Tag Archives: Raphael

March 5, 2012 · 11:28 am

Parting the Veil: A Renaissance Masterpiece Turns 500

I was very pleased to read that Germany has issued a commemorative postage stamp celebrating the 500th anniversary of the creation of one of the most beautiful paintings in the world, Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna”.  This painting, or at least the lower part of it, is probably well-known to many of my readers who are not Catholic or familiar with art history because of the two small angels in the picture, who are resting their arms on the edge of the frame.  They have been adapted and used in all kinds of advertising campaigns and commercial products over the years, and have become something of an iconic image in themselves.  That being said, it is the main portion of the work itself, that of Mary holding Jesus, which is of singular importance.

The “Sistine Madonna” was commissioned in 1512 for the Benedictines of the Monastery of Saint Sixtus – hence the term “Sistine” – in the town of Piacenza, to be placed above the high altar there in the center of their monastic church.  Since 1754 however, this magnificent and highly influential work of art has been – apart from a ten-year-period after World War II when it was stolen by the Soviets – the pride of the city of Dresden.  In that year, it was purchased from the monastery by Augustus III, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, who placed it in his palace in Dresden, and ever since it has drawn a crowd.  Indeed, Augustus apparently rearranged his throne room so as to be able to better see and display the painting.

Raphael is one of the “Big Three” of the Italian High Renaissance, along with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.  He is something of a Mozart-like figure in art history, having produced seemingly effortlessly a large number of important works of art before he died in his 30′s, leaving the world wondering what he might have gone on to achieve had he lived longer.  While he could paint insightful portraits and magnificent frescoes, without question Raphael has always been best-loved as THE painter of scenes of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child.  Over the course of his comparatively short career, Raphael took this seemingly simple theme, and came up with an almost infinite number of variations on it.

The image of Mary cradling her Son in her arms is an ancient one in Christian art.  The first known artistic representation of it dates from about 200 A.D., in the form of a wall fresco located in the Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome.  Once Christianity was no longer outlawed, it became more and more common to portray the Mother and Child in a very regal setting, crowned and seated on a throne.  One can find examples of an emotional interplay between Mary and Jesus in the first thousand years or so of Christian art, but generally speaking these were exceptions rather than the rule. With the arrival of the Renaissance, and its focus on portraying realism and linear perspective, artists began to try to make their images of the Madonna and Child more realistic and accessible, while still retaining some element of the Divine; some succeeded better than others.

While he was a part of this movement, what Raphael did in his own work was to bring three key characteristics together, to create something that had a profound impact on the viewers of his day, as well as on other artists right down to the present. He recognized, first of all, that the more beautiful the figures he portrayed in his picture, the more the viewer could reflect on the beauty of God’s creation: Mary, the young woman chosen by God to bring the Messiah into the world, and Jesus, God Himself made flesh.  Raphael not only knew that people like to look at beautiful things more than they like to look at ugly things, naturally enough, but also that beauty is a reflection of Divine Perfection.

Raphael also understood that portraying an emotional connection between Mary and her Son, rather than an unapproachable, regal formality, would be more likely to evoke the sympathy of the viewer.    If the beauty of the figures drew in the eye, the realistic interaction between them made the eye linger.  In seeing the relationship between the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child as analogous to that between his own mother and himself, the viewer would not only be able to relate more closely to the individuals the picture portrays, but more broadly to reflect on the love God has for mankind.

Finally, Raphael’s technique became better and better as he painted more, meaning that his somewhat cartoonish early Madonnas, mimicking the style of his master, Pietro Perugino, were gradually replaced by a careful study of nature that invited the viewer to immerse himself in the painting.  The curve of Mary’s neck with a lock of hair trailing down it, or the sun and high clouds of a Tuscan landscape bathing the countryside behind the figures in light, or the interplay between Jesus’ baby fingers with the folds of a piece of cloth, were aspects Raphael could use to keep the viewer lost in thought, and hopefully in prayer.

