Happy Birthday Raphael!

Today is the 524th anniversary of Raphael’s birth (no, not the Ninja Turtle). Since there is soooo much information about him in Grove Art we decided to focus on his architecture in this birthday excerpt. Check it out below. (From Grove Art Online, by Nicholas Penny)

(b Urbino, 28 March or 6 April 1483; d Rome, 6 April 1520). Italian painter, draughtsman and architect. He has always been acknowledged as one of the greatest European artists. With Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Titian, he was one of the most famous painters working in Italy in the period from 1500 to 1520, often identified as the High Renaissance, and in this period he was perhaps the most important figure. His early altarpieces (of 1500–07) were made for Città di Castello and Perugia; in Florence between 1504 and 1508 he created some of his finest portraits and a series of devotional paintings of the Holy Family. In 1508 he moved to Rome, where he decorated in fresco the Stanze of the papal apartments in the Vatican Palace—perhaps his most celebrated works—as well as executing smaller paintings in oil (including portraits) and a series of major altarpieces, some of which were sent from Rome to other centres. In Rome, Raphael came to run a large workshop. He also diversified, working as an architect and designer of prints….

(i) Drawn and painted architecture.

Among Raphael’s earliest drawings are some that reveal a close interest in architecture. The most notable of these is a fine drawing of the Pantheon in Rome (Florence, Uffizi), which is sometimes claimed as a copy of a drawing by him, sometimes regarded as a copy by him of another of his drawings, and is evidence for a visit to Rome made long before he settled there. Such a visit is also suggested by some of the echoes of ancient sculpture found in his early paintings and by the studies in one of his drawings (Oxford, Ashmolean) of the ornamental frames in Filippino Lippi’s Caraffa Chapel in S Maria Sopra Minerva, Rome. On the verso of the compositional study (Lille, Mus. B.-A.) for the altarpiece of St Nicholas of Tolentino there is a sketch that may be inspired by the courtyard of the Palazzo Ducale in his native Urbino, a reminder that he grew up near one of the finest works of 15th-century architecture in Italy. Undoubtedly the achievements, perhaps also the projects, of Francesco di Giorgio Martini, architect to the Montefeltro court, were known to Raphael, and he may also have been given some training as an architect.

Certainly an exceptional knowledge of architecture is a feature of Raphael’s early paintings. The distant temple in the scene of the crowning of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pius II) in the library frescoes in Siena Cathedral (painted after Raphael’s design of c. 1502) and above all the exquisite circular temple in the Sposalizio (dated 1504; Milan, Brera) may not be notably practical buildings, but they are structurally plausible; they could be built. This is seldom true of Perugino’s architecture, which nonetheless strongly influenced Raphael’s. Such architecture is clean in outlines, with sharp mouldings, and is both uniform in colour and unencrusted with coloured inlays or reliefs, which were so beloved by other painters in Italy in this period. Although there is no evidence of Raphael’s work on any actual building during his Florentine period, Vasari noted that he participated actively in the discussions about architecture that took place in the house of the Florentine architect Baccio d’Agnolo. Vasari also mentioned his expert knowledge of perspective (from which Fra Bartolommeo is said to have benefited).

When Raphael came to paint the School of Athens in the Stanza della Segnatura, he responded to the power and magnificence of ancient Roman architecture as no painter before him had done. The great vaulted interior behind the figures (ingeniously designed so that they appear to be within it) is reminiscent not only of such great buildings as the Basilica of Maxentius in the Roman Forum (whence its coffering is derived) but also of the work of Donato Bramante, who was re-creating such structures in his own rebuilding of St Peter’s. Vasari indeed credits Bramante with the invention of this painted structure, and it is highly likely that Raphael worked closely with him.

(ii) Planned and built architecture.

It was Bramante’s death in April 1514 that turned Raphael into an architect, for Leo X promoted him to Bramante’s office as architect of St Peter’s, to work with Fra Giovanni Giocondo and Giuliano da Sangallo. It is likely that Raphael was profoundly involved in every aspect of the architect’s work but he was no less active as a painter and it is clear that he depended, to a far greater extent than had Bramante, on the assistance of expert draughtsmen with much more practical experience of building. In particular, the talented nephew of Giuliano da Sangallo, Antonio da Sangallo (ii), who succeeded Raphael at St Peter’s, occupied a position that was in some respects comparable to those of Giulio Romano and Giovan Francesco Penni in Raphael’s painting studio. The extent of Raphael’s responsibility is not easy to assess for this reason, especially in the case of the Palazzo Pandolfini, which was erected in Florence from c. 1516 by the Sangallo family using designs by Raphael. Vasari relates that without Antonio’s prompt intervention the Vatican Loggie for which Raphael was responsible would have crumbled—a significant story even if probably a garbled one.

