Miscellaneous Studies; a series of essays — John Shaqi
Miscellaneous Studies; a series of essaysPater, Walter
Philosophy
Miscellaneous Studies; a series of essays
Pater, Walter
Essays
It was so especially with the artist of whom Raphael first became
certainly a learner--Perugino. Giovanni Santi had died in Raphael's
childhood, too early to have been in any direct sense his teacher. The
lad, however, from one and another, had learned much, when, with his
share of the patrimony in hand, enough to keep him, but not to tempt
him from scholarly ways, he came to Perugia, hoping still further to
improve himself. He was in his eighteenth year, and how he looked just
then you may see in a drawing of his own in the University Galleries,
of somewhat stronger mould than less genuine likenesses may lead you to
expect. There is something of a fighter in the way in which the nose
springs from the brow between the wide-set, meditative eyes. A
strenuous lad! capable of plodding, if you dare apply that word to
labour so impassioned as his--to any labour whatever done at Perugia,
centre of the dreamiest Apennine scenery. Its various elements (one
hardly knows whether one is thinking of Italian nature or of Raphael's
art in recounting them), the richly-planted lowlands, the sensitive
mountain lines in flight one beyond the other into clear distance, the
cool yet glowing atmosphere, [42] the romantic morsels of architecture,
which lend to the entire scene I know not what expression of reposeful
antiquity, arrange themselves here as for set purpose of pictorial
effect, and have gone with little change into his painted backgrounds.
In the midst of it, on titanic old Roman and Etruscan foundations, the
later Gothic town had piled itself along the lines of a gigantic land
of rock, stretched out from the last slope of the Apennines into the
plain. Between its fingers steep dark lanes wind down into the olive
gardens; on the finger-tips military and monastic builders had perched
their towns. A place as fantastic in its attractiveness as the human
life which then surged up and down in it in contrast to the peaceful
scene around. The Baglioni who ruled there had brought certain
tendencies of that age to a typical completeness of expression, veiling
crime--crime, it might seem, for its own sake, a whole octave of
fantastic crime--not merely under brilliant fashions and comely
persons, but under fashions and persons, an outward presentment of life
and of themselves, which had a kind of immaculate grace and discretion
about them, as if Raphael himself had already brought his unerring gift
of selection to bear upon it all for motives of art. With life in
those streets of Perugia, as with nature, with the work of his masters,
with the mere exercises of his fellow-students, his hand rearranges,
refines, renews, as if by simple contact; [43] but it is met here
half-way in its renewing office by some special aptitude for such grace
in the subject itself. Seemingly innocent, full of natural gaiety,
eternally youthful, those seven and more deadly sins, embodied and
attired in just the jaunty dress then worn, enter now and afterwards as
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