Of the architects outstanding at Rome in the pontificates of Alexander VI and Julius II two were brothers, and a third was their nephew. Giuliano da Sangallo began as a military engineer in the Florentine army; passed to the service of Ferrante of Naples; and became a friend of Giuliano della Rovere in the early days of the latter’s cardinalate. For Giuliano, the cardinal, Giuliano the architect turned the abbey of Grottaferrata into a castle-fortress; probably at Alexander’s behest he designed the great coffered ceiling of Santa Maria Maggiore, and gilded it with the first gold brought from America. He accompanied Cardinal della Rovere into exile, built a palace for him in Savona, went with him to France, and returned to Rome when his patron at last became pope. Julius invited him to submit plans for the new St. Peter’s; when those of Bramante were preferred the old architect reproached the new Pope, but Julius knew what he wanted. Sangallo outlived both Bramante and Julius, and was later appointed administer et coadiutor to Raphael in the building of St. Peter’s; but he died two years later. Meanwhile his younger brother Antonio da Sangallo had also come from Florence, as architect and military engineer for Alexander VI, and had built the imposing church of Santa Maria di Loreto for Julius; and a nephew, Antonio Picconi da Sangallo, had begun (1512) the most magnificent of the Renaissance palaces of Rome—the Palazzo Farnese.
The greatest name in the architecture of this age was that of Donato Bramante. He was already fifty-six when he came from Milan to Rome (1499), but his study of the Roman ruins fired him with youthful zeal to apply classical forms to Renaissance building. In the court of a Franciscan convent near San Pietro in Montorio he designed a circular Tempietto, or Little Temple, with columns and cupola so classical in form that architects studied and measured it as if it had been a newly discovered masterpiece of ancient art. From that beginning Bramante passed through a succession of chefs-d’oeuvre: the cloister of Santa Maria della Pace, the elegant cortile of San Damaso… Julius overwhelmed him with assignments, both as architect and as military engineer. Bramante laid out the Via Giulia, finished the Belvedere, began the Loggie of the Vatican, and designed a new St. Peter’s. He was so interested in his work that he cared little for money, and Julius had to command him to accept appointments whose revenue would maintain him;17 some rivals, however, accused him of embezzling papal funds and using shoddy materials in his buildings.18 Others described him as a jovial and generous soul, whose home became a favorite resort of Perugino, Signorelli, Pinturicchio, Raphael, and other artists in Rome.
The Belvedere was a summer palace built for Innocent VIII, and situated on a hill some hundred yards away from the rest of the Vatican. It took its name from the beautiful view (bel vedere) that extended before it; and it gave its name to various sculptures that were housed in it or its court. Julius had long been a collector of ancient art; his prize possession was an Apollo discovered during the pontificate of Innocent VIII; when he became Pope he placed it in the cortile of the Belvedere, and the Apollo Belvedere became one of the famous statues of the world. Bramante gave the palace a new façade and garden court, and planned to connect it with the Vatican proper by a series of picturesque structures and gardens, but both he and Julius died before the plan could be carried out.
If we attribute the Reformation proximately to the sale of indulgences for the building of St. Peter’s, the most momentous event in the pontificate of Julius was the demolition of the old St. Peter’s and the beginning of the new. According to the received tradition the old church had been built by Pope Sylvester I (326) over the grave of the Apostle Peter near the Circus of Nero. In that church many emperors, from Charlemagne onward, had been crowned, and many popes. Repeatedly enlarged, it was, in the fifteenth century, a spacious basilica with nave and double aisles, flanked with smaller churches, chapels, and convents. But by the time of Nicholas V it showed the wear of eleven centuries; cracks veined its walls, and men feared that it might at any moment collapse, perhaps upon a congregation. So in 1452 Bernardo Rossellino and Leon Battista Alberti were commissioned to strengthen the edifice with new walls. The work had hardly begun when Nicholas died; and succeeding popes, needing funds for crusades, suspended it. In 1505, after considering and rejecting various other plans, Julius II determined to tear down the old church, and build an entirely new shrine over what was said to be St. Peter’s grave. He invited several architects to submit designs. Bramante won with a proposal to rear a new basilica on the plan of a Greek cross (with arms of equal length), and to crown its transept crossing with a vast dome; in the famous phrase ascribed to him, he would raise the dome of the Pantheon upon the basilica of Constantine. In Bramante’s intent the new majestic edifice would cover 28,900 square yards—11,600 more than the area covered by St. Peter’s today. Excavation was begun in April, 1506. On April 11 Julius, aged sixty-three, descended a long and trembling rope ladder to a great depth to lay the foundation stone. The work progressed slowly as Julius and his funds were more and more absorbed in war. In 1514 Bramante died, happily not knowing that his design would never be carried out.
