Quote of the Day (Ingrid Rowland, on Raphael, ‘Artistic Entrepreneur’ of the Italian Renaissance)

“As the mature man's skill and sophistication are gradually stripped away, we realize how remarkable his [Raphael’s] career really was, and how utterly unlikely: how many factors, how much hard work and ruthless self-criticism, combined to transform a promising young painter into an artistic entrepreneur of a kind that Italy had never seen before: painter; architect; designer of jewelry, sculpture, and graphics; pioneer of historical preservation; artistic theorist.”—Univ. of Notre Dame professor of architecture and history Ingrid Rowland, “The Virtuoso,” The New York Review of Books, Aug. 20, 2020

I never got around back on April 6 to take note of the 500^th anniversary of the death of Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, a.k.a. Raphael. Unlike contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, he never had the chance to live to late middle age or even old age, having passed away on his 37^th birthday.

Maybe it’s better that I didn’t write about it then, because I might have felt less inclined to consider Ms. Rowland’s appreciation of Raphael’s legacy in The New York Review of Books. She hails not only his “natural facility” as a painter (“on a par with Mozart’s in music and Michelangelo’s in stone”) but also the way he interacted with—and, in turn, influenced—Rome in this “veritable age of entrepreneurs, every one of them giddy with the excitement of intercontinental exchange.”

It is curious that Rowland—using her review of this year’s Raphael exhibition at Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale—does not tie the painter’s temperament to his ability to attract such a large spectrum of work and patrons.

To the extent that this is possible, I turned to Giorgio Vasari’s short biography of him in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (2nd edn, 1568), which relates how Raphael created a ton of admirers among his fellow painters through his aura of amiability:

“[T]hey were overcome both by his courtesy and by his art, and even more by the good disposition of his nature, which was so full of gentleness and so overflowing with loving kindness, that it was seen that the very animals, not to speak of men, honored him. It is said that if any painter who knew him, and even any who did not know him, asked him for some drawing that he needed, Raffaello would leave his own work in order to assist him. And he always kept a vast number of them employed, aiding them and teaching them with such a love as might have been the due rather of his own children than of fellow craftsmen; for which reason he was never seen to go to Court without having with him, as he left his house, some fifty painters, all able and excellent, who kept him company in order to do him honor. In short, he lived not like a painter, but like a prince.”

All of this stood in sharp contrast to most craftsmen of the time, Vasari insisted, who were afflicted with “a certain element of savagery and madness, which, besides making them strange and eccentric, had brought it about that very often there was revealed in them rather the obscure darkness of vice than the brightness and splendor of those virtues that make men immortal.”

Rowland’s discussion of Rome as an entrepreneurial beehive of the Renaissance has made me want to pick up again a book I laid aside for lack of time: Niccolo Rising, the first installment in Dorothy Dunnett’s sprawling sequence of eight historical novels, The House of Niccolo. Not just a novelist but also an accomplished portrait painter, constant traveler and active philanthropist, she would have been in a unique position to explain to readers how so many influences combined to create the likes of Raphael.

(The image accompanying this post is a self-portrait of the artist from the Art Archive/Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence/Alfredo Dagli Orti.) 

Quote of the Day (Giorgio Vasari, on Michelangelo’s Character and Routine)

“He [Michelangelo] delighted much in the sacred scriptures, like the good Christian he was, and held in veneration the works of Fr. Girolamo Savonarola, having heard him preach. In his manner of life he was most abstemious, being content when young with a little bread and wine while at his work, and until he had finished the Last Judgment he always waited for refreshment till the evening, when he had done his work. Though rich he lived poorly, never taking presents from any one. He took little sleep, but often at night he would rise to work, having made himself a paper cap, in the middle of which he could fix his candle, so that he could have the use of his hands. Vasari, who often saw this cap, noticed that he did not use wax candles, but candles made of goats' tallow, and so he sent him four bundles, which would be 40 lbs. His servant took them to him in the evening, and when Michelangelo refused to take them, he answered, ‘Sir, carrying them here has almost broken my arms, and I will not carry them back again; but there is some thick mud before your door in which they will stand straight enough, and I will set light to them all.’ Upon which Michelangelo answered, ‘Put them down here, then, for I will not have you playing tricks before my door.’ He told me that often in his youth he had slept in his clothes, too worn out with his labours to undress himself. Some have accused him of being avaricious, but they are mistaken, for he freely gave away his drawings and models and pictures, for which he might have obtained thousands of crowns.”— Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists (1550)

