes in the Cambio, Perugia, 1499). Around 1500, Raphael, now a “magister,” began working independently. Principal and certain works from these early years include: the small panels of *The Knight’s Dream* (London, National Gallery, where the cartoon is also preserved, c. 1500), those of *The Three Graces* (Chantilly, Musée Condé, same date), *St. George* (Paris, Louvre; drawings in Florence, Uffizi, c. 1500–1502), and *St. Michael* (ibid., same date), as well as the *Madonna of the Book* (Leningrad, Hermitage, same date) and another *St. George* (Washington, National Gallery). In these paintings, marked by a still timid grace, the Umbrian formal language seems to vanish like a chrysalis under the internal pressure of the figures it clothes, unable to express the full ideal realism toward which Raphael’s vision tended—a realism that the Renaissance regarded as the most difficult secret of the restored ancient art.

From the same period, though unfortunately largely lost, is the large altarpiece with the *Coronation of St. Nicholas of Tolentino* (fragments in Brescia, Pinacoteca Martinengo, and Naples, Museo Nazionale), executed in collaboration with Evangelista di Pian di Meleto, a pupil of Giovanni Santi (contract dated 10 Dec. 1500). A partial copy of the lost original is preserved in the Civic Gallery of Città di Castello. His last works in the manner of Perugino are the *Coronation of the Virgin* (Florence, Pitti, c. 1505), the portraits of Angelo and Maddalena Doni (both in Florence, Pitti, c. 1505), where the second shows the evident influence of Leonardo’s *Mona Lisa*; the so-called *Pregnant Woman* (ibid., same date); and some of his most serene Madonnas: the hieratic *Granduca Madonna* (ibid., same date), the *Madonna of the Goldfinch* (Florence, Uffizi, same date), idyllic in character, and finally the one known as the *Beautiful Gardener* (Paris, Louvre, signed and dated 1507), “a free application of Leonardo’s inspiration and Michelangelo’s example” (Fischel).

The most important date in Raphael’s life, that of his arrival in Rome, is now certain thanks to a document discovered by C. Cecchelli and published by V. Golzio (*R.*, Vatican City 1936, p. 370). It is a receipt for payment for the frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, dated 13 Jan. 1509. Raphael was therefore in Rome by the last months of the previous year. Introduced by his relative Bramante, architect of the Apostolic Palaces, to the court of Julius II, he was judged according to his true worth by this great connoisseur of genius. Though barely twenty-five years old and, as Giovio says, *nee adhuc stabili authoritate*, he was appointed a writer of Briefs (4 Oct. 1509) and commissioned to fresco, *ad praescriptum Julii Pontificis* (Giovio), the Rooms or halls of the Pope’s new apartment in the very years when Michelangelo, almost in competition with him, was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. In the Stanza della Segnatura (1508–11), originally intended to house Julius II’s library, as shown by the subjects of the paintings, Raphael represented in historical form (in the wall frescoes), allegorical form (in the small panels of the vault), and symbolic form (in the medallions) the three supreme ideas of the True (theological or revealed in *The Disputation*, philosophical or rational in *The School of Athens*), the Good (in its subjective principle, the Cardinal and Theological Virtues; and in its objective expression: the Law, canonical in the fresco of the *Decretals*, beside *The Disputation*, and civil in that of the *Pandects*, beside *The School of Athens*), and finally the Beautiful (in the *Parnassus*), according to the concepts of Christian Platonism, then in vogue especially through the work of Marsilio Ficino.

*The Disputation of the Sacrament* depicts the glory of the Triumphant Church, which venerates in beatific vision the Holy Trinity (saints, prophets, and angels around the central group of Christ, the Virgin, and the Baptist, dominated by the majestic figure of the Eternal Father blessing, while the Dove of the Holy Spirit links the upper zone to the lower), and its communion with the Militant Church, represented by a council of saints, popes, and doctors who, on earth in the apse of an unfinished basilica, adore the Divinity in the daily miracle of its Eucharistic presence. There are numerous portraits here, among which stand out those of Dante, Savonarola (partially hidden), Sixtus IV (in gold leaf), Blessed Angelico, Bramante, and Julius II (as St. Gregory the Great, according to Hartt). This composition, already fully cinquecento in its monumental architecture, nonetheless shows in its details a clear stylistic and technical unevenness and not a few echoes of Raphael’s original Umbrian manner (the use of gold and raised stucco) that are not found in the earlier *Granduca Madonna* or *Beautiful Gardener*, a clear sign of his initial awe, quickly overcome, before the magnitude of the task entrusted to his youthful strength. As is evident, the traditional name given to this fresco in the 17th century (derived from a misreading of Vasari) is erroneous, while *Triumph of the Church* would have been far more appropriate to express the concept.

