Miscellaneous Studies; a series of essaysPater, Walter
Philosophy
Miscellaneous Studies; a series of essays
Pater, Walter
Essays
spectators, or assistants, into many a sacred foreground and background
among the friends and kinsmen of the Holy Family, among the very
angels, gazing, conversing, standing firmly and unashamed. During his
apprenticeship at Perugia Raphael visited and left his work in more
modest places round about, along those seductive mountain or lowland
roads, and copied for one of them Perugino's "Marriage of the Virgin"
significantly, did it by many degrees better, with a very novel effect
of motion everywhere, and with that grace which natural motion evokes,
introducing for a temple in the background a lovely bit of his friend
Bramante's sort of architecture, the true Renaissance or perfected
Quattro-cento architecture. He goes on building a whole lordly new
city of the like as he paints to the end of his life. The subject, we
may note, as we leave Perugia in Raphael's company, had been suggested
by the famous mystic treasure of its cathedral church, the marriage
ring of the Blessed Virgin herself.
Raphael's copy had been made for the little old Apennine town of Citta
di Castello; and another place he visits at this time is still more
[44] effective in the development of his genius. About his twentieth
year he comes to Siena--that other rocky Titan's hand, just lifted out
of the surface of the plain. It is the most grandiose place he has yet
seen; it has not forgotten that it was once the rival of Florence; and
here the patient scholar passes under an influence of somewhat larger
scope than Perugino's. Perugino's pictures are for the most part
religious contemplations, painted and made visible, to accompany the
action of divine service--a visible pattern to priests, attendants,
worshippers, of what the course of their invisible thoughts should be
at those holy functions. Learning in the workshop of Perugino to
produce the like--such works as the Ansidei Madonna--to produce them
very much better than his master, Raphael was already become a freeman
of the most strictly religious school of Italian art, the so devout
Umbrian soul finding there its purest expression, still untroubled by
the naturalism, the intellectualism, the antique paganism, then astir
in the artistic soul everywhere else in Italy. The lovely work of
Perugino, very lovely at its best, of the early Raphael also, is in
fact "conservative," and at various points slightly behind its day,
though not unpleasantly. In Perugino's allegoric frescoes of the
Cambio, the Hall of the Money-changers, for instance, under the mystic
rule of the Planets in person, pagan personages take their place indeed
side by side with the figures of the New [45] Testament, but are no
Romans or Greeks, neither are the Jews Jews, nor is any one of them,
warrior, sage, king, precisely of Perugino's own time and place, but
still contemplations only, after the manner of the personages in his
church-work; or, say, dreams--monastic dreams--thin, do-nothing
creatures, conjured from sky and cloud.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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