DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.53068#0242
RAPHAEL
stood before the Portinari altarpiece; it caused him to gain access to
Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross, which was in the chapel of the then
deserted Medici villa of Careggi. But it is more important that only he, broadly
speaking, at that time responded organically to these promptings from the
North; and they grew in him into something individual, like the teachings of
his masters, that he could not but develop further in an unsuspectedly personal
sense.
§ Perugino and Schongauer
In the midst of all the distractions of the Quattrocento Perugino represented
an orthodox art. It is little noticed that he consciously “archaised”; quite part
from his Early Christian, Byzantine elements, he certainly thought he was
approximating more closely to orthodox art when he adopted many non-
material features from the engravings of Schongauer and the young Diirer.
They may have appeared as the solemn expression of a consecrated existence of
which in Perugino’s eyes these Northern Late Gothic artists were still capable.
From the Colmar master Perugino adopted a minuet-like step; this he found
also in Diirer’s early engravings, and a tube-like drapery about the thigh that
creases above the knee and gives rise to a pattern-like play of folds, involved in
his favourite motive of the pose with the “Spielbeiri'—the unburdened leg—drawn
up. The young Raphael understood, more completely than his teacher, Schon-
gauer’s delicate lyrical quality in the interwoven lines of the compositions.
They went profoundly to his heart; he could not but transfer and extend the
pattern-motives to his entire figures—a devoted discipleship which, however, is
nothing else but an awakening of spiritual kinship.
In recent times only, the frescoes uncovered in the Minster at Breisach have
revealed the inner spiritual nearness between the “best painter in Umbria', as
Raphael was then already called, at the age of twenty, and the best painter in the
Sundgau, and thus also, as a natural necessity, Raphael’s affinity with Roger
van der Weyden, whom Nicholas of Cusa, the great adherent of both zones,
called “maximus pictor”. The men of insight of the time—they were the
“Faithful”—used the superlative only of the art that satisfied their pretensions
to be endowed with a gift profound poetic interpretation.
§ Raphael’s inner Relation to Schongauer also
Raphael’s St. Sebastian, the lovely half-figure at Bergamo, seems like an echo
of the angel bearing the Cross in the Breisach Last Judgment (Plates n, 232).
The melody of its lines, the harmony of the oval freely enclosed by the mass of
hair echoed in counterpart by the shadow at the base of the neck and by the
chain, the sweep of the interior drawing—the eyebrows curved with obvious
delight over the forehead, the stereoscopic accentuation of the bridge of
the nose and the nostrils in the manner of the old glass-painters—all these
features are clearly observable, in a sufficiently striking manner, in the Breisach
224
stood before the Portinari altarpiece; it caused him to gain access to
Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross, which was in the chapel of the then
deserted Medici villa of Careggi. But it is more important that only he, broadly
speaking, at that time responded organically to these promptings from the
North; and they grew in him into something individual, like the teachings of
his masters, that he could not but develop further in an unsuspectedly personal
sense.
§ Perugino and Schongauer
In the midst of all the distractions of the Quattrocento Perugino represented
an orthodox art. It is little noticed that he consciously “archaised”; quite part
from his Early Christian, Byzantine elements, he certainly thought he was
approximating more closely to orthodox art when he adopted many non-
material features from the engravings of Schongauer and the young Diirer.
They may have appeared as the solemn expression of a consecrated existence of
which in Perugino’s eyes these Northern Late Gothic artists were still capable.
From the Colmar master Perugino adopted a minuet-like step; this he found
also in Diirer’s early engravings, and a tube-like drapery about the thigh that
creases above the knee and gives rise to a pattern-like play of folds, involved in
his favourite motive of the pose with the “Spielbeiri'—the unburdened leg—drawn
up. The young Raphael understood, more completely than his teacher, Schon-
gauer’s delicate lyrical quality in the interwoven lines of the compositions.
They went profoundly to his heart; he could not but transfer and extend the
pattern-motives to his entire figures—a devoted discipleship which, however, is
nothing else but an awakening of spiritual kinship.
In recent times only, the frescoes uncovered in the Minster at Breisach have
revealed the inner spiritual nearness between the “best painter in Umbria', as
Raphael was then already called, at the age of twenty, and the best painter in the
Sundgau, and thus also, as a natural necessity, Raphael’s affinity with Roger
van der Weyden, whom Nicholas of Cusa, the great adherent of both zones,
called “maximus pictor”. The men of insight of the time—they were the
“Faithful”—used the superlative only of the art that satisfied their pretensions
to be endowed with a gift profound poetic interpretation.
§ Raphael’s inner Relation to Schongauer also
Raphael’s St. Sebastian, the lovely half-figure at Bergamo, seems like an echo
of the angel bearing the Cross in the Breisach Last Judgment (Plates n, 232).
The melody of its lines, the harmony of the oval freely enclosed by the mass of
hair echoed in counterpart by the shadow at the base of the neck and by the
chain, the sweep of the interior drawing—the eyebrows curved with obvious
delight over the forehead, the stereoscopic accentuation of the bridge of
the nose and the nostrils in the manner of the old glass-painters—all these
features are clearly observable, in a sufficiently striking manner, in the Breisach
224