Michelangelo Buonarotti—the consummate Renaissance painter, sculptor and architect—was born on this date in Florence in 1475. In a prior post, I quoted the biographer Vasari on how Michelangelo created his masterwork, the Sistine Chapel. But this particular quote is vivid in its own way in detailing Michelangelo’s religious fervor and personal asceticism.

Quote of the Day (Giorgio Vasari, on Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel)

“When the work was uncovered everyone rushed to see it from every part and remained dumbfounded. The Pope, being thus encouraged to greater designs, richly rewarded Michelangelo, who sometimes said in speaking of the great favours showered upon him by the Pope that he fully recognised his powers, and if he sometimes used hard words, he healed them by signal gifts and favours. Thus, when Michelangelo once asked leave to go and spend the feast of St. John in Florence, and requested money for this, the Pope said, ‘When will this chapel be ready?’ ‘When I can get it done, Holy Father.’ The Pope struck him with his mace, repeating, ‘When I can, when I can, I will make you finish it!’ Michelangelo, however, returned to his house to prepare for his journey to Florence, when the Pope sent Cursio, his chamberlain, with five hundred crowns to appease him and excuse the Pope, who feared what Michelangelo might do. As Michelangelo knew the Pope, and was really devoted to him, he laughed, especially as such things always turned to this advantage, and the Pope did everything to retain his good-will.”—Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists (1550)

Say what you want about Pope Julius II (and in a prior post, I said quite a lot about this “warrior pope,” little if any of it complimentary). But one look at this image also says this: you have to give him credit for knowing genius when he saw it.

On All Saints Day in 1512, Michelangelo Buonarroti staggered the world of the Renaissance when his work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was exhibited to the public for the first time.

When the artist completed it, his immediate sensation might have been sheer physical relief. As Vasari, the fine artist who gave us even finer biographical sketches of the great paints and sculptors of the time, put it: “Michelangelo had to stand with his head thrown back, and he so injured his eyesight that for several months he could only read and look at designs in that posture.” (For someone like myself with a severe fear of heights, it’s equally daunting that he did all of this work atop a 60-ft. scaffold.)

The artist’s second feeling might have been sweet vindication in the game of artistic and Vatican politics. In his section on this great work of art, Vasari notes that the commission resulted from a booby trap laid by an enemy, the architect Donato Bramante. At least some modern scholars have disputed Vasari’s contentions (evidently held by Michelangelo himself) that a) Bramante was a kinsman of Raphael, and b) that the two, in an effort to undermine a rival for patronage, convinced Julius to hire the sculptor in an area where he felt less sure of himself: painting. (Michelangelo really wanted to do the tomb of the pontiff.) Nevertheless, Michelangelo felt angry enough about these two that he was still complaining three decades later that they caused the only troubles he ever had with the pope.

Reams of art criticism have been created about the Sistine Chapel over the past 500 years, but I think Michelangelo might have best enjoyed reading about himself in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s travelogue Italian Journey (1816), in which the titan of German letters admits that he had grown “so enthusiastic about Michelangelo that I have lost all my taste for Nature, since I cannot see her with the same eye of genius as he did.”

Here’s the part that would have brought a smile to the competitive artist’s lips: “From the chapel we went to the loggias of Raphael, and, though I hardly dare admit it, I could not look at them any longer. After being dilated and spoiled by Michelangelo’s great forms, my eye took no pleasure in the ingenious frivolities of Raphael’s arabesques, and his Biblical stories, beautiful as they are, do not stand up against Michelangelo’s.”

One of my memories as a kid was watching the 1965 film adaptation of Irving Stone’s biographical novel of the creation of the Sistine Chapel, The Agony and the Ecstasy, with Charlton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as Julius. What sticks in my mind (indelibly, because it was repeated ad nauseum) was the pontiff’s importunate question— “When will you make an end?”—and the artist’s equally disgusted response—“When I am finished!”

