DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.53068#0252
RAPHAEL
§ Raphael as Imitator of Nature: Poetry of Space
When the artist turned back from nature to his studio, the essence of his
impressions lived on so powerfully here—“diretro agli occhi”—that it guided
him still when he was composing; his creation seems to come to life—quietly set
in motion and animated by the artist himself, like every one of his figures.
In this sphere, the means he employs to guide the eye along the lines and curves
that charm him are a matter of indifference. Whether it is the form of a hill-top
with the haze of the valley behind it, or the line of a shoulder set off against back-
ground and distance, or a foreshortened hand beyond the knuckles of which one
can imagine the whole back of the hand, it is precisely the perceptible delight in
sounding these depths in things great and small alike that should be regarded as
his most personal signature—the droop of an eyelid, the quiver and set of the nostrils,
the projection of a lip, a forearm or a hand stretched out towards us, the ease
with which, in a portrait, the body draws in and bends forward, the way in
which, in the portrait of a lady in green (Plate 49), a necklace with its
shadow models the rise and fall of the collar-bone, the little cross above the
bosom seems to move as she breathes: “ecce pictor!” The greatest masters
of utmost tranquillity do not know how to do better—Lotto, Terborch, Vermeer,
Chardin! The vitality of a form rises gently and as if fleetingly out of the depths—
mobility, not motion, the last, Praxitelean freedom of Central Italian art—for
foreshortening, depth, space, landscape always appear in his picture-area solely
for a purpose, never for their own sake; they remain subordinate to the greater
vitality, to form, expressive and wholly animated—and whatever in the way of
colour incidentally plays around and over the figures serves only to give inten-
sified, concentrated expression. In whatever direction nature has it in her power
to allure him, she finds in him her master and her son—her son because he loves
her, her master because he knows her.
§ Figures “Possessed”
If the celebrated epitaph speaks of him as Victor over Nature, it can only signify
that there stand, as it were, at his command, tones from the world of reality which
he in his poetic sphere causes to resound in harmony with one another, where
figures and objects seem to soar in a stratum above the ground; but everything
has previously passed through his experience, through his all-perceiving sensi-
bility. The step of his heroic personages has been conceived out of his own innate
feeling for the human figure; from the same source, the gravity of any given model
is overcome so that mobility is attained above the ordinary, without which there
is in art no appearance that is convincing, or capable of beguiling us into the be-
yond. He traverses, as it were, with his figures the space through which they seem
in sentiment to reach out towards a goal; their motion resembles a perpetual
gentle impulse to press forward, seen already in the drawing, at Oxford, of a
woman walking (Plate 38); in his dramatic figures there is the striving of
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§ Raphael as Imitator of Nature: Poetry of Space
When the artist turned back from nature to his studio, the essence of his
impressions lived on so powerfully here—“diretro agli occhi”—that it guided
him still when he was composing; his creation seems to come to life—quietly set
in motion and animated by the artist himself, like every one of his figures.
In this sphere, the means he employs to guide the eye along the lines and curves
that charm him are a matter of indifference. Whether it is the form of a hill-top
with the haze of the valley behind it, or the line of a shoulder set off against back-
ground and distance, or a foreshortened hand beyond the knuckles of which one
can imagine the whole back of the hand, it is precisely the perceptible delight in
sounding these depths in things great and small alike that should be regarded as
his most personal signature—the droop of an eyelid, the quiver and set of the nostrils,
the projection of a lip, a forearm or a hand stretched out towards us, the ease
with which, in a portrait, the body draws in and bends forward, the way in
which, in the portrait of a lady in green (Plate 49), a necklace with its
shadow models the rise and fall of the collar-bone, the little cross above the
bosom seems to move as she breathes: “ecce pictor!” The greatest masters
of utmost tranquillity do not know how to do better—Lotto, Terborch, Vermeer,
Chardin! The vitality of a form rises gently and as if fleetingly out of the depths—
mobility, not motion, the last, Praxitelean freedom of Central Italian art—for
foreshortening, depth, space, landscape always appear in his picture-area solely
for a purpose, never for their own sake; they remain subordinate to the greater
vitality, to form, expressive and wholly animated—and whatever in the way of
colour incidentally plays around and over the figures serves only to give inten-
sified, concentrated expression. In whatever direction nature has it in her power
to allure him, she finds in him her master and her son—her son because he loves
her, her master because he knows her.
§ Figures “Possessed”
If the celebrated epitaph speaks of him as Victor over Nature, it can only signify
that there stand, as it were, at his command, tones from the world of reality which
he in his poetic sphere causes to resound in harmony with one another, where
figures and objects seem to soar in a stratum above the ground; but everything
has previously passed through his experience, through his all-perceiving sensi-
bility. The step of his heroic personages has been conceived out of his own innate
feeling for the human figure; from the same source, the gravity of any given model
is overcome so that mobility is attained above the ordinary, without which there
is in art no appearance that is convincing, or capable of beguiling us into the be-
yond. He traverses, as it were, with his figures the space through which they seem
in sentiment to reach out towards a goal; their motion resembles a perpetual
gentle impulse to press forward, seen already in the drawing, at Oxford, of a
woman walking (Plate 38); in his dramatic figures there is the striving of
234