Raphael

Raphael! At the mere whisper of this magic name, our whole being seems spell-bound. Wonder, delight, and awe, take possession of our souls, and throw us into a whirl of contending emotions. Of the cause it is hard to give a sufficient analysis. The marvel is that whilst Raphael puts this thraldom upon us, he remains as a man, almost a stranger. We know less of him than of Donatello, Miechaelangelo, Ghirlandaio, or da Vinci. What we feel in regard to him is not due to any sufficient acquaintance with his person, the details of his daily life, or the vicissitudes of his career, but to a conviction that he who could produce such masterpieces must have been a man of uncommon mould, who infused into his creations not only his own but that universal spirit which touches each spectator as if it were stirring a part of his own being. He becomes familiar and an object of fondness to us because he moves by turns every fibre of our hearts. We are with him in his placid mood when the perfect sweetness and purity of his feeling imparts to us a sense of absolute harmony.

It is hard to say whether in his own time Raphael was equally familiar to his countrymen. Some few could boast of having seen all his works. The majority of his admirers were probably not acquainted with more than one of the numerous phases into which his talent was subdivided as lie passed from the Umbrian to the Tuscan and Roman styles.

None, perhaps, appreciated Raphael in his own days more thoroughly than professional men. It was not Vasari alone who thought Raphael's art divine. There was not a master of the Umbrian or Florentine school at the beginning of the 16th century who would not have admitted his superiority. At that period Florence still held her place as the chief centre of every form of culture; she wielded undisputed sway in all matters pertaining to design. Yet so steady and universal had been the progress which art had made, that whilst Florentine painters were acknowledged as the ablest in all the world, there was hardly a state into which Italy was subdivided where rivals of almost equal eminence might not have been found; nor would any one who chanced to visit Rome have been able to discern that the Florentines who laboured there had done more than claim for themselves a fair field and no favour. But art, high as it stood, was still capable of a higher impulse.

That impulse came, and the master who gave it combined and embodied all the ideal elements which had been the outcome of earlier centuries. When Raphael appeared at Florence for the first time he was admitted to the brotherhood of his fellows as an equal. A few years later he was proclaimed their superior, and accepted as the chief who was to give its last perfection to Italian painting. At his death, which occurred prematurely, there was not a man of capacity to fathom the depth of his genius but might be ready to admit that the greatest master of modern times had been taken to his grave; nor would Italy have been ungrateful to confess that Raphael's like would never be seen again, or that the leading spirit whose presence all craftsmen had been willing to adore would never be replaced.

Raphael was born in a provincial city. He died at Rome, the political centre of the world in the papacy of Leo X. Between Urbino and Rome, the poles of his existence, he wandered with but one apparent purpose in life, the purpose - diligently pursued and never abandoned - of studying everything that had been done by others before him, of assimilating the good and eliminating the bad amongst the numerous examples which had come within his ken. From Urbino to Perugia, from thence to Citta di Castello and Sienna, from Sienna to Florence and thence to Rome; -throughout that wonderful journey which to him was little else than a triumph, he studied one after another, nature, the antique, and the Tuscan.