In the “Sistine Madonna”, Raphael quite literally pulls back the veil of Heaven, to reveal a vision of the Madonna and Child walking across celestial clouds, flanked by Pope St. Sixtus and St. Barbara, and with the aforementioned two little angels at the bottom. Both Mary and Jesus are shown as very beautiful figures, which pleases our eyes, but we soon become caught up in how the two cling to one another, as we have so often seen mothers and children do.  Here however, the symbolic importance of this emotional reaction on the part of both Mother and Child comes from what is not shown in the picture: the crucifix above the high altar that the figure of Pope Saint Sixtus is pointing to, which would have been opposite the painting in its original setting at the monastic church.

The Madonna and Child in this picture are very simply portrayed, with no crowns, thrones, or jewels.  Yet the celestial surroundings make this more than just an image of motherhood: they make us reflect on how a humble Jewish girl from Nazareth and her Divine Son went on to change the world.  Christ does so by promising forgiveness and redemption through His Passion, Death, and Resurrection; Mary by setting the example for all Christians of the importance of obedience to God’s Will, no matter what.

This was the last image of the Madonna and Child which Raphael painted in his long career of thinking about this subject, and also the last painting which he himself fully finished.  At the time of his death a few years after completing this painting, he was working on an altarpiece of the Transfiguration now kept in the Vatican, and which Bible story we heard just yesterday in the Gospel reading at mass.  That painting was carried at the head of his funeral procession to St. Peter’s Basilica.  However from my perspective, given how much it encapsulates Raphael’s unique understanding of the relationship between Christ and His Mother, his artistic talent, and his beautiful vision of Heaven, it might have been more fitting had they borrowed his “Sistine Madonna” from the monks in Piacenza for this purpose.


The “Sistine Madonna” by Raphael (1512-1513/4)
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden

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August 18, 2011 · 3:20 pm

Portraits and the Past

Yesterday in conversation with a well-regarded classical architect of my acquaintance, the gentleman pointed out how amazing a time it must have been for the patron of this blog, Count Castiglione, to have been alive, given that he had his portrait painted by both Raphael and Titian.  For those unfamiliar with their work – and you have a lot of catching up to do if you are not – these men were two of the artistic giants of not only the Italian Renaissance, but in all of art history.  More observant readers will spot that I use a detail from Raphael’s portrait of Castiglione, specifically the Count’s folded hands, as the masthead for this site.  Yet for all of his greatness, and indeed the greatness of those who painted him, Castiglione was a mortal man, and the importance of his portraits lies not only in their beauty or technical accomplishment, but in the fact that they humanize him for us.

The art of portraiture is still being practiced at many levels in the present age, several centuries after artists like Raphael and Titian.  I have a large portrait of yours truly seated in an interior, painted by an up-and-coming Hong Kong artist friend, that stylistically falls somewhere between Kandinsky and de Kooning, for example. And at some point when I am a bit more capable of doing so, I may want to commission my friend British artist Rupert Alexander to use his considerable talents on trying to capture a visage that is often not amenable to being captured.  Someday, one hopes, they will be considered as good memorials for those who knew me, and once no one is left who remembers me, they may be appreciated as art objects – or not, given their subject matter falls far short of perfection.

The development of the formal portrait photograph has also been an important one. A snapshot portrait is fine, as far as it goes, in that it can capture a specific moment, often very informally. However there is a world of difference between you and the lads taking pictures of each other with a red-eye-reduction filter down the pub on a Tuesday night, and the work of portraitists who either try to make you look as good as possible, like George Hurrell, or who try to capture you warts and all, like Richard Avedon.  A formal portrait photograph can make a lasting impression in how we perceive an individual, in much the same way as a formal portrait painting or sculpture does.

With all of that said, the importance of the portrait through the centuries is not only as an artistic medium in which the portraitst can demonstrate his skill, or as a document for future generations, but as a symbol of continuity.  In the ancient past this was quite obvious, such as the anthropomorphic Egyptian mummy cases, or the busts of the Roman emperors.  The former was part of the theological construct for keeping the universe going and holding chaos at bay, while the latter was a way of symbolically showing that those states subject to Roman control were under a single authority.