Raphael was asked to submit designs for the façade of the Medici church in Florence, S Lorenzo (1515–16), and for the Florentine church in Rome, S Giovanni dei Fiorentini (1518). He also designed a small Roman church of the goldsmiths, S Eligio degli Orefici. His designs for the first two were never executed and his work for S Eligio was largely obliterated by subsequent modifications. At St Peter’s much of what was built under his supervision was demolished. Project drawings (New York, Pierpont Morgan Lib.), however, give a clear idea of how he intended to modify Bramante’s plan for the façade: surprisingly, he multiplied distinct and relatively small architectural parts into a design with a complex pattern, in some respects a gothic treatment of classical architectural elements.

Raphael himself lived in a building designed by Bramante, the Palazzo Caprini (destr.), and he used its paired pilasters in one of the first buildings he designed in Rome, the huge stable block (begun 1512–14; destr.) for Agostino Chigi’s villa, where he applied them in two stages. He also used the rusticated ground floor of the Palazzo Caprini for the palazzo (completed c. 1519) that he designed in the Borgo for the Pope’s doctor, Jacopo da Brescia. The rich textural effects and powerful metaphorical ideas implicit in this type of stonework (or imitation stonework) were developed in his fresco of the Fire in the Borgo. Partly through the influence of Giulio Romano, it then entered the mainstream of European architecture.

Agostino Chigi’s burial chapel in S Maria del Popolo, Rome, is the most complete example of an interior built to Raphael’s design. In plan, elevation and structure it might have been designed by Bramante, and indeed it follows his scheme for the dome of St Peter’s, but the treatment of the detail, most notably the Corinthian capitals and the frieze connecting them, is both original and erudite. The same applies to Raphael’s use of many varieties of coloured and patterned marbles for the cladding of the walls (as well as the paving, where it would have been expected). Such cladding, which was unprecedented in the Renaissance, was directly inspired by Raphael’s study of ancient Roman practice; indeed the materials were all recycled from Roman ruins. His interest in colour—a marked contrast with the taste of Perugino and Bramante, his previous models—is also well illustrated by the architecture in Raphael’s later paintings, especially that of the tapestry cartoons.

The use of coloured marbles in this way was to prove highly influential, not only in the later 16th century but even more so in the 17th century when continued interest in the Chigi Chapel was guaranteed by the respectful embellishments it received from Gianlorenzo Bernini. Even more influential, however, was Raphael’s façade for the Palazzo Branconio dell’Aquila (destr.), which he designed c. 1518. Perhaps for the first time in Rome a palace street façade was entirely emancipated from the character of a fortified house and was given instead the ornamental appearance of a triumphal arch—assuming permanently the look that many palaces were given during temporary festive displays. Moreover, the rhythm of framing and openings on different floors, in addition to the relationship between solid and void, niche and window aedicule and painted and sculptured relief, were novel and witty, and the order achieved must have seemed highly complex and even dissonant to many viewers. The Palazzo Spada (originally Palazzo Capodiferro; designed c. 1550 by Bartolomeo Baronino (b 1511)) is the most conspicuous of the 16th-century urban palaces in Rome that the Palazzo Branconio dell’Aquila inspired, but its influence is even more evident in numerous villas and casinos built in or near Rome in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Raphael’s greatest work as an architect was the villa he began on the Monte Mario just outside Rome for Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, now known as the Villa Madama. The plan, which was worked out by 1518, was described very fully in a letter by Raphael (copy in Florence, Archv Stato), a letter that reveals his profound study of Vitruvius and Pliny, his knowledge of such Roman remains as Emperor Hadrian’s villa near Tivoli and, of course, the somewhat similar schemes of Bramante in the Belvedere of the Vatican. It reveals that Raphael was no mere paper architect: he enjoyed solving practical planning problems, making ingenious accommodations both to the site and to the user’s needs—for air, cool, quiet, privacy, views, defence, advertisement. The round courtyard of the villa was partially built, showing its extraordinary arrangement of large and small brick columns, almost entirely concealing the wall to which they are applied.

It is the great tripartite loggia, which was vaulted and decorated soon after his death by his workshop, that most impresses; there is no more magnificent room built in the Renaissance. Yet, for all its grandeur, the loggia is convivial in feeling and social in character, perhaps because of the small scale and playful nature of its crisp stucco ornament: the pilasters articulate the wall but are part of its low-relief pattern so that the surfaces flow unbroken from space to space, from walls into domes and semi-domes and apses. Although every other major aspect of Raphael’s genius was well known in previous centuries, his achievement as an architect has been reappreciated fully only in the 20th century. This reappraisal is, however, confined to those who have visited this villa, which is not open to the public. Standing in this room, no less than in front of the Transfiguration, one is most acutely aware of how much was lost by Raphael’s early death.