DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61022#0038
EARLY YEARS
contained a fraction of the essential element which its prototype
manifests either for our liking or dislike. But, among all the
offenders in this respect, few could equal Raphael’s master,
Perugino. Achieving his success by the adoption of thorough
habits of observation, and by a study such as Perugia had never
known before of certain effects of nature and of the human face
and form, he soon learnt that his essential charm and sweetness,
the appearance of a superhuman blissfulness, could be produced
in painting with the minimum of solid pains. He was the first
to parody himself, and by the use of a method of transference of
drawings which amounts to nothing more than stencilling, he
could teach his pupils in their hundreds to produce the ill-
composed, ill-coloured, featureless inanities which cover the walls
of Umbrian museums. It is said that form can be copied, but
feeling never. Nothing can be less true. Feeling can be repro-
duced by the discovery and repetition of the few central forms
until, as in the case of Perugino’s imitators, all the aesthetic
virtues have disappeared and nothing remains but the primal
emotional intention, which stares, like the cat’s grin in the
children’s story, from the picture’s frame, and, through the loss
of all attendant circumstances, becomes over-potent, oppressive,
or in this case, cloying.
This is the bad side of the early influences which beset
Raphael’s life. His training as a craftsman enabled him to
keep pace with his ideas, to assimilate and yet to retain a
mastery over himself and the influence of others, and this served
him in good stead when he had outgrown the ideas of his
youth and had a wider imagination for his field. But he gained
with his training something of the tradesman’s lack of conscience,
the necessary professional carelessness, which allows work of
admitted inferiority to be put forth as sufficient for the pur-
pose for which it is intended. As far as this tendency resulted
in the production of early and transitory work, it was in Raphael’s
case wholly good. His powers of development were so great
16
contained a fraction of the essential element which its prototype
manifests either for our liking or dislike. But, among all the
offenders in this respect, few could equal Raphael’s master,
Perugino. Achieving his success by the adoption of thorough
habits of observation, and by a study such as Perugia had never
known before of certain effects of nature and of the human face
and form, he soon learnt that his essential charm and sweetness,
the appearance of a superhuman blissfulness, could be produced
in painting with the minimum of solid pains. He was the first
to parody himself, and by the use of a method of transference of
drawings which amounts to nothing more than stencilling, he
could teach his pupils in their hundreds to produce the ill-
composed, ill-coloured, featureless inanities which cover the walls
of Umbrian museums. It is said that form can be copied, but
feeling never. Nothing can be less true. Feeling can be repro-
duced by the discovery and repetition of the few central forms
until, as in the case of Perugino’s imitators, all the aesthetic
virtues have disappeared and nothing remains but the primal
emotional intention, which stares, like the cat’s grin in the
children’s story, from the picture’s frame, and, through the loss
of all attendant circumstances, becomes over-potent, oppressive,
or in this case, cloying.
This is the bad side of the early influences which beset
Raphael’s life. His training as a craftsman enabled him to
keep pace with his ideas, to assimilate and yet to retain a
mastery over himself and the influence of others, and this served
him in good stead when he had outgrown the ideas of his
youth and had a wider imagination for his field. But he gained
with his training something of the tradesman’s lack of conscience,
the necessary professional carelessness, which allows work of
admitted inferiority to be put forth as sufficient for the pur-
pose for which it is intended. As far as this tendency resulted
in the production of early and transitory work, it was in Raphael’s
case wholly good. His powers of development were so great
16