Today, portraits of the Founding Fathers and subsequent leaders of this country are featured on things such as money, documents, etc., and yet I suspect that most people never stop to ask why.  There is no Constitutional requirement that an image of George Washington must be shown on any currency re-design that we go through, and we have been through many such re-designs over the past two centuries.  So why should we put pictures of dead people whom none of us have known on such things? After all, even monarchies like Britain put a picture of the ruling monarch, i.e. a live head of state, on their coinage and postage stamps.

An image of someone who has gone before us, whether one as large as a Sargent oil or as small as one of FDR on a dime,  provides a powerful sense of continuity with the past from human being to human being, in a way that other types of images very often cannot.  It has always seemed to me that one of the fundamental errors in sects or philosophies which eschew the representation of human beings, such as in portraiture, is a failure to appreciate that in order to live in the present, we must be reminded of from whence we have come, and how we are not so very different from those who came before us.  That connection with the past is more than simply recognizing a human genetic chain of descent, such as in the case of a monarchic dynasty: it is an acknowledgement of the uniqueness of the human species, and its ability to think about the past, present, and future.

The practical application of this for most of us is not to be found in artistic portraiture, even though I would encourage those of you with the means to do so to seriously consider commissioning a portrait drawing, painting, or the like, if ever you are able.  What you can do, however, is ask your parents, grandparents, and so on, to provide you with copies of photographs, or even photographic reproductions of the portrait of a family member, and put them on display or in an album. You may never have met your grandmother’s great-uncle Richard, but if she has a splendid picture of him taken in a photography studio when he went off to fight in World War I, what a marvelous thing that would be to have sitting on your piano or bookshelf.  Or perhaps your second cousin owns an oil portrait of your great-great-aunt as a young girl, which you may never have the chance to own yourself – perhaps you can ask to have a high-resolution photograph taken of it, and then take the image file to a photography specialist to have it printed and framed, as you would a reproduction of any work of art you might like at an art museum.

The greater the gulf of time that separates us, the more we need images of previous generations to ground us, reminding us not only of the accomplishments of our predecessors, but also of their flaws and failings.  Otherwise, we come away with the false impression that the dead were demigods and beings utterly strange to us, whose talents or day-to-day experiences are completely removed from our own.  True, most of us will probably never accomplish, in the eyes of the world, particularly great things.  Yet the men and women who did accomplish great things were frail, earthly things as we are, and by seeing portraits of them, we can remember that they got up in the morning, got dressed, had lunch, and so on, just as we do.  Adding the images of these people to those of your immediate family and friends is a way to always remind yourself of the fact that you are connected to these people, to history, and indeed to those who will come after you.


George Hurrell working on portrait photos with Rosalind Russell
Beverly Hills, 1942

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June 20, 2011 · 1:58 pm

Standing In for God

Yesterday being the Feast of the Holy Trinity, no doubt many of my readers had some picture in their mind’s eye, when thinking about the Trinity, as to the three distinct Divine Persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Among the various images that may leap to mind when you think about the first is probably not that in the Baronci Altarpiece by the great High Renaissance artist Raphael. However, this depiction of God the Father is an interesting work of art for us to examine, in that it allows us the opportunity to understand the working methods of one of the most highly influential artists in history.

Raphael’s first major commission (that we know of) as a credentialed painting master was an altarpiece he began at the end of 1500 when he was seventeen years old, and which he completed by September 1501. The Baronci family had endowed a chapel in the Church of St. Augustine in Città di Castello, Umbria, and asked Raphael to decorate it for them. The resulting painting featured the Augustinian mystic St. Nicholas of Tolentino, standing over a defeated Satan in an architectural setting. St. Nicholas was flanked by the Virgin Mary, St. Augustine, and three angels, with God the Father appearing above surrounded by angels, and holding a crown over St. Nicholas’ head.

Unfortunately, the painting was heavily damaged in an earthquake in the 18th century. The surviving parts of the altarpiece were then cut up into pieces, and scattered around to various collections. One of these remaining fragments is the aforementioned image of God the Father appearing in the heavens, and shows him as the old, bearded man many of us no doubt think of when we think of the Father.