*The School of Athens* (on the opposite wall) depicts an ideal gathering of the most famous philosophers and scientists of ancient Greece, assembled around Plato and Aristotle, the two greatest representatives of classical thought (and Plato is on the right), beneath the arches of a vast basilica designed by Bramante, almost prefiguring the interior of the new Vatican Temple then under construction. In the brief interval between this and the previous fresco, Raphael succeeded in mastering the difficult technique of mural painting, achieving a style even more evolved and individual, free of any trace of uncertainty. Here too there are many portraits: Plato is Leonardo da Vinci, Euclid is Bramante, in the right corner Raphael himself appears beside Sodoma, Francesco Maria della Rovere is the youth in white, and Federico Gonzaga the curly-haired boy. Particularly noteworthy is the portrait of Michelangelo, seated alone in the foreground under the guise of the melancholic Heraclitus, a powerful figure in Michelangelesque manner derived from the Isaiah of the Sistine ceiling, partially uncovered in Aug. 1511 and added to the already completed fresco. The inclusion of artists among the seekers of Truth is an idea not Platonic but typical of the Renaissance and certainly due to Raphael’s initiative. On the hem of Bramante-Euclid’s tunic, the letters R.V.S.M. appear in gold: *Raphael Urbinas Sua Manu*.

The Parnassus shows at its center APOLLO intent upon playing the lyre, with his arm resting on the hill sacred to the Muses, who stand beside him together with the Three Graces and the most famous poets of antiquity and the Renaissance: SAPPHO, PETRARCH, ENNIUS, DANTE, HOMER, VIRGIL, CASTIGLIONE, BOCCACCIO, TEBALDEO, and others. Here Raphael’s genius brings to life in the form of art a theme that neo-Latin versifiers of Humanism rarely succeeded in translating into poetry. He does so with a confidence and nonchalance “of the cinquecento” that suggests a date later than *The School of Athens*, but earlier than the lunette of the Virtues, where the influence of Michelangelo—manifest in the interpolated figure of Heraclitus—is much more palpable.

The Cardinal Virtues of Fortitude, Prudence, and Temperance (Justice, according to the thought of Plato later taken up by St. Augustine, is depicted above in the medallion as the sum and guide of the other three), together with the Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity (the cherubs, according to Wind), symbolize the moral content or subjective principle of the Law, which is represented in the two scenes flanking the window: *The Delivery*: Gregory IX receiving the Decretals from St. Raymond of Peñafort (the Pope is a portrait of Julius II) and Tribonian delivering the Pandects to Justinian—two rather mediocre frescoes, the first largely executed by Raphael’s assistants, the second painted by Guglielmo di Marcillat (Donati).

Each Idea is depicted twice on the vault, in a progressively higher degree of abstraction: first in an episode of transparent allegory (in the small corner panels) and then in its symbolic personification (in the roundels), almost as if to recall the Platonic itinerary of the spirit from the phenomenal world to the realm of pure Ideas. Corresponding to *The Disputation* are the panel with the Fall of Man and the medallion of Theology (inspired by Dante’s Beatrice); to *The School of Athens* correspond *The First Mover* (a gigantic female figure setting in motion the sphere of the movable heavens) and Philosophy; to the Virtues, the little scene of Solomon’s Judgment and Justice, still almost Peruginesque; and finally, to the Parnassus, the story of Apollo and Marsyas (perhaps by the hand of Peruzzi) and Poetry. The progress Raphael made in painting this room is prodigious: if in *The Disputation* traces of Umbrian quattrocento style can still be detected, in the other frescoes his style has already attained that perfect maturity, that equilibrium between truth and poetry, that “classicism,” in short, which makes it the mirror of the aesthetic ideal of the Renaissance. In the concept here illustrated—the reconciliation of ancient philosophy and theology, of the ancient world and the Christian world—this cycle admirably expresses one of the essential aspects of Humanism and makes of the *Stanza della Segnatura* a sanctuary of Western culture.

