The painting was borne of the artist's adoration rather than a work that was commissioned. In it, Margherita's facial features are reminiscent of the face in many of his Madonnas and present a quality of loveliness bestowed by the male gaze. The clear smoothness of her skin, the alluring almond shape of her eyes, and the perfectly modeled face in a pose of the divine, otherwise considered unattainable, make this piece an unforgettable testament to love.
In fact, the art historian Oskar Fischel called it "a love-prompted improvisation. He also adopted Leonardo's innovation of painting half-length portraits, which allowed Raphael to focus on his skill at painting the lustrously shimmering fabric of his subject's dress.
The art critic Julia Addison saw an amorphic sexuality in the looseness with which it is depicted the way others refer to the voluptuous sexuality of Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings. The painting remains important to Raphael's overall oeuvre. Although a portrait of extraordinary beauty, La Donna Velata is unique in that it is of a real person, not merely a represented objectification of beauty.
By painting a portrait imbued with such personal history, Raphael not only gives us a consummate homage to beauty and his legendary love of women, but also a reflection of his adoration of the sitter which makes him so personable. Raphael's portrait of his close friend Baldassare Castiglione is rife with intimacy and emotionality in its depiction of a cultured man. His gaze is powerful yet humble, in homage to the kind of power gained without affectation or arrogance.
He appears to be a man confident in his intellect, and thus a man devoted to the highest ideals of humanism, which was the most influential philosophy of the time.
The brown background adds to the solemnity of the painting as it mutes the colors of the doublet trimmed with fur and black ribbon. In the quiet space of his presence, lurks the human vulnerability of the sitter. Castiglione was a diplomat and author of The Book of the Courtier , a text which discussed manners and court etiquette, and which became an important cultural influence in the 16 th century.
The Book of the Courtier , on the other hand, considered the responsibility of power guided by humanistic virtue. With its excellent vulnerability, Raphael's portrait epitomized the restrained elegance of the courtier, which Baldassare proposed as necessary in his book. Baldassare was so impressed by the painting he referred to it in a poem he wrote to his wife in which he praised the uncanny likeness and the human presence it emits.
The composition showing the sitter in three-quarter profile gazing out at the viewer, contained within the pyramidal design much favored in the Renaissance was reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa , which Raphael is said to have seen before Leonardo da Vinci left for France.
The painting is one of the most famous portraits of the High Renaissance and has enjoyed extensive popularity over the years. Its influence can be seen in the work of other prominent artists, including Titian with his Portrait of a Man , the self-portraits of Rembrandt, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' Portrait of Monsieur Bertin One of the most well-known of Raphael's paintings which was not commissioned, La Fornarina is a sister portrait to La Donna Velata and depicts Margherita Luti, the artist's great love.
The painting shows a seated half-length nude looking out at the viewer in an undone dress, concealing the lower part of her body. While her left hand rests on her lap, her right hand touches her breast. A veil, while a symbol of modesty, fails to conceal her sensuously presented upper torso.
The dark landscape in the background enhances the tonal modeling quality of the painting, and richness of the turban she wears. With her flawless skin and radiant face she looks straight past us, smiling to someone on our right, and, knowing her relationship with Raphael, we have no hesitation in imagining her looking at her lover as he painted her.
Raphael signed this painting on the band on her arm, perhaps alluding to his possession of her. After a recent restoration it appears the girl was originally wearing a wedding ring. Because the wedding ring was painted out, speculation rose that Raphael had secretly married Margherita. But due to their different social classes, and the fact that he was already engaged to Maria Bibbiena, the pair had to enjoy their union in private. The work shows Leonardo's influence on Raphael, seen in the way gesture is used to convey meaning.
It is also representative of the artist's mission to depict only the highest ideals of beauty. As Gustave Flaubert noted in his Dictionary of Received Ideas , "Fornarina: She was a beautiful woman," of which there is little doubt.
In it, Margherita is resting on Raphael's knee, with Raphael looking adoringly at his own painting of La Fornarina. Picasso, too, was entranced by Raphael's secret passion and in created his famous series of 25 erotic etchings. This painting combines two biblical narratives. The title refers to the story of Christ referred to in the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, in which he took three of his disciples up a mountain to show his true form, an act validated by the voice of God.
The second tale is that of the Miracle of the Possessed Boy , which relates an encounter after the Transfiguration when Jesus and his disciples descended the mountain only to encounter a man who begged Christ to heal his devil-possessed son. The presentation of these two stories is visually accomplished by the contrast between above and below.