Interestingly enough for our consideration, we are fortunate in that some of Raphael’s preparatory drawings for the Baronci Altarpiece have been preserved, and are today in the Musee des Beaux Arts in the French city of Lille. As you can see from the comparison of the drawing and the final image shown below, Raphael’s work was a combination of both observation and imagination. He had an assistant wearing a skullcap stand in the pose he wanted the figure of God the Father to be holding in the painting, so that he could get the composition and shadowing of the figure right. The final product looks little like the young man who acted as the stand-in for God the Father, other than perhaps their respective noses, and the fact that they hold the same pose.

Oftentimes when we see an Old Master painting like this one, we do not have the sketches and preparatory drawings made by the painter to look at as a point of comparison. This makes the Baronci Altarpiece, even in its present fragmented state, all the more special. When examined alongside the surviving drawings, it gives us a good idea of how the young Raphael liked to work. It is also astounding that someone as young as Raphael was at the time could produce such a balanced, carefully studied composition, reminding me more than just a little of Mozart’s facility with musical composition more than two centuries later.

We will never know the identity of the young man who stood in for God the Father when Raphael was coming up with this design, though we cannot help but think what was going through his mind when he had to pose as God for a period of time while Raphael worked out his ideas. His arms probably got tired, of course, but I think most of us would also be slightly uncomfortable knowing that we are standing in the place of the Creator. Yet being made in the image and likeness of God as we are, it is only appropriate that such a beautiful piece was arrived at by Raphael through carefully reflecting on the face and form of one of God’s children – a child who, in turn, is a reflection of the Father.

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May 9, 2011 · 1:31 pm

A Master’s Portrait of His Friend

It has now been a week since this blog switched to a domain name and hosting with WordPress, and so far I am satisfied with the change; I have been receiving many comments and compliments from my readers, as well as some suggestions for improvements which are being considered. Among these was a suggestion by my friend and fellow blogger Margaret Perry over at Ten Thousand Places that I ought to write a little bit about the Raphael portrait of this blog’s patron, Count Baldassare Castiglione, a section of which serves not only as the banner background but also to establish the color scheme for these pages. I reproduced the portrait for the first post at this new location, but I am happy to tell my readers a little bit more about it.

Although the painting is not dated, in terms of Raphael’s stylistic development and because of the fact that Castiglione is dressed in velvet and fur, the piece is believed to date from the winter of 1514-1515, when Castiglione was serving as Ambassador of the Duke of Urbino to the Holy See.  At this point Castiglione had already been friends with Raphael for about a decade.  Art historians believe the two first met around 1504, when Castiglione was engaging in diplomatic efforts on behalf of the Duchy of Urbino, and Raphael was a young court painter to the Duke.  However, their friendship really blossomed in Rome, and its importance to art history is highly significant.

Following subsequent travels by both men after their first acquaintance in Urbino, they were no doubt pleased to run into each other again in Rome, while great artistic projects and cultural debates were taking place all over the Eternal City.  Raphael had arrived there in 1508 from Florence, seeking a Papal commission.  He received that of the famous Stanze della Signatura, the private apartments of Pope Julius II. Those familiar with these frescoes are aware that the painter’s style developed quite rapidly as he went along, moving from the safe, statically ethereal to the majestic and self-confident.  Compare the “Disputation of the Holy Sacrament” of 1508-1509 to the legendary “School of Athens” painted at the end of 1509: the former is a capable, but unremarkable piece of painting. The latter is one of the most famous paintings ever created, still hanging, in reproduction, in university philosophy departments all over the world.

While the influences of both Da Vinci and Michelangelo are well-known with respect to his artistic development, it is also believed that Raphael received a great deal of advice from Castiglione, who was well-read in the classics and had been trained as a humanist scholar and writer . The two were known to visit archaeological excavation sites in and around Rome together, where they would discuss the historic significance of the structures, but also their function, symbolism and design.  From these excursions and the tutelage of his friend on Greek and Roman history, poetry, philosophy, and so on, as well as the influences he was absorbing from other artists working in Rome, there was a very visible shift in Raphael’s style as he began to move in the direction of greater realism, proportion, and solidity.  Castiglione was therefore not only a friend but a kind of older brother to the painter, and it is said that the figure of Zoroaster in the “School of Athens” – a bearded man in a turban who along with two others is shown having a conversation with Raphael in the lower right corner of the fresco – is Castiglione himself.

