April 18 2009
Raphael’s ‘Small Cowper Madonna'
"Leonardo promises heaven,” said Picasso. “but Raphael, he gives it to us.” It is just one of a myriad tributes to the painter whose unique fusion of figurative skill with sublime vision made him the champion of Renaissance artists. History has been less kind to his father. Giovanni Santi (1439-84) was the court painter to the Duke of Urbino, Federico di Montefeltro. A ruthless mercenary soldier with a passion for Renaissance humanism, this intriguing personality ruled his duchy from a hilltop citadel in Italy’s Marches region. His patronage of Santi’s workshop ensured that, by the time Raphael was born in 1483, it was the largest and most successful in Urbino. Nevetheless the critical fate of Raphael’s father was sealed when the 16th-century biographer Giorgio Vasari denigrated him as a “painter of no great talent”. According to Vasari, Santi packed Raphael off to the Umbrian maestro, Perugino, and there the boy apprentice – his father died when he was just 11 – learnt the basics of his craft before going to Florence where, inspired by Leonardo and Michelangelo, he blossomed into the painter described by Vasari as “Nature’s gift to the world”.
This exhibition aims to prove that Vasari, and generations of art historians who have followed his lead, got it wrong. By juxtaposing works by Santi and his contemporaries with 40 paintings and drawings by the young Raphael, it makes a convincing case for the theory that the roots of his genius are planted in his hometown. Boosting the hypothesis is the recent discovery of documents showing that Raphael was regularly in Urbino until leaving for Florence in 1504. Perhaps he never worked in Perugino’s studio at all. Both Santi’s paintings and Federico’s palace, in which the show is held, reveal that Renaissance Urbino offered plenty of stylistic inspiration. Painted by Santi to decorate a room in the palace dedicated to the Greek artistic deities, the figures in “The Muses” (1480-90) have a languid, Botticelli-like grace but the elaborate details – ornately patterned dresses, pebble-strewn foregrounds and undulating horizons – testify to the influence of the Flemish painters, such as Giusto di Gand, at the Duke’s court. Federico was particularly fascinated by the age’s new mathematical discoveries. Both the scholar Leon Battista Alberti – who translated mathematical principles into artistic method – and the great artistic maestro and geometrician Piero della Francesca stayed at his court and his palace’s peerless architecture was based on strict geometric rules.
The desire for geometric harmony is a leitmotif in Santi’s paintings. Among the most simple and effective are five panels depicting the Apostles, c1475. Framed by deep niches, the three-dimensional figures enjoy the limpid, architectural clarity that was Della Francesca’s trademark. Either absorbed in a book or clasping one like a talisman, these alert, dignified gentlemen epitomise the culture of learning that was the signature of Renaissance humanism. In Santi’s larger altarpieces his striving for perspective strains his draughtsmanship. At times, the crisply modelled loggias, imposing thrones and immaculately plotted landscapes threaten to overwhelm the human story. Nevertheless the majestic settings and complex choreography do feel like visual ancestors to Raphael’s great Roman fresco cycles. Yet the first works by Raphael suggest that he avoided trying to emulate his father’s somewhat forced monumentality. Instead, he mastered the curving, linear rhythms that animate Santi’s muses and the coy, windswept angels hovering above his Madonnas. Such daintiness, a legacy of Gothic art, is also a defining characteristic of Perugino’s style, as demonstrated by the ethereal damsels fluttering across the Umbrian’s predella, “Scenes from the Life of Mary”. Yet Perugino could never have achieved the exquisitely articulated distance between God and the crown He holds, in Raphael’s “The Coronation of San Nicolo da Tolentino” (1500-01). This is Raphael’s first signed work and it is a tribute to the curators that they have managed to reunite three of its elements – two angels and the crown-fingering God – for the first time here.
Painted by Raphael in 1503, portraits of the Duke of Urbino and his wife Elizabetta Gonzaga reinforce the links between the artist and his birthplace. Equally telling is the letter of recommendation written by Guido’s aunt, Giovanna Feltria, when Raphael left for Florence in 1504. “I love him very much, and wish him to reach good perfection,” wrote the woman whose face may serve as the model for the enigmatic portrait, “The Mute” (1505-07). By now, Raphael’s unrivalled draughtsmanship permitted him a freedom of composition that was beyond either Santi or Perugino. The questing, experimental lines of the early drawings on display are testaments to his ceaseless pursuit of the perfect form, the ideal contour, the loveliest face.
More obviously dazzling is “The Knight’s Dream” (c1504), from London’s National Gallery. Under the gaze of crumpled, violet mountains and rolling, sage-green hills, the slumbering knight is flanked by Minerva and Aphrodite. Will he choose to follow the path of war and wisdom? Or beauty, idleness and pleasure? A typical classical conundrum, the painting has always been seen as one of the early fruits of Raphael’s exposure to the High Renaissance culture of Florence. Yet the catalogue suggests it is actually inspired by the “blue remembered hills” of Raphael’s birthplace, while the somnolent cavalier was based on Federico di Montefeltro, whose fusion of military and intellectual prowess made him a true Renaissance man.
The final section gathers together a stellar clutch of early Florentine masterpieces including the Leonardesque “Holy Family”, whose spiralling rhythms and whimsical iconography see Baby Jesus actually astride the lamb. Even more famous is the “Small Cowper Madonna” (c1506), from Washington’s National Gallery. Ideal yet intensely human, motherly yet maidenly, vulnerable yet robust, this blooming, flaxen-haired Madonna transcends her predecessors to become one of the first truly great Raphaels. Yet even at this juncture of his career, the painter clung on to his roots. The church behind her is almost certainly that of San Bernardino in Urbino. The best way to find out for sure is to go and see it, and this riveting exhibition, for yourself.
Raphael and Urbino, until July 12, Palazzo Ducale, Urbino, http://www.palazzoducaleurbino.it/
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