Christ is shown in the upper half with the prophets Moses on the right and Elijah on the left, both illuminated by the emanating divine light.
Peter, James, and John cower below them on the mountaintop, overwhelmed as they shield their eyes from the radiance. On the left of the top half of the painting are said to be two saints, Felicissimus and Agapitus, who were martyred with Pope Sixtus II in , on the feast day commemorating the Transfiguration. In the lower half of the painting we see earthly turmoil as the crowd awaits the miracle Christ is about to perform to rid the boy of demons, which has also been interpreted as an epileptic fit.
The boy's father leads him toward the apostles on the left, who are unable to help him. One points to Christ, another at the child, while the one on the bottom right holds out his hand as if asking the viewer to be privy to the scene.
This was the last painting Raphael worked on. Raphael's was for an altarpiece. The reputation of the court had been established by Federico III da Montefeltro, a highly successful condottiere who had been created Duke of Urbino by the Pope — Urbino formed part of the Papal States — and who died the year before Raphael was born.
The emphasis of Federico's court was rather more literary than artistic, but Giovanni Santi was a poet of sorts as well as a painter, and had written a rhymed chronicle of the life of Federico, and both wrote the texts and produced the decor for masque-like court entertainments. His poem to Federico shows him as keen to show awareness of the most advanced North Italian painters, and Early Netherlandish artists as well.
In the very small court of Urbino he was probably more integrated into the central circle of the ruling family than most court painters. Federico was succeeded by his son Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, who married Elisabetta Gonzaga, daughter of the ruler of Mantua, the most brilliant of the smaller Italian courts for both music and the visual arts.
Under them, the court continued as a centre for literary culture. Growing up in the circle of this small court gave Raphael the excellent manners and social skills stressed by Vasari. Court life in Urbino at just after this period was to become set as the model of the virtues of the Italian humanist court through Baldassare Castiglione's depiction of it in his classic work The Book of the Courtier, published in Castiglione moved to Urbino in , when Raphael was no longer based there but frequently visited, and they became good friends.
He became close to other regular visitors to the court: Pietro Bibbiena and Pietro Bembo, both later cardinals, were already becoming well known as writers, and would be in Rome during Raphael's period there. Raphael mixed easily in the highest circles throughout his life, one of the factors that tended to give a misleading impression of effortlessness to his career.
He did not receive a full humanistic education however; it is unclear how easily he read Latin. Article Wikipedia article References Wikipedia article. Wikipedia: en. Raphael Famous works. The Madonna Conestabile Raphael Living in Florence from to , he began painting a series of "Madonnas.
He later painted another fresco cycle for the Vatican, in the Stanza d'Eliodoro "Room of Heliodorus". Around the same time, he completed his last work in his series of the "Madonnas," an oil painting called the Sistine Madonna.
Raphael died in Rome on April 6, At the time, Urbino was a cultural center that encouraged the Arts. In , when Raphael was just 11 years old, Giovanni died. As a teen, he was even commissioned to paint for the Church of San Nicola in the neighboring town of Castello.
In , a master painter named Pietro Vannunci, otherwise known as Perugino, invited Raphael to become his apprentice in Perugia, in the Umbria region of central Italy. In Perugia, Perugino was working on frescoes at the Collegio del Cambia. He was made a "Groom of the Chamber" of the Pope, which gave him status at court and an additional income.
Vasari claims he had toyed with the ambition of becoming a Cardinal, perhaps after some encouragement from Leo, which also may account for his delaying his marriage. According to Vasari, Raphael's premature death on Good Friday April 6, possibly his 37th birthday , was caused by a night of excessive sex with her, after which he fell into a fever and, not telling his doctors that this was its cause, was given the wrong cure, which killed him.
Whatever the cause, in his acute illness, which lasted fifteen days, Raphael was composed enough to receive the last rites, and to put his affairs in order. He dictated his will, in which he left sufficient funds for his mistress's care, entrusted to his loyal servant Baviera, and left most of his studio contents to Giulio Romano and Penni. At his request, Raphael was buried in the Pantheon.
Vasari, in his biography of Raphael, says that Raphael was also born on a Good Friday, which in fell on March This would mean that while Raphael was born and died on Good Friday, he was actually older than 37 on the Good Friday which fell on April 6.