In the panel portrait of a bearded, turbaned Castiglione that inspires the look of this blog, Raphael gives us a sensitive, lifelike image of his friend – one which, in a letter to his wife, Castiglione described as rather hauntingly lifelike.  At the time it is believed that the picture was painted Castiglione was only 36-37 years old, though his portrait shows us a man who to our modern eye looks rather older than that.  Raphael himself was about 32-33 years old, but we know from his self-portraits both before and after this painting that he maintained a very youthful appearance throughout his relatively short life.

There has been some criticism that the portrait was actually painted by Raphael’s workshop, albeit with his hand guiding the assistants here and there, based on a 1516 letter from the humanist poet Pietro Cardinal Bembo to Bernardo Cardinal Bibbiena, both friends of Castiglione and of Raphael, suggesting this to have been the case. This seems to me to be nonsense. Given their close friendship and the fact that during the winter of 1514-1515 Castiglione and Raphael probably met almost every day, it would be hard to imagine that Castiglione would have been satisfied with a workshop production, or that Raphael would give such a good friend an object that was not painted entirely or primarily by his hand.

Moreover, there could be two possible reasons for the aforementioned letter. Although they were friends, Cardinal Bembo and Count Castiglione were known to have had a bit of a rivalry going with respect to art collecting, and so Cardinal Bembo may have had an ulterior motive in writing to Cardinal Bibbiena about the Castiglione portrait to try to puff up the importance of his own collection. In addition, Raphael in fact painted portraits of all three men during their lifetimes. That of Cardinal Bembo is from early in Raphael’s career and it is said to be overly idealized. That of Cardinal Bibbiena, painted c. 1516 and now in the Pitti in Florence, is almost universally believed to be only partially by Raphael, with the remainder completed by his workshop. The lines and contours of the face in particular are more harsh and less well-accomplished than in Raphael’s other paintings of the time. Could it be that Cardinal Bembo is trying to calm Cardinal Bibbiena down because his portrait was not as nice as Castiglione’s?

Turning our attention back to the Count’s portrait, at the time it is believed to have been painted Castiglione had not yet been to Spain; his first diplomatic posting there took place in 1524, and the “Book of the Courtier” followed in 1528. In that book, as I have written about previously, Castiglione often praises the fashion of the Spanish court, which was far more restrained in palette than the Italian and French courts of the day. It is clear from Raphael’s portrait that Castiglione himself was already of like mind long before he went to Madrid.  It would be fair to say that the man was a good match for the job.

After so many years currying favor in Italy, it must have felt for Castiglione to be something like a homecoming when he arrived in Spain. Here were serious, thoughtful, devout people whose personal style reflected their attitude toward life. On the golden-brown plains of Castile and among the perennially-black-clad Spaniards, mixing with the courtiers who ruled the most powerful empire in Europe, Castiglione no doubt felt a kind of kinship which he would not have felt in more glittering, colorful European courts of the day, like that of François I. At the time Raphael painted him, several years earlier, Castiglione was already being drawn, perhaps unknowingly, into a kind of Hispanophilia; indeed, the Count would ultimately die not in his native Italy, but rather in the Spanish city of Toledo in 1529.

The importance of Raphael’s portrait of Castiglione lies not just in its documentation of the friendship of these two great men, but also in its significance to art history. The sombre tones and the immediacy of the picture show us a man who is listening attentively and thoughtfully to our conversation and seems about to respond, rather than someone so far away and above us that we can have no hope of gaining his ear. This image had a tremendous impact on later portrait painters from Rubens to Velázquez and beyond, and for very good reason. It masterfully celebrates intelligence, good taste, and good manners so that, even if we did not know the identity of the sitter, these qualities would be readily apparent to any sensitive observer.

Detail of the “Portrait of Count Baldassare Castiglione” by Raphael (c.1514-1515)
Musée du Louvre, Paris

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