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 RAPHAEL

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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