DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.53068#0236
XIII
RAPHAEL AND GOTHIC
“We retrieve the treasure of piety for a new age and to take noble form.”
C. F. Meyer: Huttens letzte Tage.
FOR centuries Raphael has been looked upon as the master who achieved
perfection of form; we see him fulfilling the strivings of three generations
of the Renaissance, he gives embodiment to an ideal that may perhaps in
favourable moments have floated at times before the eyes of humanists, but was
only seldom attained by artists apart from him. In the new canon, his figures
animate the space in which they freely breathe; they appear to be released from
every confinement, delivered from the dusty classicalism of literary culture,
called only to lend new life to the Antique myths that are the happy possession
of everyone. One can believe they are alive and breathing in their airy element;
now for the first time the style seems to have been discovered in which to tell
over again pictorially, in an adequate manner, the vital stories of the Hellenistic
circle. And just as, to Raphael, the kindred creatures took shape between the
lines and verses of classical texts, so his age in astonishment saw him evoking
speech from the stones when he took upon himself to reawaken Ancient Rome,
and gave life to Antique motives and rules of architecture the influence of which
we can trace right down to our own day.
§ Apollo and Dante
And yet, with reference to this happy inheritance from the Ancients, we may
venture to speak of “Gothic” \ indeed, as we survey his work, we are almost en-
titled to call one of the most essential chapters “Dante and the Belvedere Apollo”.
So deeply grounded is his call to interpret the divine, and his impulse to fashion
into tools for this mission the powers operative in himself, that wherever he met
with evidences of the beyond, it must have stirred him as a greeting of the spirit
and a new summons to aims he had early foreknown. In fact, a propensity for the
world of the soul operates with excessive force in this Southerner, who seems from
birth to have been consecrated as a “disciple of the Greeks”; in him this pro-
pensity may perhaps have arisen out of a peculiar blending of blood that fairly
often betrays itself in many stocks of the peninsula from their contacts with the
peoples of the Migration period in their freshness; it is as if it were communicated
and promoted through a community of primordial beginnings that can merely
be divined.
218
RAPHAEL AND GOTHIC
“We retrieve the treasure of piety for a new age and to take noble form.”
C. F. Meyer: Huttens letzte Tage.
FOR centuries Raphael has been looked upon as the master who achieved
perfection of form; we see him fulfilling the strivings of three generations
of the Renaissance, he gives embodiment to an ideal that may perhaps in
favourable moments have floated at times before the eyes of humanists, but was
only seldom attained by artists apart from him. In the new canon, his figures
animate the space in which they freely breathe; they appear to be released from
every confinement, delivered from the dusty classicalism of literary culture,
called only to lend new life to the Antique myths that are the happy possession
of everyone. One can believe they are alive and breathing in their airy element;
now for the first time the style seems to have been discovered in which to tell
over again pictorially, in an adequate manner, the vital stories of the Hellenistic
circle. And just as, to Raphael, the kindred creatures took shape between the
lines and verses of classical texts, so his age in astonishment saw him evoking
speech from the stones when he took upon himself to reawaken Ancient Rome,
and gave life to Antique motives and rules of architecture the influence of which
we can trace right down to our own day.
§ Apollo and Dante
And yet, with reference to this happy inheritance from the Ancients, we may
venture to speak of “Gothic” \ indeed, as we survey his work, we are almost en-
titled to call one of the most essential chapters “Dante and the Belvedere Apollo”.
So deeply grounded is his call to interpret the divine, and his impulse to fashion
into tools for this mission the powers operative in himself, that wherever he met
with evidences of the beyond, it must have stirred him as a greeting of the spirit
and a new summons to aims he had early foreknown. In fact, a propensity for the
world of the soul operates with excessive force in this Southerner, who seems from
birth to have been consecrated as a “disciple of the Greeks”; in him this pro-
pensity may perhaps have arisen out of a peculiar blending of blood that fairly
often betrays itself in many stocks of the peninsula from their contacts with the
peoples of the Migration period in their freshness; it is as if it were communicated
and promoted through a community of primordial beginnings that can merely
be divined.
218