History

Raphael Painter

Raphael was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. He is best known for his frescoes and paintings, including the famous "School of Athens" in the Vatican. His work is characterized by its harmony, balance, and idealized forms, and he is considered one of the greatest artists of all time.

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6 Key excerpts on "Raphael Painter"

  • Book cover image for: Gardner's Art through the Ages
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    Gardner's Art through the Ages

    A Global History, Volume II

    In 1508, Julius II called Raffaello Santi (or Sanzio), known as Raphael (1483–1520) in English, to the papal court in Rome, which would soon displace Florence, Urbino, Mantua, and Milan as the leading Italian patron of art and architecture (see “Art in the Princely Courts of Renaissance Italy,” page 625). Born in a small town in Umbria near Urbino, Raphael probably learned the basics of his art from his father, Giovanni Santi (d. 1494), a painter con- nected with the ducal court of Federico da Montefeltro (fig. 21-44). Raphael soon developed an individual style—one that came to embody the ideals of High Renaissance art. Although he died at an early age, Raphael completed a large body of work, and several of his assistants became leaders of the next generation of Italian art- ists, extending his influence well into the century. Marriage of the Virgin. Among Raphael’s early works is Mar- riage of the Virgin (fig. 22-7), which he painted for the chapel of Saint Joseph in the church of San Francesco in Città di Castello, southeast of Florence. The subject was a fitting one for Joseph (see 22-6A LEONARDO, Vitruvian Man, ca. 1485–1490. 22-6B LEONARDO, central-plan church, ca. 1487–1490. 22-7 Raphael, Marriage of the Virgin, from the Albizzini chapel, San Francesco, Città di Castello, Italy, 1504. Oil on wood, 59 70 × 39 10 1 2 0. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. In this early work depicting the marriage of the Virgin to Saint Joseph, Raphael incorporated perspective devices used by Perugino (FIG. 21-41) and demonstrated his mastery of foreshortening. 1 ft. Every thumbnail image has a corresponding full-size MindTap Bonus Image and content in the MindTap reader for this chapter. 641 642 CHAPTER 22 Renaissance and Mannerism in Cinquecento Italy “Early Christian Saints,” pages 246–247). According to the Golden Leg- end (a 13th-century collection of stories about the lives of the saints), Joseph competed with other suitors for Mary’s hand.
  • Book cover image for: Understanding Art
    Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 370 | CHAPTER 17 The Renaissance RAPHAEL SANZIO A younger artist who assimilated the lessons offered by Leonardo, especially on the human-istic portrayal of the Madonna, was Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520). As a matter of fact, Michelangelo was not far off base in his accusation that Raphael copied from him, for the younger artist freely adopted whatever suited his purposes. Raphael truly shone in his ability to combine the techniques of other masters with an almost instinctive feel for Classical art. He rendered countless canvases depicting the Madonna and Child along the lines of Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks . Raphael was also sought after as a muralist. Some of his most impres-sive Classical compositions, in fact, were executed for the papal apartments in the Vatican. The commission came from Pope Julius, and to add fuel to Michelangelo’s fire, was executed at the same time Michelangelo was at work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. For the Stanza della Segnatura, the room in which the highest papal tribunal was held, Raphael painted The School of Athens ( Fig. 17.18A ), one of four frescoes designed within a semicircular frame. In what could be a text-book exercise of one-point linear perspective, Raphael crowded a veritable “who’s who” of Classical Greece con-vening beneath a series of barrel-vaulted archways. The figures symbolize philosophy, one of the four subjects deemed most valuable for a pope’s education. (The others were law, theology, and poetry.) The members of the gath-ering are divided into two camps representing opposing philosophies and are led, on the right, by Aristotle and on the left, by his mentor, Plato. Corresponding to these leaders are the Platonists, whose concerns are the loftier realm of Ideas (notice Plato pointing upward), and the Aristotelians, who are more in touch with matters of the earth, such as natural science.
  • Book cover image for: Giorgio Vasari
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    Giorgio Vasari