His funeral was extremely grand, attended by large crowds. The inscription in his marble sarcophagus, an elegiac distich written by Pietro Bembo, reads: "Ille hic est Raffael, timuit quo sospite vinci, rerum magna parens et moriente mori. Raphael was highly admired by his contemporaries, although his influence on artistic style in his own century was less than that of Michelangelo. He was soon seen as the ideal model by those disliking the excesses of Mannerism: the opinion Those, like Dolce and Aretino, who held this view were usually the survivors of Renaissance Humanism, unable to follow Michelangelo as he moved on into Mannerism.
Vasari himself, despite his hero remaining Michelangelo, came to see his influence as harmful in some ways, and added passages to the second edition of the Lives expressing similar views.
Raphael's compositions were always admired and studied, and became the cornerstone of the training of the Academies of art. His period of greatest influence was from the late 17th to late 19th centuries, when his perfect decorum and balance were greatly admired. He was seen as the best model for the history painting, regarded as the highest in the hierarchy of genres. Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses praised his "simple, grave, and majestic dignity" and said he "stands in general foremost of the first [ie best] painters", especially for his frescoes in which he included the "Raphael Cartoons" , whereas "Michael Angelo claims the next attention.
He did not possess so many excellences as Raffaelle, but those he had were of the highest kind Nobody excelled him in that judgment, with which he united to his own observations on nature the energy of Michael Angelo, and the beauty and simplicity of the antique.
To the question, therefore, which ought to hold the first rank, Raffaelle or Michael Angelo, it must be answered, that if it is to be given to him who possessed a greater combination of the higher qualities of the art than any other man, there is no doubt but Raffaelle is the first.
But if, according to Longinus, the sublime, being the highest excellence that human composition can attain to, abundantly compensates the absence of every other beauty, and atones for all other deficiencies, then Michael Angelo demands the preference.
Reynolds was less enthusiastic about Raphael's panel paintings, but the slight sentimentality of these made them enormously popular in the 19th century:"We have been familiar with them from childhood onwards, through a far greater mass of reproductions than any other artist in the world has ever had In 19th century England the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood explicitly reacted against his influence and that of his admirers such as "Sir Sploshua" , seeking to return to styles before what they saw as his baneful influence.
According to John Ruskin:. The doom of the arts of Europe went forth from that chamber [the Stanza della Segnatura], and it was brought about in great part by the very excellencies of the man who had thus marked the commencement of decline.
The perfection of execution and the beauty of feature which were attained in his works, and in those of his great contemporaries, rendered finish of execution and beauty of form the chief objects of all artists; and thenceforward execution was looked for rather than thought, and beauty rather than veracity. And as I told you, these are the two secondary causes of the decline of art; the first being the loss of moral purpose.
Pray note them clearly. He was still seen by 20th century critics like Bernard Berenson as the "most famous and most loved" master of the High Renaissance, but it would seem he has since been overtaken by Michelangelo and Leonardo in this respect. From wikipedia. Report error on this page.
The School of Athens from the Stanza della Segnatura Order a Hand-Painted Reproduction of this Painting. Biography of Raphael. Early life and work Raphael Sanzio, usually known by his first name alone in Italian Raffaello April 6 or March 28, — April 6, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance, celebrated for the perfection and grace of his paintings and drawings. The influence of Florence Raphael led a "nomadic" life, working in various centres in Northern Italy, but spent a good deal of time in Florence, perhaps from about Roman period The Vatican "Stanze".
Other projects The Vatican projects took most of his time, although he painted several portraits, including those of his two main patrons, the popes Julius II and his successor Leo X, the former considered one of his finest. Workshop Vasari says that Raphael eventually had a workshop of fifty pupils and assistants, many of whom later became significant artists in their own right.
Architecture After Bramante's death in , he was named architect of the new St Peter's. Drawings Raphael was one of the finest draftsmen in the history of Western art, and used drawings extensively to plan his compositions. Printmaking Raphael made no prints himself, but entered into a collaboration with Marcantonio Raimondi to produce engravings to Raphael's designs, which created many of the most famous Italian prints of the century, and was important in the rise of the reproductive print.
Private life and death Raphael lived in the Borgo, in rather grand style in a palace designed by Bramante. Critical reception Raphael was highly admired by his contemporaries, although his influence on artistic style in his own century was less than that of Michelangelo. Newsletter For exclusive news and discounts Submit Email.
0コメント