DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.53068#0074
RAPHAEL
full-face, severely fitted into the frame (Plate 45). There was much truth in the
error by which the picture was attributed to Holbein. The quiet, not to say frigid,
sense of superiority in his first independent step in this sphere betrays the artist,
not yet twenty years of age, as born interpreter of a society to which he was hardly
beginning to belong. The full-face portrait of a richly-dressed boy, in the Pitti
Palace, came from Urbino—a youth with almost adult, mature features, cool-
ness and energy in the look and mouth; seen in profile, the aggressive features
would certainly be dominant. Gronau, who rescued this small panel picture
from the indifferent name of Giacomo Francia, suggested Francesco Maria
della Rovere, adopted successor to the throne of Urbino; thirty years later
Titian painted him, in a state of physical and moral decay. Here already the
sinister character of the features is rendered in the enamel of the painting with
the delicate feeling for the rise and fall of the forms, so that the head sets a
standard to which the pose of the arms is not equal. Indeed, the wonderfully
noble harmony, metallic and gold-like, of warm brown, red, gold and white
against the blue distance, and the free, mobile calm in the eyelids, nostrils and
mouth, lead one to expect that the figure would rise up less stiffly in the space
above the balustrade, and that the arms might be more freely developed. Can
it be that these parts were completed by a less creative hand? As regards the
lower part of the figure, it is not quite every inch the future ruler whose char-
acter is interpreted by Raphael; for in the effort to convey expression, Raphael
rather went beyond nature than fell short of it.
§ The Budapest Portrait
The young humanist of the Budapest Portrait (Plate 116), in the violet-
blue and red of his professional costume, backed by a distant landscape still
conceived in the Umbrian manner, overcomes as a sitter every obstacle and dis-
plays his very self; with his intellectually refined nature, he goes on his way through
the world of phenomena as if transfigured, with swan-like motion, and the forceful
anatomy of the neck inevitably contributes to the triumph of the expression
in the face. The same effect is indeed convincingly conveyed by the hands,
which are not concealed from view; the one with the paper indicates that he is
“appointed to be a writer”, the other, in a motive that Giorgione hit upon in
the same period, causes the bust to recede from the balustrade into the
corporeal world which encompasses his shoulders and dark-complexioned head,
with its red cap. And so his character is summed up clearly in the fiery,
facetious eyes and the sensual mouth. With his intellectual attractiveness, he
goes as a favourite gracefully on his way amongst affairs and men. One
is reminded of the role of the young Bibbiena among the cortegiani of Urbino—
in the circle of the ladies, a forerunner of the abbes of the eighteenth century
salons.
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full-face, severely fitted into the frame (Plate 45). There was much truth in the
error by which the picture was attributed to Holbein. The quiet, not to say frigid,
sense of superiority in his first independent step in this sphere betrays the artist,
not yet twenty years of age, as born interpreter of a society to which he was hardly
beginning to belong. The full-face portrait of a richly-dressed boy, in the Pitti
Palace, came from Urbino—a youth with almost adult, mature features, cool-
ness and energy in the look and mouth; seen in profile, the aggressive features
would certainly be dominant. Gronau, who rescued this small panel picture
from the indifferent name of Giacomo Francia, suggested Francesco Maria
della Rovere, adopted successor to the throne of Urbino; thirty years later
Titian painted him, in a state of physical and moral decay. Here already the
sinister character of the features is rendered in the enamel of the painting with
the delicate feeling for the rise and fall of the forms, so that the head sets a
standard to which the pose of the arms is not equal. Indeed, the wonderfully
noble harmony, metallic and gold-like, of warm brown, red, gold and white
against the blue distance, and the free, mobile calm in the eyelids, nostrils and
mouth, lead one to expect that the figure would rise up less stiffly in the space
above the balustrade, and that the arms might be more freely developed. Can
it be that these parts were completed by a less creative hand? As regards the
lower part of the figure, it is not quite every inch the future ruler whose char-
acter is interpreted by Raphael; for in the effort to convey expression, Raphael
rather went beyond nature than fell short of it.
§ The Budapest Portrait
The young humanist of the Budapest Portrait (Plate 116), in the violet-
blue and red of his professional costume, backed by a distant landscape still
conceived in the Umbrian manner, overcomes as a sitter every obstacle and dis-
plays his very self; with his intellectually refined nature, he goes on his way through
the world of phenomena as if transfigured, with swan-like motion, and the forceful
anatomy of the neck inevitably contributes to the triumph of the expression
in the face. The same effect is indeed convincingly conveyed by the hands,
which are not concealed from view; the one with the paper indicates that he is
“appointed to be a writer”, the other, in a motive that Giorgione hit upon in
the same period, causes the bust to recede from the balustrade into the
corporeal world which encompasses his shoulders and dark-complexioned head,
with its red cap. And so his character is summed up clearly in the fiery,
facetious eyes and the sensual mouth. With his intellectual attractiveness, he
goes as a favourite gracefully on his way amongst affairs and men. One
is reminded of the role of the young Bibbiena among the cortegiani of Urbino—
in the circle of the ladies, a forerunner of the abbes of the eighteenth century
salons.
56