DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.53068#0181
RAPHAEL AS ARCHITECT
relief full of energy through applied pilasters and half-pilasters and alternating
window-pediments. Hardly any flat surface remains—everything has the
appearance of an architectural member, including the brick ground and the
freestone articulation set off in chromatic contrast with one another; this latter
feature was inseparable from the vitality of a building right on into the eighteenth
century, the sense for it being lost to modern times in a false abstraction, in
just the same way as a feeling for site. Here we have it triumphant: the front on
the narrow angle, with the segment above the cornice, had the effect—to one
coming from the Vatican—of a kind of tabernacle for the arms of the Pope, and
so of a compliment to the patron who had made the building possible. Heems-
kerck’s sketch (Plate 179a) perpetuates for us the old state of the building, in all
its courtly dignity. In this dignity we have evidence that the occupant be-
longed to the narrower circle of the Palace, the “gentry”. It was not carried
in a crescendo right up to the Papal habitation; the palace of the Chamberlain
Giovan Battista Branconio d’Aquila, at the entrance from the Borgo to the Piazza
San Pietro, had a gayer effect.
§ The former Palazzo dell’ Aquila
The fagade was treated in the “grotesque” manner, customarily employed
at a later date by the Baroque as the fashion for garden fronts, decorated with
stucco, with three-quarter columns on the ground floor; iri the other storeys there
is an alternation oiaediculae or niches with statues and stucco decorations. We are
indebted to Parmegianino’s admiration for an illustration of the fagade (Plate 175).
Among the reliefs of the attic there was presumably a Cupid with the Eagle
of Zeus as a play on the name of the patron; Raphael made a sketch of it in the
wonderful little red-chalk drawing in the British Museum (Plate 179#). There was
thus a further throb of vitality in the horizontally-set rectangular projections of the
attic storey, which had a ribbon-like effect in combination with the squat
windows. A frieze of festoons and medallions is also carried along above the
windows under a strongly accentuated cornice. The eagle appears again as a
heraldic supporter: two, of the same antique form, guard the cartouche with the
arms of the Papal patron. The palace was demolished; it had to make way for
Bernini’s colonnades. The exit from the Borgo thus lost a superb, beautifully
profiled cornerpiece, which died away with a projecting ramp into the uneven-
ness of the site. From the drawings of Dosio and Heemskerck, which are to-day,
since the destruction of the entire Borgo, absolutely priceless, we see that this
was the last corner of the Borgo.
We must find consolation in the enduring effect of these motives in later
buildings. In the Palazzo Spada they occur afresh, and in many a Baroque
garden front we have proof of an enduring stream of energy inevitably inherent
in Raphael’s ideas, the notions that he was the first to conceive. Nothing of
this was lost, even when the originals disappeared.
163
relief full of energy through applied pilasters and half-pilasters and alternating
window-pediments. Hardly any flat surface remains—everything has the
appearance of an architectural member, including the brick ground and the
freestone articulation set off in chromatic contrast with one another; this latter
feature was inseparable from the vitality of a building right on into the eighteenth
century, the sense for it being lost to modern times in a false abstraction, in
just the same way as a feeling for site. Here we have it triumphant: the front on
the narrow angle, with the segment above the cornice, had the effect—to one
coming from the Vatican—of a kind of tabernacle for the arms of the Pope, and
so of a compliment to the patron who had made the building possible. Heems-
kerck’s sketch (Plate 179a) perpetuates for us the old state of the building, in all
its courtly dignity. In this dignity we have evidence that the occupant be-
longed to the narrower circle of the Palace, the “gentry”. It was not carried
in a crescendo right up to the Papal habitation; the palace of the Chamberlain
Giovan Battista Branconio d’Aquila, at the entrance from the Borgo to the Piazza
San Pietro, had a gayer effect.
§ The former Palazzo dell’ Aquila
The fagade was treated in the “grotesque” manner, customarily employed
at a later date by the Baroque as the fashion for garden fronts, decorated with
stucco, with three-quarter columns on the ground floor; iri the other storeys there
is an alternation oiaediculae or niches with statues and stucco decorations. We are
indebted to Parmegianino’s admiration for an illustration of the fagade (Plate 175).
Among the reliefs of the attic there was presumably a Cupid with the Eagle
of Zeus as a play on the name of the patron; Raphael made a sketch of it in the
wonderful little red-chalk drawing in the British Museum (Plate 179#). There was
thus a further throb of vitality in the horizontally-set rectangular projections of the
attic storey, which had a ribbon-like effect in combination with the squat
windows. A frieze of festoons and medallions is also carried along above the
windows under a strongly accentuated cornice. The eagle appears again as a
heraldic supporter: two, of the same antique form, guard the cartouche with the
arms of the Papal patron. The palace was demolished; it had to make way for
Bernini’s colonnades. The exit from the Borgo thus lost a superb, beautifully
profiled cornerpiece, which died away with a projecting ramp into the uneven-
ness of the site. From the drawings of Dosio and Heemskerck, which are to-day,
since the destruction of the entire Borgo, absolutely priceless, we see that this
was the last corner of the Borgo.
We must find consolation in the enduring effect of these motives in later
buildings. In the Palazzo Spada they occur afresh, and in many a Baroque
garden front we have proof of an enduring stream of energy inevitably inherent
in Raphael’s ideas, the notions that he was the first to conceive. Nothing of
this was lost, even when the originals disappeared.
163