It appears no improbable conjecture that Raffaello, after settling the
plan and fully arranging the figures of his picture, drew the nudities
of this design as the bases of his draperies: for this reason only, the
principal parts of the forms, and those muscles that would act most
visibly on the draperies, are designed correctly, and finished with
decision; whilst the heads, and what was either to be naked in the
picture or did not act immediately on the drapery, remained in careless
and superficial lines.
That Raffaello suffered parts of his Transfiguration, and in my opinion
some of the most important parts, to receive all but the last finish from
a pupil, if tradition had not told us, there is ocular demonstration in
the picture itself. The proportions of the Demoniac's father are neglected
as a whole, in relation of limb to limb, and the figure is sacrificed to
place. The face of Christ himself, as it was seen in the Louvre, is
unworthy of Raffaello's hand and conception.[98]
The reason why some of the figures are drawn in the true spirit of the
artist, and others in a bald and insignificant manner, may be, that
after slightly sketching the whole, he gave his own finish in the design
to those parts only which he intended to execute with his own hand in
the picture; and less solicitous for the rest, left them to the hand of
some inferior pupil.
The height of this extraordinary design is one foot eight inches four
lines; its breadth one foot two inches five lines; it is without injury.
* * * * *
Taddeo and Federigo Zuccari, the first declared mannerists of this
school, sons of Ottaviano Zuccari, a mediocre painter of S. Angiolo in
Vado, came to Rome successively, formed a school, and filled towns and
states with an immense farrago of good, tolerable, and bad pictures.
From the instructions of Pompeo da Fano and Giacomone da Faenza, but
chiefly from an obstinate study of Raffaello's works, Taddeo, at no
protracted period, gathered enough to diffuse over his own, an air,
though not reality, of style, and to anticipate by contrivance and
facility the rewards which time owes to invention and genius. Courting
the senses of the multitude, he became the hero of the day; they saw
their portraits in his faces, their limbs in his forms, their action in
his attitudes; his draperies, hair, beards, had a cut of fashion. The
simplicity of his disposition is often contrasted by half figures
emerging from his foregrounds; perhaps less from a principle of
imitating his more remote predecessors, than to invigorate the effect of
his chiaroscuro, a method not unknown to Parmegiano.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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