Many good Christians were shocked at the thought of destroying the venerable old cathedral. Most of the cardinals were strongly opposed, and many artists complained that Bramante had recklessly shattered the fine columns and capitals of the ancient nave when with better care he might have taken them down intact. A satire published three years after the architect’s death told how Bramante, on reaching St. Peter’s gate, had been severely rebuked by the Apostle, and had been refused admittance to Paradise. But, said the satirist, Bramante did not like the arrangement of Paradise anyway, nor the steep approach to it from the earth. “I will build a new, broad, and commodious road, so that old and feeble souls may travel on horseback. And then I will make a new Paradise, with delightful residences for the blessed.” When Peter rejected this proposal Bramante offered to go down to hell and build a new and better inferno, since the old one must by this time be almost burned out. But Peter returned to the question: “Tell me, seriously, what made you destroy my church?” Bramante tried to comfort him: “Pope Leo will build you a new one.” “Well, then,” said the Apostle, “you must wait at the gate of Paradise until it is finished.”19
It was finished in 1626.
III. THE YOUNG RAPHAEL
1. Development: 1483–1508
After Bramante’s death Leo X named to succeed him, as architectural director of the work at the new St. Peter’s, a young painter thirty-one years old, too young to bear on his shoulders the weight of Bramante’s dome, but the happiest, most successful, and best-loved artist in history.
His good fortune began when he was born to Giovanni de’ Santi, then the leading painter at Urbino. Some pictures survive from Giovanni’s brush; they suggest an indifferent talent; but they show that Raphael-named after the fairest of the archangels—was brought up in the odor of painting. Visiting artists like Piero della Francesca often stayed at Giovanni’s home; and Giovanni was sufficiently familiar with the art of his time to write intelligently of a dozen Italian, and some Flemish, painters and sculptors in his Rhymed Chronicle of Urbino. Giovanni died when Raphael was only eleven, but apparently the father had already begun to transmit the art to his son. Probably Timoteo Viti, who returned to Urbino from Bologna in 1495 after studying with Francia, continued the instruction, and brought to Raphael what he had learned from Francia, Tura, and Costa. Meanwhile the boy grew up in circles that had access to the court; and that refined society that Castiglione was to describe in The Courtier was beginning to spread among the lettered classes of Urbino the graces of character, manners, and speech that Raphael would illuminate with his art and his life. The Ashmolean Museum at Oxford has a remarkable drawing attributed to Raphael in the period between 1497 and 1500, and traditionally supposed to be a self-portrait. The face almost of a girl, the soft eyes of a poet: these are the features that we shall meet again, darker and a little wistful, in the engaging self-portrait (c. 1506) in the Pitti Gallery.
