Raphael - Biography

Raphael - Self Portrait Uffizi, Florence

Raphael Sanzio was born at Urbino in 1483. The fortunes of his family had been broken by war. The father, Giovanni Santi, was literate, and was also a painter at the court of Urbino. Of his mother, the boy Raphael knew little; and his father married again and died when Raphael was still quite young; but he may have given him early lessons and transmitted certain tendencies of feeling to this extremely sensitive mind.

At fifteen, perhaps, the boy went to Perugia, where there were artists and schools; that is to say, apprenticeship in the workshop of painters. Pietro Vanucci, called Perugino, took him into his studio at the age of seventeen; perhaps he had some instruction at Urbino from Timoteo Viti, who was always his friend. And the one great gift of Raphael, a power of almost instant assimilation, must have enriched him from the earliest times by whatever he liked or tried to understand. All this early life is entangled with the work of Perugino, though it is made out that some of the very early pieces accredited to the more famous youth have something harking back to an earlier influence.

In those days, the work of the master was not only the example, but the model and the storehouse of the pupil. He borrowed this or that scheme and filled in with fragments of his own; or he imitated fragments to put into his own new scheme, as it happened with Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin (1504), heavily influenced by Perugino. And so every one borrowed from the other; it was not something wrong, it was a manner of admiration, and often a possible help when, as often happened, one artist called upon others to help him carry out his work. In such way Pinturicchio, also of Perugia, called upon Raphael for help in his work at Siena. It seems also that the youngster destined to be the more famous based some of his early work on the studies of Pinturicchio.

It was, therefore, with no small powers, original and acquired, that, after having worked at Siena, the young Raphael came up to Florence in 1504 with recommendation of the Duchess of Urbino to the Gonfaloniere.

Here, Raphael biography is intersecting (how else?) the great masters. There he found Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo designing the famous cartoons, now lost, which were among their greatest achievements, and which affected permanently the entire discipline of Italian and European art. Both these men he must have studied to some extent, as he also studied the earlier painters whose works were on the walls of the churches. Indeed, their memory lasted to that extent that Raphael, long after, merely transposed one of the great figures of Masaccio into his design of Paul preaching at Athens. The gentle youth formed a friendship with the Monk Fra Bartolommeo, himself a serious student and painter, though only from obedience. Once upon a time he had given up art and entered the cloister, and had burned publicly the pagan works of his youth in the great bonfire which the puritans of Savonarola’s preaching built in horror of the excesses of art and luxury. There was an interchange of knowledge between these two men; and in this beautiful companionship and in the absorption of the influences of Florence, which were to determine the future, Raphael began to form the style by which we know him best. He has said himself that he paid attention to everything. It must also be said that he made all his own, that it was rather a renewal of himself than an accumulation of knowledge which defines this continuous increase in the wealth of his resources.

It seems but natural that, in 1508, the great Pope Julius called him to his service in Rome. Under the benevolence of his new patron, his art developed in every direction, and he begins the great wall paintings of the Vatican which are the full bloom of decorative art. His cycle of frescoes are decorating the Vatican chambers, and the chamber known as Stanza della Segnatura is displaying two of his masterpieces: The Dispute and The School of Athens.

He paints also portraits which remain as surely among the most prodigious representations of realistic study. Even in the few painted in Florence we feel the uncompromising perception of the individual. Their methods may be undeveloped, but are faithful to the essential difference of the portrait as having its own mode of life. They are few in number, but they testify to a prodigious sincerity and a power of suggesting some intimate life behind that of the external one. The means by which he attains this are as mysterious as the causes of the grace and nobility of his great show pieces.

The next Pope, Leo X, was less great than his predecessor, certainly less noble, but more distinctly fond of the pleasures of art. That charm which satisfied the sterner Pope was more than sufficient to make the self-indulgent Medicean favor Raphael and his cohort of friends and dependants, just as the independent standing of Michelangelo displeased him.

Between 1513-1514, Raphael painted the Sistine Madonna.  In 1514, he accepted the position of Architect of the new Saint Peter’s, obtaining, with his usual good fortune, the help of a learned assistant who could be at the same time his teacher, the celebrated Dominican Fra Giocondo of Verona, and was having translated for him Vitruvius, in whose pages the men of that day hoped to find the secret of all ancient architectural art.