    The Man and the Book

    X 8 Raphael and Michelangelo "IN a word, for all Vasari commends him to the skies, Michel Angelo was a better Sculptor than Painter: One may say of Raphael and of him, that their characters were opposite, and both great Designers; the one endeavouring to show the Difficulties of the Art, and the other aiming at Easiness; in which, perhaps, there is as much Difficulty." So it seemed to William Aglionby at the end of the seventeenth cen- tury. "Raffaelle," wrote Sir Joshua Reynolds in his fifth discourse, "had more taste and fancy, Michelangelo more genius and imagination." Every period of art criticism uses its terms with different inflections of meaning; here are echoes of the Vasarian problem of assessing these two great figure's: the dark-eyed, languorous young man, who looks out so romantically from the much re-painted Uffizi self-portrait' [150], and the rugged, tortured face, so often rendered by his devoted followers, of Buonarroti [151]. The brilliant, attractive youth, who charmed everyone with his graziata affabilitd, was in vivid contrast with the withdrawn but pungent "divine old man." It was not only in his art that he triumphed, but also in his behavior ("dall'arte e dai cos- tumi insieme"). Giorgio well understood the prestige Raphael had given to the artificers of design; compared with him many of his prede- cessors seemed uncouth and unbalanced. He stands forth in a new status, the possessor of such rare gifts that he seemed a mortal god. Vasari knew that his own deep prejudice made him critical and a little jealous of Raphael's fame. The revisions in the second edition include minor stylistic changes, a nicety which elsewhere he rarely troubled to carry out. It shows how closely he pondered over this par- ticular Vita, which itself is only a part of what he wrote about "the miraculous Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino," a name that recurs pervasively throughout the whole work.
  • Book cover image for: The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Art and Artists
    Pop artist. In the early 1960s, comic book characters provided his images; subsequently he did paintings of pin-up girls of increasing eroticism.
    Ramsay Allan (1713–84). Scottish portrait painter. After studying in Italy he settled in London and became painter to George III. His most notable portraits are of women; in them he could give free expression to the grace and delicacy characteristic of his style, e.g. his painting of his 2nd wife, Margaret. An important male portrait is that of the philosopher Rousseau. In the 1760s he delegated most of his work to assistants and joined the literary group round Dr Samuel Johnson.
    Raphael (1483–1520). Raffaello Sanzio, Italian painter, with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci one of the three masters of the High Renaissance. Born at Urbino, already a flourishing centre of the arts, and the son of a painter, R. was brought into contact with the highest artistic achievements from childhood. He was trained by Perugino, who was then at the height of his own career. R.’s precocious talent was recognized long before he was 20 and his early Vision of a Knight shows an astonishing maturity. R. was astute enough to realize that the art of Leonardo and Michelangelo was transforming the whole conception of painting and in 1504 he went to Florence to study it. Betrothal of the Virgin (1504) shows the transition between the teaching of Perugino and the assertion of the new influences. R.’s colour and the emotional qualities of his work always remained within the tradition of Central Italian painting, while his sense of composition and the dynamic power of his draughtsmanship were learned from the Florentines. Early portraits too, show how much he owed to Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, e.g. Maddalena Doni. In his Madonnas, e.g. La Bella Jardinière (c. 1520), the influence of Fra Bartolommeo is combined with that of Leonardo’s drawings of St Anne with the Madonna and Child, e.g. Madonna with the Goldfinch and Madonna del Granduca. By 1508 R. was receiving offers from both the French court and the Pope; late in that year he went to Rome to take part in the grandiose decorative schemes of Pope Julius II for the new Papal apartments in the Vatican. R.’s response to the enormous artistic challenge his part of the scheme presented is also one of those astonishing ‘leaps forward’ in art history and is matched, perhaps, only by Masaccio’s painting of the frescoes in the Carmine church, Florence, 100 years earlier, and the exactly contemporary (1508–12) frescoes of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. When he found himself the peer and rival of Michelangelo R. was 26. Considered for their composition alone, The School of Athens, Parnassus and Disputà (Disputation concerning the Holy Sacrament) are probably supreme in art. They were immediately studied by every artist in Rome and remained an ‘art school in themselves’. At the same time R. was painting portraits such as the celebrated Young Cardinal. The next 8 years were, indeed, a record of astonishing achievement: R. and his assistants continued the Vatican frescoes – in the Stanza d’Eliodoro there is a richer use of colour, esp. in The Mass of Bolsena; while in the Stanza dell’ Incendio del Borgo the almost forced dramatic quality shows his study of the Michelangelo frescoes. In 1514 R. was-preferred to Michelangelo by the new Pope, Leo X, as successor to Bramante, architect-in-charge of St Peter’s. In 1518 he was to be made, with A. da Sangallo, ‘Superintendent of the Streets of Rome’, which made him responsible for town planning as well as for the day-to-day upkeep of the entire city. Before this, he had decorated the Farnesina Villa (1514). The famous Galatea is, with Botticelli’s Venus and Primavera, the supreme Renaissance evocation of the classical ‘Golden Age’; it is also unmatched in its interpretation of spontaneous and graceful female action. The classical themes remind one too, that R. was also responsible for the Papal colls of antiquities. In 1515–16, R. drew the cartoons for the tapestries which, woven in Flanders, were hung in the Sistine Chapel. 7 of the cartoons are preserved. Yet he also found time to paint altarpieces, e.g. The Sistine Madonna and The Transfiguration, a painting left unfinished when he died of fever. It was completed by Giulio Romano
  • Book cover image for: Raphael’s Ostrich
    2 R A P H A E L ’ S O S T R I C H to be the work of Raphael, but the lower section, with its discordant leaps between light and darkness and strangely twisted figures, had to be painted by someone else, surely not the luminous and harmonious Raphael of the Madonna paintings and the School of Athens. Art historians now recognize the whole as Raphael’s invention and largely his execution and see the contrasting upper and lower parts of the picture as creating an animating tension between the heavenly revelation of the divine and the earthly apostles’ frustrated attempts to exorcise a possessed boy. 7 The Raphael that is famous today and was idolized in the nineteenth century is a much simpler and more anodyne painter than the one that was divinized in 1520. All of those small “dear Madonnas” so celebrated for their sweetness were early modest works, probably made on spec, before he had received any of his grand commissions, and so were not much reproduced or widely praised in his day. The School of Athens, now famous for its seemingly perfect evocation of a harmonious classicism, was also little known, as it was painted in one of the pope’s private apartments and so, unlike the Transfiguration, could be seen only by a select few. 8 It is precisely because Raphael was apotheosized after his demise as no artist had been before him and became the chief god in the artistic Pantheon that we have inherited such a distorted vision of his art. The myth- making, begun during his life and dramatically amplified by his death, has narrowed our view of Raphael, who was celebrated in the sixteenth century for his broad range of abilities. Vasari and others hailed Michelangelo as a master painter of one supreme subject—the heroic male body, made in God’s image. Raphael was, in contrast, infinitely flexible, a painter of male and female, old and young, people, ani- mals, and plants. raphel’s ostrich 1 Tomb of Raphael, marble and other stones, begun in 1520, Pantheon, Rome.
  • Book cover image for: Goethe, Volume 3
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    Goethe, Volume 3

