ART & ARTISTS: Raphael

Monday, 1 November 2021

Raphael - part 3

For centuries Raphael has been recognised as the supreme High Renaissance painter, more versatile than Michaelangelo and more prolific than their older contemporary Leonardo. Though he died at 37, Raphael's example as a paragon of classicism dominated the academic tradition of European painting until the mid-19th century.

Raphael (Raffaello Santi) was born in Urbino where his father, Giovanni Santi, was court painter. He almost certainly began his training there and must have known works by Mantegna, Uccello, and Piero della Francesca from an early age. His earliest paintings were also greatly influenced by Purgino. From 1500 - when he became an independent master - to 1508 he worked throughout central Italy, particularly Florence, where he became a noted portraitist and painter of Madonnas.

In 1508, at the age of 25, he was called to the court of Pope Julius II to help with the redecoration of the papal apartments. In Rome he evolved as a portraitist, and became one of the greatest of all history painters.

He remained in Rome for the rest of his life and in 1514, on the death of Bramante, he was appointed architect in charge of St Peter’s.

For earlier works see parts 1 & 2 also.

This is part 3 of 5 parts on the works of Raphael:

c1505-1507 The Lamentation
(Study for the Entombment of Christ)
pen and brown ink over geometrical indications in blind stylus 17.9 x 20.6 cm
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

c1505 Madonna and Child
oil on panel 59.5 x 44 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

c1505 Portrait of a Young Man in Red
oil on panel 67.3 x 52.7 cm
The J. Paul Getty Museum

c1505 The Virgin and Child with St John (Madonna del Cardellino)
pen and brown ink over blind stylus, some traces of lead or chalk 23 x 16.3 cm
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

c1506-1507 The Madonna of the House of Orleans
oil on panel 31 x 23 cm
Musée Condé, Chantilly, France

c1506 Saint George and the Dragon
oil on panel 28.5 x 21.5 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

1507 La Belle Jardinière
(Madonna and child with Saint John the Baptist)
oil on panel 122 x 80 cm
Louvre, Paris

1507 The Deposition
oil on panel 174.5 x 178.5 cm
Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy

c1507-1508 Colonna Madonna
oil on poplar wood panel 53 x 38 cm
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

c1507-1508 Portrait of a Young Woman
oil on wood panel 64 x 48 cm
Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino

c1507 Guidobaldo da Montefeltro
oil on wood panel 71 x 50 cm
Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy

c1507 Saint Catherine of Alexandria
oil on poplar panel 72.2 x 55.7 cm
The National Gallery, London

Catherine of Alexandria, a fourth-century princess, was converted to Christianity and in a vision underwent a mystic marriage with Christ. When she would not give up her faith, Emperor Maxentius ordered that she be bound to a spiked wheel and tortured to death. However, a thunderbolt destroyed the wheel before it could harm her. Catherine was then beheaded.

Raphael has focused on the visionary aspect of the saint’s faith, capturing her with her hand on heart and her lips parted, in a moment of divine ecstasy looking heavenwards to a golden break in the clouds. In the foreground is a dandelion seed head. The dandelion often appears in Netherlandish and German paintings as a symbol of Christian grief and the Passion (Christ’s torture and crucifixion).

The saint’s twisting pose reflects Raphael’s study of the sinuous grace of Perugino’s paintings, the dynamic compositions of Leonardo and the monumentality of Michelangelo’s figures

c1507 The Infant Christ and other Studies
pen and brown ink over lead-point, on white paper
28.3 x 16 cm
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

1508 Niccolini-Cowper Madonna
oil on panel 80.7 x 57.5 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

c1508-1509 Sketch for the lower left section of the "Disputa"
pen and brown ink 28.2 x 41.6 cm
Städel Museum

c1508 Madonna Colonna
oil on poplar wood panel 78.9 x 58.2 cm
Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

c1508 The Tempi Madonna
oil on wood panel 75 x 51 cm
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

c1506-07 Madonna of the Pinks:

In this painting, Raphael transforms the familiar subject of the Virgin and Child into something entirely new. The figures are no longer posed stiffly and formally as in paintings by earlier artists, but display all the tender emotions one might expect between a young mother and her child. The pair are seated in a bedchamber in an Italian Renaissance palace, and exchange carnations, which are symbolic of divine love and of Christ’s Passion (his torture and crucifixion).

This small picture may have been intended to be held in the hand for prayer and contemplation. A manuscript inventory dating to the early 1520s states that it was made for ‘Maddalena degli Oddi, a nun in Perugia.

c1506-07 Madonna of the Pinks
oil on yew wood panel 27.9 x 22.4 cm
The National Gallery, London

1508-1524 Raphael Rooms, Apostolic Palace, Vatican

The four Raphael Rooms (Stanze di Raffaello) form a suite of reception rooms in the Apostolic Palace, now part of the Vatican Museums in Vatican City. They are famous for their frescoes painted by Raphael and his workshop. Together with Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes, they are the grand fresco sequences that mark the High Renaissance in Rome.

The Stanze, as they are commonly called, were originally intended as a suite of apartments for Pope Julius II. He commissioned Raphael, then a relatively young artist and his studio in 1508 or 1509 to redecorate the existing interiors of the rooms entirely. It was possibly Julius' intent to outshine the apartments of his predecessor (and rival) Pope Alexander VI, as the Stanze are directly above Alexander’s Borgia Apartment. They are on the third floor, overlooking the south side of the Belvedere Courtyard.