Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [65]
There was, however, one additional element in Raphael’s art that does not fit neatly into this picture of superb and decorous proficiency. A part of Raphael rejected serenity and sought transcendence. One of his Vatican frescoes, Fire in the Borgo (c. 1514), presents terror and anarchy and the mob appealing for a miracle. Raphael was a materialist who longed to believe in the supernatural, and in this sense regretted the medieval world, with its absolute credulity, which was now slipping away. Medieval painters could present the supernatural, and did it all the time. But they could not convey it by painterly techniques of atmospheric light and subtle suggestiveness. Raphael could. Normally he did not choose to do so. His Madonnas and “sacred conversations,” with saints posed together in seemly adoration of the divine, are tender and elevating but stick to nature. However, in the Sistine Madonna (now in Dresden), Raphael depicts a Virgin and Child of astonishing beauty and absolute solidity and reality, who nevertheless are not of this world and seem to be levitating upward by supernatural power, poised between this earth and heaven. It is the painting of a vision and astonishingly successful.
Raphael follows this trend in his magnificent last painting, the huge Transfiguration, completed in the year he died, 1520, and now in the Vatican Museum. Christ floats above the astonished apostles, realistically painted but a mass of light and air, while at the bottom of the picture a scene of chaos shows his disciples trying and failing to cure a frantic boy whom demons have seized. It is not surprising that this work awed contemporaries and made them ponder. It hints of a new world of art to come, and makes the tragedy of Raphael’s early death seem even more poignant.
The “divine trio” of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, though of different ages, were all alive and working at the same time, and there must have been interactions among their powerful artistic personalities, though this is largely conjecture. The impact of Leonardo can be clearly traced in many of Raphael’s superb drawings. He adopted red chalk and replaced the boy or male models he used for female figures (a practice also followed by Michelangelo) by women models, and the results are spectacular. They ravished young artists at the time, for Raphael was generous and open in showing work in progress to his colleagues, and they have inspired emulation in the greatest figure painters ever since. Raphael’s relationship with Michelangelo, on the other hand, was different. They were both working in Rome together. There is no evidence that Raphael was ever jealous of a fellow artist—quite the contrary—but Michelangelo was introspective and secretive and could be mean-minded. His friend Sebastiano del Piombo (1485–1547), also in Rome from 1511 and a considerable painter in his own right, used to feed Michelangelo with anti-Raphael anecdotes, presumably because the master wished to hear them.
The difficulty for Michelangelo, in his relations with Raphael, is that he considered himself, and was, primarily a sculptor. He painted little before he came to Rome to produce his three great series of frescoes (the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Last Judgment of the altar end wall, and the Pauline Chapel). His only authenticated and documented painting on panel, the Holy Family of the Doni Tondo (now in the Uffizi), is a powerful work, quite unlike Raphael’s Madonnas but obviously seen as competitive. Controversy and mystery surround other attributed works, which are in any case few. His drawings are numerous and often magnificent. The Sistine Ceiling is a great physical achievement apart from anything else, given the intrinsic difficulties of fresco, the area to be covered and the awkwardness