Raphael: a step into enternity

This an article just to enlarge our cultural horizons.

Raffaello Sanzo, known as Raphael

Raphael was the third giant of the Renaissance Epoch. His art is an ideal of harmony. Raphael was born in Urbino (1483-1520). In 1504 Raphael painted The Marriage of the Virgin for a church. He was 21 years old.

 Two years later, Raphael arrived in Florence and met the first & the second giants of the Renaissance. They were Leonardo and Michelangelo, who were working there in the High Renaissance style. Raphael met the demand with ease and grace.

Raphael absorbed Leonardo's composition and Michelangelo's strength and power in painting. More over, Raphael put his personal stamp on everything he did in the «Apostle of Beauty» drawing.

During his three-year stay in Florence he painted a great number of portraits and Madonnas. Raphael's pictures are simple, because to Raphael’s mind harmony was the basic purpose of any composition.

In 1508 Pope Julius II invited twenty-six-year-old Raphael to paint the Stanze (chambers) of the Vatican. The first room frescoed by Raphael was Stanza della Segnatura.

In the other Stanza painted afterwards, Raphael abandoned the perfect but static harmony for more dynamic compositions, which brought him to the threshold of the Baroque. From this period dates the Sistine Madonna, so called because Saint Sixtus II kneels at the Virgin's right. The picture was intended to commemorate the death of Julius II in 1513.

After the death of the warrior pope Julius II Giovanni de Medici became Roman pope. Raphael painted the portrait of Pope Leo X. His analysis of the character was unexpected and profound. Raphael has shown the Pope who was incapable of holding the Roman Catholic Church together.

One of Raphael's last and greatest paintings was the Transfiguration of Christ, painted in 1517. In contrast to the traditional rendering of the subject, Raphael painted an accompanying incident as well. It was told by Matthew and Luke. When Peter, James, and John had accompanied Christ to the top of a high mountain, the remaining Apostles were unable without his presence to cast out the demons from the possessed boy.

Christ and the prophets fly in the air as if lifted up by the spiritual experience to save the boy. In this vision of Christ Raphael embodied his beliefs.

The great painter died on Good Friday, April 6, 1520, at the age of thirty-seven. His art is still alive as the High Renaissance synthesis of Classical and Christian painting.