DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.53068#0167
RAPHAEL AS ARCHITECT
§ Cappella Chigi: Unity of Building and Decoration
Once Raphael had the rare good fortune of being able to conceive and
give final shape to such a space for worship as a single whole together with its
pictorial decoration—just as Michael Angelo had in the family chapel of the
Medici at San Lorenzo. This was in the sepulchral chapel for Agostino Chigi
in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo. The building, with the sweep of
cornices and niches in the wall, the pyramidal tomb of the founder, gently
expanding and melting away again into the wall, the lighting, which entices
the eye and leads it on to the reflections on the pictorial mosaic decoration of the
ceiling, make of the little room one single sursum corda.
It is difficult to give an idea of the interior effect (Plate 160). Photography fails;
architectural diagrams lack spatial quality, and nothing else is here important.
An impetus is communicated to the eye, starting with the lower storey. The pillars
of the dome have niches with statues between pilasters; even these adapt them-
selves with their absolutely audacious recession to the lines of the space. The
‘tomb-pyramids stand in the great intervening arched recesses. Raphael was the
first to use them, though not yet in their present baroque forcibleness, as an
interruption of the classical line and yet bound to the wall-surface—a form with a
mystic intention, the symbol of eternity. The spherically trapeze-shaped
spandrels carry the cornice of the dome, and here the energy of the circular
movement is renewed in its sweep. The eye feels itself carried on from the fixed
cornice into ever more ethereal regions—from the inert stone to the light-inter-
woven sphere with its dazzling effect before the dome, causing reflections on its
mosaic decoration; the play of light that, in the Deliverance of Peter, con-
fronted the gaze towards the window in the picture, is here repeated more boldly
and deliberately (Plate 161). The confusion of the eye in the presence of the miracle
on earth here becomes a dazzled attraction towards the luminous spheres of the
upper and highest region. A soft atmospheric blue gleams between the strongly
profiled cornices and ribs; in front of it advance the figures of the Planets, who
of old set the starry firmament in motion, the deities of the Greeks, guided in
their course by angels of God. And beyond their sphere the gaze passes irresist-
ibly, through an ever lighter framework of gleaming gold, up to the opaion, and
sees God the Father through the ethereal, fiery air, wielding sway with un-
approachable hands over the universe and the stars, overpoweringly threatening
and yet immeasurably vast, just as a cloud passes above the “eye” of the Pan-
theon (Plate 302).
It was the heart’s desire of Agostino Ghigi and the most intimate wish of
the “gran mercante di christianita” to know himself to be, in his life, under
the sway of the daemons that guide the stars. It was with this in his mind that
his villa on the Lungara offered hospitality to the gods of Antiquity; in his
thoughts of death, he wished to feel himself and the stars that ruled his life to be
in the hand of the Most High.
L I49
§ Cappella Chigi: Unity of Building and Decoration
Once Raphael had the rare good fortune of being able to conceive and
give final shape to such a space for worship as a single whole together with its
pictorial decoration—just as Michael Angelo had in the family chapel of the
Medici at San Lorenzo. This was in the sepulchral chapel for Agostino Chigi
in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo. The building, with the sweep of
cornices and niches in the wall, the pyramidal tomb of the founder, gently
expanding and melting away again into the wall, the lighting, which entices
the eye and leads it on to the reflections on the pictorial mosaic decoration of the
ceiling, make of the little room one single sursum corda.
It is difficult to give an idea of the interior effect (Plate 160). Photography fails;
architectural diagrams lack spatial quality, and nothing else is here important.
An impetus is communicated to the eye, starting with the lower storey. The pillars
of the dome have niches with statues between pilasters; even these adapt them-
selves with their absolutely audacious recession to the lines of the space. The
‘tomb-pyramids stand in the great intervening arched recesses. Raphael was the
first to use them, though not yet in their present baroque forcibleness, as an
interruption of the classical line and yet bound to the wall-surface—a form with a
mystic intention, the symbol of eternity. The spherically trapeze-shaped
spandrels carry the cornice of the dome, and here the energy of the circular
movement is renewed in its sweep. The eye feels itself carried on from the fixed
cornice into ever more ethereal regions—from the inert stone to the light-inter-
woven sphere with its dazzling effect before the dome, causing reflections on its
mosaic decoration; the play of light that, in the Deliverance of Peter, con-
fronted the gaze towards the window in the picture, is here repeated more boldly
and deliberately (Plate 161). The confusion of the eye in the presence of the miracle
on earth here becomes a dazzled attraction towards the luminous spheres of the
upper and highest region. A soft atmospheric blue gleams between the strongly
profiled cornices and ribs; in front of it advance the figures of the Planets, who
of old set the starry firmament in motion, the deities of the Greeks, guided in
their course by angels of God. And beyond their sphere the gaze passes irresist-
ibly, through an ever lighter framework of gleaming gold, up to the opaion, and
sees God the Father through the ethereal, fiery air, wielding sway with un-
approachable hands over the universe and the stars, overpoweringly threatening
and yet immeasurably vast, just as a cloud passes above the “eye” of the Pan-
theon (Plate 302).
It was the heart’s desire of Agostino Ghigi and the most intimate wish of
the “gran mercante di christianita” to know himself to be, in his life, under
the sway of the daemons that guide the stars. It was with this in his mind that
his villa on the Lungara offered hospitality to the gods of Antiquity; in his
thoughts of death, he wished to feel himself and the stars that ruled his life to be
in the hand of the Most High.
L I49