Picture the youth of the e
arlier portrait passing at sixteen from quiet and orderly Urbino to a Perugia where despotism and violence were the order of the day. But Perugino was there, whose fame was filling Italy; Raffaello’s guardian uncles felt that the boy’s manifest talent deserved instruction from the best painters in Italy. They could have sent him to Leonardo at Florence, where he might have imbibed some deepening strain of that master’s esoteric lore; but there was something peculiar about the great Florentine, something a bit left-handed—literally sinister—in his loves, which disturbed all good uncles. Perugia was closer to Urbino, and Perugino was returning to Perugia (1499) with presumably all the technical tricks of Florentine painters at the tips of his brushes. So for three years the handsome lad worked for Pietro Vannucci, helped him to decorate the Cambio, mastered his secrets, and learned how to paint virgins as blue and devout as Perugino’s own. The Umbrian hills—above all around the Assisi that Raphael could sight from the Perugian plateau—gave teacher and pupil a full supply of such simple and devoted mothers, fair with the forms of youth, yet molded to a trustful piety by the Franciscan air that they breathed.
When Perugino went again to Florence (1502) Raphael remained in Perugia, and fell heir to the demand that his master had developed for religious pictures. In 1503 he painted for the church of St. Francis a Coronation of the Virgin, now in the Vatican: the Apostles and Magdalen, standing around an empty sarcophagus, gaze upward to where, on a pavement of clouds, Christ places a crown upon Mary’s head, while graceful angels celebrate her with the music of lute and tambourines. There are many signs of immaturity in the picture: heads insufficiently individualized, faces inexpressive, hands ill formed, fingers rigid, and Christ Himself, obviously older than His pretty mother, moving as awkwardly as a commencement graduate. But in the angel musicians—the grace of their motion, the flow of their draperies, the soft contour of their features—Raphael gives a pledge of his future.
The picture was apparently successful, for in the following year another church of San Francesco, in Città di Castello, some thirty miles from Perugia, ordered from him a similar picture—a Sposalizio or Marriage of the Virgin (Brera). It repeats some figures from the earlier painting, and copies the form of a similar picture by Perugino. But the Virgin herself has now the peculiar mark and grace of Raphael’s women—the head modestly inclined, the oval face tender and demure, the smooth curve of shoulder and arm and raiment; behind her is a woman more buxom and alive, blonde and lovely; to the right a youth in tight garb shows that Raphael has studied the human form sedulously; and now all the hands are well drawn, and some are beautiful.
About this time Pinturicchio, who had made Raphael’s acquaintance in Perugia, invited him to Siena as assistant. There Raphael made sketches and cartoons for some of the brilliant frescoes with which Pinturicchio, in the library of the cathedral, told such portions of Aeneas Sylvius’ story as befitted a pope. In that library Raphael was struck by an antique statuary group, The Three Graces, that Cardinal Piccolomini had brought from Rome to Siena; the young artist made a hasty drawing of it, apparently to help his memory. He seems to have recognized in these three nudes a different world and morality than those that had been impressed upon him in Urbino and Perugia—a world in which woman was a joyful goddess of beauty rather than the sorrowful Mother of God, and in which the worship of beauty was considered as legitimate as the exaltation of purity and innocence. The pagan side of Raphael, which would later paint rosy nudes in the bathroom of a cardinal, and place Greek philosophers beside Christian saints in the chambers of the Vatican, developed now in quiet company with that aspect of his nature and his art which would produce The Mass of Bolsena and The Sistine Madonna. In Raphael, more than in any other hero of the Renaissance, the Christian faith and the pagan rebirth would live in harmonious peace.
Shortly before or after his visit to Siena he returned briefly to Urbino. There he painted for Guidobaldo two pictures that probably symbolized the Duke’s triumph over Caesar Borgia: a St. Michael and a St. George, both now in the Louvre. Never before, so far as we know, had the artist succeeded so well in representing action; the figure of St. George drawing his sword back to strike, while his horse rears up in terror and the dragon claws at the knight’s leg, is startling in its vigor and yet pleasing in its grace. Raphael the draftsman was coming into his own.
And now Florence called him, as it had called Perugino and a hundred other young painters. He seemed to feel that unless he could live for a while in that stimulating hive of competition and criticism, and learn at first hand the latest developments in line and composition and color, in fresco and tempera and oil, he would never be more than a provincial painter, talented but limited, and fated at last for obscure domesticity in the town of his birth. Late in 1504 he set out for Florence.