    Essays on Art and Literature

    • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gearey, Ellen von Nardroff, Ernest H. von Nardroff(Authors)
    • 2018(Publication Date)
    92 ESSAYS ON ART and strike out on their own. They therefore develop a kind of pictorial language which enables them to represent the visible world, more or less successfully, with dexterous and easy strokes. Thus they bedazzle us with all kinds of scenes, so that sometimes whole nations are pleas- antly entertained and beguiled for decades on end, until at last one or the other artist returns to nature and a higher concept of art. Antiquities of Herculaneum 4 offer proof that even the ancients finally declined into a sort of mannerism. But the models they learned from were too grand, too imposing and still well-preserved and accessible for ordinary painters to lose themselves completely in insignificance. In order to examine the issue from a higher and more rewarding van- tage point, let us turn to Raphael's unique talent. He was born with the most promising natural gifts and grew up in a time when art was pursued with utmost dedication and interest, hard work and perse- verance. Masters showed the way and led the novice to the threshold, and he only had to take a final step to enter the temple of art. Guided by Pietro Perugino 5 in the acquisition of a most painstaking technique, Raphael developed his remarkable talent using Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo as models. Despite the heights their genius attained, both these masters seem to have derived little genuine satisfaction from their artistic endeavors during their long lives. Leonardo literally thought himself into exhaustion and labored too long on technical matters. In- stead of adding extraordinary works of sculpture to his list of artistic achievements as he intended, Michelangelo toiled in quarries during the last years of his life selecting marble blocks and slabs. As a result, of all the planned sculptures of major figures from the Old and New Testaments, only Moses was completed—an example of what he could and should have accomplished.
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