DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.53068#0027
ANTECEDENTS
what lies within, his great, reverent feeling for landscape. In like manner Fra
Angelico, in the very midst of the disintegrating victory of the new perspective,
had painted his landscapes, the loveliest revelations of Italian distances with all
their colour, with his back to nature, in the pious seclusion of his cell; thus
Raphael in his maturity depicted his perceptions of the wide expanses that
stirred his imagination. What higher gift, comparable with that received from
this, with his constant “ducae poeta”, had Florence, with the scholarly wisdom of
her art, yet to bestow on this painter of the beyond?
Dante lived in every painter of the Renaissance; but only Botticelli and
Michael Angelo were fired by the idea of illustrating him. Through Raphael
we gain a new approach to his world.
At that time the old Flemish painters visited many a princely Court in the
South with samples of their art. They caused disquiet to every painter, at
least at moments; rejection of what was alien came about for the most part as a
natural reaction, the plundering of it, as a matter of course and almost always
in a spiritless fashion.
At Urbino, in addition to that strange sojourner from Ghent, there were
certainly a large number of works from the North, just as there were in the
residences of the Medici at Florence. No one at that time absorbed with so
much genuine understanding the exciting wonders of Hieronymus Bosch as
this young disciple of Dante among the painters. He comes across one of the
visions of Bosch full of bogies and witches’ kitchens, and it was certainly not
the “draughtsman” in him that was affected by the essence of this art—
phantoms summoned up by an unbounded imagination out of the primal
consciousness of the elemental in man and nature; immediately, as they
coalesce with impressions from Dante, the horizon widens out for him into
an endless scene of Hell permeated with darkness and glow of fire!
As a painter he begins his ascent to the “regions of an ancestry sublime” where
stand the few poets of the other world. This was destiny; what do external
influences signify, stages passed on the journey by his work, the procession of
figures that go by? Perhaps one might speak of kings appearing to him in the
mirror of history, in a succession at the end of which he was called to take his
place.
9
what lies within, his great, reverent feeling for landscape. In like manner Fra
Angelico, in the very midst of the disintegrating victory of the new perspective,
had painted his landscapes, the loveliest revelations of Italian distances with all
their colour, with his back to nature, in the pious seclusion of his cell; thus
Raphael in his maturity depicted his perceptions of the wide expanses that
stirred his imagination. What higher gift, comparable with that received from
this, with his constant “ducae poeta”, had Florence, with the scholarly wisdom of
her art, yet to bestow on this painter of the beyond?
Dante lived in every painter of the Renaissance; but only Botticelli and
Michael Angelo were fired by the idea of illustrating him. Through Raphael
we gain a new approach to his world.
At that time the old Flemish painters visited many a princely Court in the
South with samples of their art. They caused disquiet to every painter, at
least at moments; rejection of what was alien came about for the most part as a
natural reaction, the plundering of it, as a matter of course and almost always
in a spiritless fashion.
At Urbino, in addition to that strange sojourner from Ghent, there were
certainly a large number of works from the North, just as there were in the
residences of the Medici at Florence. No one at that time absorbed with so
much genuine understanding the exciting wonders of Hieronymus Bosch as
this young disciple of Dante among the painters. He comes across one of the
visions of Bosch full of bogies and witches’ kitchens, and it was certainly not
the “draughtsman” in him that was affected by the essence of this art—
phantoms summoned up by an unbounded imagination out of the primal
consciousness of the elemental in man and nature; immediately, as they
coalesce with impressions from Dante, the horizon widens out for him into
an endless scene of Hell permeated with darkness and glow of fire!
As a painter he begins his ascent to the “regions of an ancestry sublime” where
stand the few poets of the other world. This was destiny; what do external
influences signify, stages passed on the journey by his work, the procession of
figures that go by? Perhaps one might speak of kings appearing to him in the
mirror of history, in a succession at the end of which he was called to take his
place.
9