Through five centuries, millions of visitors to the site—and even more who have beheld it through lavishly illustrated books or some visual medium—are likely to agree that the wait was worth it.

(The image here is, of course, a detail of the great fresco from the ceiling on The Creation of Adam.)

This Day in Renaissance History (Giorgio Vasari, Father of Art History, Born)

July 30, 1511—Giorgio Vasari, who embodied the term “Renaissance man” with his painting, architecture, and biographical profiles of prior influential artists of the age, was born in Arezzo in Tuscany.

A child prodigy, Vasari paid heed to a relative who urged him, “Study well, little kinsman.” As he grew into adulthood and became the breadwinner for his family (his father, an ornamental potter, had died in a plague), Vasari became a busy, if not trend-setting, painter (his teacher was Michelangelo) and architect. (Two weeks ago, The International Herald Tribune, marking the 500th anniversary of Vasari’s birth, published an article by Roderick Conway Morris that highlighted the artist’s extraordinary commissions from his patron, Cosimo de’ Medici, the Duke of Florence.)

But Vasari’s great fame rests on Vite de' più eccell, pitori, scultori et archit (On the Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects). It had its faults, to be sure (notably, Vasari’s bias in favor of Tuscans and occasional inaccuracies).

But, at a time when the art of biography was not very well advanced, Vasari created a blueprint for how it could be done, offering a practitioner’s insight into the problems faced by his subjects, as well as willingness in later editions to correct prior inaccuracies. He not only created an indispensable record of the Renaissance in Italy, but, when translated, also influenced historical portraits of this period elsewhere, too.

In his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, for instance, Jacob Burckhardt, the influential 19th century historian, wrote: “Without Giorgio Vasari of Arezzo and his all-important work, we should perhaps to this day have no history of modern art, or of the art of modern Europe, at all.”

In addition to illuminating the lives of the great Italian Renaissance artists (he’s one of the principal sources for our knowledge that Leonardo and Michelangelo, Vasari’s teacher and friend, were not-so-friendly rivals), Vasari also framed subsequent understanding of the Renaissance. It was a rebirth of the great art of antiquity, which, he argued, had been left in mere shards by a Roman Catholic hierarchy intent on destroying any pagan art that could adversely affect the morals of Christians.

In recent years, modern historians, while valuing Vasari’s writing for its insight and verve, have also learned to regard some of it with a critical eye. In discussing medieval architecture, for instance, he coined the term “Gothic” to express his extreme displeasure with a form he regarded as Germanic and barbarian. The artist-biographer's disdain not only reeks of prejudice but, as one looks around examples of such architecture, is hardly evidence of a reversion of civilization, but an advance on it.

Quote of the Day (Giorgio Vasari, on Michelangelo’s “David”)

“For in it may be seen most beautiful contours of legs, with attachments of limbs and slender outlines of flanks that are divine; nor has there ever been seen a pose so easy, or any grace to equal that in this work, or feet, hands and head so well in accord, one member with another, in harmony, design, and excellence of artistry.”-- Italian Renaissance painter, architect, and biographer Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), “Michelangelo's David” (1550)

On this date in 1504, Michelangelo Buonarroti unveiled in Florence his statue of David, at the moment when the Biblical hero had determined to take on Goliath. 

The project, finished three years and three weeks after he had won the official contract, must have seemed to the Overseers of the Office Works (Operai) the same kind of Herculean task that faced the Old Testament athlete-warrior-king.

Opera, comprised mostly of members of the influential Wool Guild, reached out to Donatello and his assistant, Agostino di Duccion, about creating the statue as part of a series of 12 large Old Testament sculptures for the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore—all the way back in 1464.

Duccion’s involvement with the project ended with Donatello’s death two years later.

The man who succeeded him on the project, Antonion Rossellino, had his contract terminated not long after.

For a quarter century, the husk of a statue—just legs, feet and chest beginning to take shape—lay exposed to the elements outside in the cathedral’s workshop. The Operai, wanting it finished, called in several people, including Leonardo da Vinci, to see what could be done. In the end, it was 26-year-old Michelangelo who convinced them he was the man for the job.

History has proven him right.