In the *Stanza di Eliodoro* (1512–14), Raphael developed a less complex program, representing

four miracles of Providence protecting the Church, threatened in its wealth destined for worship and charity (Heliodorus), in the treasure of the Faith (Bolsena Mass), in the person of the Vicar of Christ (Liberation of St. Peter), and in the seat of the papacy, Rome (Attila). All these scenes allude to the life and politics of Julius II, who cannot have been uninvolved in the choice of themes. Here Raphael, now master of Tuscan design, attempts to conquer the chromatic magic of the Venetians, stimulated by the example of Sebastiano del Piombo, who had been in Rome since 1511.

The fresco of *The Expulsion of Heliodorus*, who had robbed the Temple’s treasure and is driven from the sanctuary by three scourging angels, is an entire composition built around whirlwinds, where the true protagonist, the spirit of God, remains invisible: it seems to descend from the gilded domes above the altar, then to sweep onward, clearing a path before it and hurling the avenging angels upon the fallen desecrator. Here Raphael first confronts the pictorial problem of violent motion, rendered all the more vivid by the richness of color. The painting alludes to the policy of restoring the temporal rights of the Church so tenaciously pursued by Pope della Rovere (cf. “Drive out the barbarians”), who appears in the left corner carried on the sedia gestatoria in a superb triumphal portrait.

In *The Mass at Bolsena*, Raphael brilliantly solves an exceedingly difficult spatial problem, illustrating a miracle that occurred in 1263, when the consecrated Host exuded drops of blood during Mass celebrated by a priest returning from doubt. To paint his scene, he had at his disposal the space of a lunette, reduced and made asymmetrical by the void of a large ribbed window shifted to the left. Raphael overcomes the difficulty by tilting all the figures on that side toward the right and extending the window’s architrave to serve as a step for the altar, placed at the center of the lunette, while on the other side all the figures form stable masses. In doing so, he not only corrects the defect of the space but turns it to advantage, for the restless figures of the faithful behind the celebrant suggest doubt, while the Pope (a portrait of Julius II) and his court on the other side of the altar signify, in their immobility, the certainty of Faith. The famous group of the Swiss Guards (below, to the right) is marvelously preserved and extraordinarily Venetian in color, giving an idea of how the frescoes of the Rooms appeared to contemporaries. In this little band Raphael imitates, as nowhere else in his work, the style of the Venetians to master their secret of chromatic magic, just as in the figure of Heraclitus he had imitated Michelangelo to conquer his plastic power of design. Julius II was devoted to the sacred relic of the Corporal of the Miracle (preserved in the cathedral of Orvieto), which partly explains the choice of this unusual subject in sacred iconography.

*The Liberation of St. Peter from Prison*, depicted exactly according to the text of the Acts of the Apostles, anticipates Rembrandt and marks the entry of light as the principal protagonist in a European painting, with the light from the window below contributing (as Vasari already noted) to the dazzling effect of the scene. The luminous effect of the central episode is heightened by the stark contrast of the black bars of the grate behind which the scene unfolds and the radiance of the angel. The choice of subject clearly alludes to the title of *St. Peter in Chains*, held by Julius II when he was a cardinal.

*The Encounter of Attila and Pope Leo the Great*, a composition well balanced in its movement of masses but cold when compared with the others, marks the beginning of the overwhelming collaboration of the master’s pupils in his work, and here one feels in particular the heavy hand of Giulio Romano. During the execution of this fresco Pope della Rovere died, so his head was replaced with that of his successor, Leo X de’ Medici; thus he appears twice in the same painting, having already been portrayed as a cardinal in the Pope’s retinue. The allusion to the Battle of Ravenna could also apply to the Medici Pope, who had been present at it in 1512. The vault shows in four segments of draped fabric the frescoed episodes of the Burning Bush, the Sacrifice of Isaac, Jacob’s Ladder, and the Lord’s Appearance to Noah before the Ark—frescoes designed by Raphael but executed by Guglielmo di Marcillat, all of them in symbolic relation to the corresponding compositions on the walls.

