DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.53068#0168
RAPHAEL
This involved for Raphael more than a commission; here he was concerned
with the conception of the universe of an entire circle, the elite of his time,
amongst whom he was allowed to reckon himself. This view of an Olympus
ordered on a Christian basis had already become part of his experience through
Dante. This it was to which he succeeded here in giving shape.
§ Architect, Painter and Poet: The Marchigiano
Those who wish to comprehend Raphael as painter and poet must spend
an hour of contemplation in this chapel, beneath this dome. For the sense of
transfiguration evinced in his painting has nowhere been preserved in such
purity as here. It is certain that the mosaics were inserted after complete
coloured designs by his hand. Nor could the mosaicist Alvise del Pace as a
Venetian have produced, about 1515, these sunny effects; he would never have
found them at that period in his native school, in Giorgione, Titian or Palma
Vecchio. If these luminous half-shadows melting in blue atmosphere came
from any source other than Raphael’s intuition, we have here a revival of the
prototype inherited from another son of the Marches, Melozzo da Forli, and there-
with of the great colour tradition of Early Christian mosaics. Melozzo’s ceiling
in the Sagrestia della Cura at Loreto shows a similar sub-division with openings
through which the angels glide in, above the heads of the Prophets reclining
on the cornice, with that objectivity of the Quattrocento which succeeded in
conquering reality. Raphael keeps gods and angels on the further side of the
windows and so of what is earthly, and from his predecessor’s colour-scheme he
introduces for his purpose only the transfiguring brightness, with soft lights in
gold, against the soft blue background of the sky. Melozzo’s Apostles and angels
accompanying the Ascension of the Redeemer could still be seen by him, in the
choir of the SS. Apostoli; they were at that time still preserved intact. Their
radiant fragmentary remains in the Vatican still tell us what the Marchigiano
round worthy of his acknowledgment in his fellow-countryman.
§ Raphael’s Ideas as a Painter perpetuated in Mosaic and Weaving:
Calculated Scheme of Colouring
At that period Raphael had to conceive his greatest pictorial schemes—this
Planet ceiling and the history of the Apostles—in a gleaming material, in mosaic
and tapestry work, shot through with gold and bound up with the principles
of architectural decoration. Where the high-lights were to have their most
powerful effectiveness in gold, there resulted a scale of bright colours leading up
to the metallic gleam. It thus came about in his case as in that of his master
Perugino, more than a generation earlier, in his work for the glass-painters,
that his chromatic style acquired from these higher principles of decoration
an impulse of its own.
The mosaicists seem to have understood him better than the Flemish
150
This involved for Raphael more than a commission; here he was concerned
with the conception of the universe of an entire circle, the elite of his time,
amongst whom he was allowed to reckon himself. This view of an Olympus
ordered on a Christian basis had already become part of his experience through
Dante. This it was to which he succeeded here in giving shape.
§ Architect, Painter and Poet: The Marchigiano
Those who wish to comprehend Raphael as painter and poet must spend
an hour of contemplation in this chapel, beneath this dome. For the sense of
transfiguration evinced in his painting has nowhere been preserved in such
purity as here. It is certain that the mosaics were inserted after complete
coloured designs by his hand. Nor could the mosaicist Alvise del Pace as a
Venetian have produced, about 1515, these sunny effects; he would never have
found them at that period in his native school, in Giorgione, Titian or Palma
Vecchio. If these luminous half-shadows melting in blue atmosphere came
from any source other than Raphael’s intuition, we have here a revival of the
prototype inherited from another son of the Marches, Melozzo da Forli, and there-
with of the great colour tradition of Early Christian mosaics. Melozzo’s ceiling
in the Sagrestia della Cura at Loreto shows a similar sub-division with openings
through which the angels glide in, above the heads of the Prophets reclining
on the cornice, with that objectivity of the Quattrocento which succeeded in
conquering reality. Raphael keeps gods and angels on the further side of the
windows and so of what is earthly, and from his predecessor’s colour-scheme he
introduces for his purpose only the transfiguring brightness, with soft lights in
gold, against the soft blue background of the sky. Melozzo’s Apostles and angels
accompanying the Ascension of the Redeemer could still be seen by him, in the
choir of the SS. Apostoli; they were at that time still preserved intact. Their
radiant fragmentary remains in the Vatican still tell us what the Marchigiano
round worthy of his acknowledgment in his fellow-countryman.
§ Raphael’s Ideas as a Painter perpetuated in Mosaic and Weaving:
Calculated Scheme of Colouring
At that period Raphael had to conceive his greatest pictorial schemes—this
Planet ceiling and the history of the Apostles—in a gleaming material, in mosaic
and tapestry work, shot through with gold and bound up with the principles
of architectural decoration. Where the high-lights were to have their most
powerful effectiveness in gold, there resulted a scale of bright colours leading up
to the metallic gleam. It thus came about in his case as in that of his master
Perugino, more than a generation earlier, in his work for the glass-painters,
that his chromatic style acquired from these higher principles of decoration
an impulse of its own.
The mosaicists seem to have understood him better than the Flemish
150