In the same year, in one of his few letters to his uncle, the brother of his mother, at home in Urbino, he tells how he was staying at Rome, "as he shall never be able to stay anywhere else again, out of love of the building of Saint Peter’s. For what spot on earth is more dignified than Rome? What enterprise is more dignified than St. Peter’s—the first temple of the world and the greatest piece of building that has ever been seen?" He tells his uncle how well satisfied he is, "how he holds property in Rome, and an income, and a salary from St. Peter, never to fail so long as he lives, and that he has more work for very large sums; and finally that Cardinal Bibbiena, his friend and patron, wishes him to marry a niece, and that he is engaged to her, and therefore that he is doing credit to his family, and to the lords of his native Urbino, to whom he sends homage."

Raphael Pope Leo X. with two Cardinals Uffizi, Florence

Great moneyed men were now in the front, and in a day which pre-eminently recognized achievement in every direction it seemed but fitting that their position should receive the adornment of cultured art. Naturally, again the name of Raphael becomes associated with that of the great banker Chigi, and, for him and for others, adorns or presides over the decorations of palaces. What we today call the Villa Farnesina is another of the buildings which Raphael marks with his name. Most of what we see is not his own handwork. No mere man could have carried this out with the very many other decorations and special paintings he had undertaken. So that these buildings are translated into the language of his assistants; even then they seem fine dreams of that classical antiquity which was beginning to be dug out from the ruins of Rome.

One of the many sides of Raphael was a passionate love for the discovery and resuscitation of the ancient Rome, carried so far as to make him hope that he might bring back the City to something like its former shape and splendor. Partly from this love, and partly because he was asked to build also, he followed with devotion the unearthing of the precious ruins. In 1515, Pope Leo X appointed Raphael as a Supervisor of the preservation of the Vatican collection of classical antiquities, and in 1517, he was made Commissioner of antiquities for the City of Rome.

Meanwhile, however, he not only placed before the eyes of the world the remains of classical antiquity, but in his usual way he gave to that antiquity a new form, so much more adapted to our comprehension that we still see the antique through the lovely vision by which he expressed it. It became with him a means of expression. He not only dressed Greek fable and story in his own shape, opening to the common mind what before was the privilege of a few, but he dressed in its way and manners the ancient Bible and the whole Christian story. The scenes of the Old Testament and those of the New are still in our minds tinged with the classical feeling— semi-pagan—which Raphael chose to clothe them in.

Most of the antiques which he uncovered are inferior in their own spirit, if one may so say, to that spirit which he discovered in them. The ornamental decorations which he uncovered in ancient ruins are only in a very few exceptional cases as rich, and largely understood, as the imitations which he or even his disciples made out from the original. 

The days of his personal work were drawing to a close. After 1517, his personal sharing in the work done is small. Nonetheless, the amount of work which he directed or prepared or retouched continued increasing.

In 1519, the paintings of Chigi and of the Vatican were not yet finished. Daily, however, he was asked to undertake new work, to draw cartoons for frescoes, or designs for ornaments, or for dies for coinage. Foreign princes asked their ambassadors for pictures from him. The Envoys found the Master unable to satisfy them, though he accepted, and pretended to believe that he might carry out the orders. He lived surrounded by pupils and assistants, and he was beginning to feel for the first time the pressure of his gigantic work. He was giving designs for architecture in which the serenity of his paintings is visible. He attended to the excavation of ancient Rome.

The last of the great Raphael's paintings, The Transfiguration, was executed between 1517-1520. The painting was commissioned by the Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, the future Pope Clement VII, for the Cathedral of San Giusto in Narbonne. In his pages dedicated to Raphael's biography, Vasari says that this is the "most beautiful and the most divine" of all works. But the future was to be closed for Raphael, as he died on Good Friday, 1520, his body laying in state before the unfinished picture. The work was finished shortly after the death of the master by his assistant, Giulio Romano.

The cord had been stretched too far and snapped. The longest life of any artist had not produced as much as this short career of thirty-seven years, a course accomplished without failure and in so far happier, perhaps, than a longer one with a possible decline. All the more bright seems this young rounded life. All the more do we think of a Raphael perpetually young. Italy felt his death; with him had departed the serenity and sweetness of the classical revival.