In the Stanza dell'Incendio (c. 1514–17), the last to be decorated, there is little of his own work beyond the designs and perhaps, at least in part, some cartoons. The fresco execution was carried out by his pupils, especially Penni and Giulio Romano. The program proposed to Sanzio aimed to exalt the Church by recalling memorable events from the lives of two great Roman pontiffs, Leo III and Leo IV, in homage to the reigning Leo X: the Fire in the Borgo, which gives its name to the room, and perhaps four miracles of Providence protecting the Church, threatened in its wealth destined for worship and charity (Heliodorus), in the treasury of the Faith (Mass of Bolsena), in the person of the Vicar of Christ (Liberation of St. Peter), and in the person of the Pope himself (Miracle of Leo III). These frescoes allude to the peace policy desired by the Medici pope; the Battle of Ostia, fought in 849, commemorates here the fortification of the Lazio coast undertaken by Leo X; the Coronation of Charlemagne, where the Emperor bears the features of Francis I and the Pope (as in the other frescoes) those of Leo X, in memory of the Concordat signed in Bologna between France and the Church in 1515; and finally the Justification of Leo III, alluding to the confirmation of the bull *Unam sanctam* decided in 1516 by the Lateran Council. In the first two frescoes, some intervention by Raphael in the execution of the cartoons may reasonably be supposed, though not in the painting itself; while for the other two, his participation seems to have gone no further than the designs provided to the pupils, directed by Penni and Giulio Romano. And yet this almost indirect presence places these compositions at an artistic level that, while undoubtedly inferior to that of the first two rooms executed entirely by his own hand, is still higher than that of the Sala di Costantino, carried out almost entirely by his pupils after his death.

During these years, news also comes of Raphael’s activity as an architect, an art in which he initially followed the guidance of Bramante. On his deathbed (March 1514), Bramante recommended him to the Pope as his worthy successor in the Fabbrica of St. Peter’s (papal brief of appointment dated 1 August 1514, confirming the provisional assignment of 1 April of that year) and in the role of architect of the Apostolic Palaces. For the new Vatican Basilica, Sanzio provided a wooden model (now lost), and in the Apostolic Palace he completed, continuing his predecessor’s work, the second floor of the Logge of St. Damasus (1514–18), adorned under his direction with stuccoes, small frescoes, and grotesques by Giulio Romano, Francesco Penni, Giovanni da Udine, Pierin del Vaga, and others. He also enriched Bramante’s two-story construction with a final peristyle gallery of Corinthian order, corresponding to a third floor added to the Vatican Palace, where the Stufetta of Cardinal Bibbiena (1516) stands, built to his design and decorated by him with mythological frescoes inspired by the Roman paintings of the Domus Aurea, recently brought to light. Sanzio added a flight of stairs to Bramante’s Papal Staircase to provide access to this new floor, which in the staircase building overlooks the Cortile del Maresciallo with an elegant loggia (c. 1516). Recently brought to light, this loggia is entirely adorned with frescoes similar to those of the Loggia of St. Damasus, executed under his guidance by the same artists. It is also known that Raphael took part in the competition for the new façade of San Lorenzo in Florence (won by Michelangelo); that he provided designs for the Palazzo Pandolfini (there, 1516), for the Villa Madama in Rome (same date), for the Palazzo dell’Aquila in Borgo (destroyed), and for other works, not all attributed to him with equal certainty. Sufficient for his glory as an architect is the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo (Rome), begun as early as 1512 and adorned on its vault with music executed to his designs by the Venetian Luigi de Pace (signed and dated 1516). Here too is found the only sculpture modeled by Raphael: a Jonah, carved in marble by Lorenzetto.

Among the many works of this period of full maturity and abundant production, only a few of the principal ones will be mentioned here: the Madonna of Foligno (Vatican, Pinacoteca, 1511–12), a painting of serene and satisfied beauty; the frescoes of Isaiah (Rome, Sant’Agostino, c. 1512), inspired by the prophets of the Sistine Chapel; and of the Sibyls (Rome, Santa Maria della Pace, c. 1514), wonderfully posed in movements that soften, without weakening, the harmony of masses and contrasting motions learned from Michelangelo; the joyful Galatea (Rome, Farnesina, 1514), a poet-humanist’s dream in which the ancient myth is reborn to new life; and St. Cecilia (Bologna, Pinacoteca, c. 1514–15), a poem of blessed renunciation, which, according to Vasari’s account, caused the old Francia to die of “grief and melancholy” when he saw II. Also from these years are some of his finest portraits, such as that of Tommaso Inghirami (Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, c. 1514; another version in Florence, Pitti Palace, c. 1516).