He behaved there with his usual modesty; studied the ancient sculptures and architectural fragments that had been gathered into the city; went to the Carmine and copied Masaccio; sought out and pored over the famous cartoons that Leonardo and Michelangelo had made for paintings in the Hall of Council in the Palazzo Vecchio. Perhaps he met Leonardo; certainly for a time he yielded to that elusive master’s influence. It seemed to him now that beside Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi, Mona Lisa, and The Virgin, Child, and St. Anne, the paintings of the Ferrara, Bologna, Siena, Urbino schools were struck with the rigor of death, and even the Madonnas of Perugino were pretty puppets, immature young women of the countryside suddenly endowed with an uncongenial divinity. How had Leonardo acquired such grace of line, such subtlety of countenance, such shades of coloring? In a portrait of Maddalena Doni (Pitti) Raphael obviously imitated the Mona Lisa; he omitted the smile, for Madonna Doni apparently had none; but he pictured well the robust form of a Florentine matron, the soft, plump, ringed hands of moneyed ease, and the rich weave and color of the garments that dignified her form. About the same time he painted her husband, Angelo Doni, dark, alert, and stern.
From Leonardo he passed to Fra Bartolommeo, visited him in his cell at San Marco, wondered at the tender expression, the warm feeling, the soft contours, the harmonious composition, the deep, full colors, of the melancholy friar’s art. Fra Bartolommeo would visit Raphael in Rome in 1514, and wonder in his turn at the swift ascent of the modest artist to the pinnacle of fame in the capital of the Christian world. Raphael became great partly because he could steal with the innocence of Shakespeare, could try one method and manner after another, take from each its precious element, and blend these gleanings, in the fever of creation, into a style unmistakably his own. Bit by bit he absorbed the rich tradition of Italian painting; soon he would bring it to fulfillment.
Already in this Florentine period (1504–5, 1506–7) he was painting pictures now famous throughout Christendom and beyond. The Budapest Museum has a Portrait of a Young Man, perhaps a self-portrait, with the same beret and side glance of the eyes as in the autoritratto of the Pitti Gallery. When Raphael was but twenty-three he painted the lovely Madonna del Granduca (Pitti), whose perfectly oval face, and silken hair, and small mouth, and Leonardesque eyelids lowered in pensive affection, were framed in a warm contrast of green veil and red robe; Ferdinand II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, found such pleasure in contemplating this picture that he took it with him on his travels—whence its name. Quite as beautiful is the Madonna del Cardellino—of the Goldfinch (Uffizi); the Infant Jesus is no masterpiece of conception of design, but the playful St. John, arriving triumphantly with the captured bird, is a delight to mind and eye, and the face of the Virgin is an unforgettable representation of a young mother’s tolerant tenderness. Raphael gave this painting as a wedding present to Lorenzo Nasi; in 1547 an earthquake crushed Nasi’s mansion and broke the picture into fragments; the pieces were so cleverly reunited that only a Berenson, seeing it in the Uffizi, could surmise its vicissitudes. The Madonna in the Meadow (Vienna) is a less successful variant; here, however, Raphael gives us a remarkable landscape, bathed in the soft blue light of an evening falling quietly upon green
fields, unruffled stream, towered town, and far-off hills. La Belle Jardinière (Louvre) hardly deserves to be the most famous of the Florentine Madonnas; it almost duplicates the Madonna of the Meadow, makes the Baptist absurd from nose to foot, and only redeems itself with an ideal Infant standing with chubby feet upon the Virgin’s bare foot, and looking up at her with loving confidence. The last and most ambitious of them in this period was the Madonna del Baldacchino (Pitti)—the Virgin Mother enthroned under a canopy (baldacchino), with two angels parting its folds, two saints at each side, two angels singing at her feet; all in all a conventional performance, famous only because it is Raphael’s.