DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61022#0042
EARLY PICTURES
i Raphaels ’ than appears to have been touched by any who have
written upon him, and to reconstruct upon an entirely new basis
some less prejudiced theory of his personality and development.
Another, and perhaps the more practical, method is to accept
the compromise of the critics and tradition as a consensus of
opinion which points with some probability to the truth, to display
the accepted works without prejudice, and to state clearly by a
comparison among themselves and with other works the amount
of light which they throw upon Raphael’s character, and the
amount of evidence which they afford for the rival theories.
The latter method is adopted in this book. No doubt, it is
less attractive than the method which attempts to trace directly
the course of the painter’s development and to place the extant
works in a clear-cut historical sequence; certainly it is more
difficult, since the presence of a theory, not only by emphasising
certain points in every picture but also by casting a veil upon
others, renders the historian’s task of selection among the mass
of details infinitely easier. But in the present state of knowledge
there can be no doubt which of the two methods is the sounder
and the more truly critical.
n
The first group of works which are universally accepted as
authentic rests upon the evidence of Vasari or upon the
signature of the painter. Of course, signatures are easily fabri-
cated, and Vasari, while he is the nearest thing to an eye-witness,
was also in a sense a theorist, in so far as he selects and arranges
the pictures according to the opinion which he held of Raphael’s
development. He adduces the 4 Coronation of the Virgin ’ as
evidence that Raphael’s earliest work was all but indistinguish-
able from that of Perugino, and not unnaturally upon the same
grounds the only other works of Raphael’s youth which he
mentions are formed in something of the same mould. But
20
i Raphaels ’ than appears to have been touched by any who have
written upon him, and to reconstruct upon an entirely new basis
some less prejudiced theory of his personality and development.
Another, and perhaps the more practical, method is to accept
the compromise of the critics and tradition as a consensus of
opinion which points with some probability to the truth, to display
the accepted works without prejudice, and to state clearly by a
comparison among themselves and with other works the amount
of light which they throw upon Raphael’s character, and the
amount of evidence which they afford for the rival theories.
The latter method is adopted in this book. No doubt, it is
less attractive than the method which attempts to trace directly
the course of the painter’s development and to place the extant
works in a clear-cut historical sequence; certainly it is more
difficult, since the presence of a theory, not only by emphasising
certain points in every picture but also by casting a veil upon
others, renders the historian’s task of selection among the mass
of details infinitely easier. But in the present state of knowledge
there can be no doubt which of the two methods is the sounder
and the more truly critical.
n
The first group of works which are universally accepted as
authentic rests upon the evidence of Vasari or upon the
signature of the painter. Of course, signatures are easily fabri-
cated, and Vasari, while he is the nearest thing to an eye-witness,
was also in a sense a theorist, in so far as he selects and arranges
the pictures according to the opinion which he held of Raphael’s
development. He adduces the 4 Coronation of the Virgin ’ as
evidence that Raphael’s earliest work was all but indistinguish-
able from that of Perugino, and not unnaturally upon the same
grounds the only other works of Raphael’s youth which he
mentions are formed in something of the same mould. But
20