Never were pagan and Christian so agreeably merged as in Raphael. This same worldly youth who lived like a prince and loved many women transiently, and (if one may venture such an anomaly) frolicked on ceilings with male and female nudes, painted in these same years (1513–20) some of the most appealing pictures in the gamut of history. With all his guileless sensualism he always returned to the Madonna as his favorite theme; fifty times he pictured her. Sometimes a pupil helped him, as in the Madonna dell’ Impannata; but for the most part he worked on this type of painting with his own hand, and with a touch of the old Umbrian piety. Now (1515) he painted the Sistine Madonna for the convent of San Sisto at Piacenza:* a perfect pyramidal composition; the convincing realism of the old martyr St. Sixtus; the demure St. Barbara, a bit too beautiful and too splendidly gowned; the Virgin’s green robe, over a touch of red, blown by heaven’s winds; the Child quite human in His disheveled innocence; the simple rosy face of the Madonna, a little sad and wondering (as if La Fornarina, who may have posed for this picture, realized her disqualifications); the curtains drawn aside by angels behind the Virgin, admitting her to paradise: this is the favorite picture of all Christendom, the most widely loved product of Raphael’s hand. Almost as fine, and perhaps more moving despite its traditional form, is The Holy Family under the Oak Tree (Prado), also called La Perla, “The Pearl Madonna.” In the Madonna della Sedia or Seggiola (Pitti) the mood is less evangelical, more human; the Madonna is a young Italian mother, buxom and quietly passionate; clasping her fat babe with possessive and protective love, while he nestles timidly against her, as if he had heard some myth of massacred innocents. One such Madonna could atone for many Fornarinas.
Raphael painted relatively few pictures of Christ. His buoyant spirit shrank from the contemplation or portrayal of suffering; or perhaps, like Leonardo, he realized the impossibility of representing the divine. In 1517, probably with the collaboration of Penni, he painted Christ Bearing the Cross for the convent of Santa Maria dello Spasimo in Palermo, whence the picture came to be called Lo Spasimo di Sicilia. According to Vasari it had an adventurous career: the ship that carried it to Sicily was lost in a storm; the crated painting floated safely over the waters, and landed at Genoa; “even the fury of the winds and waves,” said Vasari, “respected such painting.” It was shipped again, and was set up in Palermo, where “it became more famous than the mountain of Vulcan.”86 In the seventeenth century Philip IV of Spain had it secretly transferred to Madrid. Christ in this picture is merely an exhausted and defeated man, conveying no sense of a mission accepted and fulfilled. Raphael succeeded better in suggesting divinity in The Vision of Ezekiel, though here again he borrows his majestic God from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.
To this crowded period belongs the St. Cecilia, almost as popular as the Sistine Madonna. A Bolognese lady, in the fall of 1513, announced that she had heard heavenly voices bidding her dedicate a chapel to St. Cecilia in the church of San Giovanni del Monte. A relative undertook to build the chapel, and asked his uncle Cardinal Lorenzo Pucci to order from Raphael, for a thousand gold scudi, an appropriate picture for the altar. Delegating to Giovanni da Udine the representation of the musical instruments, Raphael finished the painting in 1516, and sent it to Bologna, as we have seen, with a kindly letter to Francia. We need not believe that Francia was mortally stricken by its beauty to feel the splendor of the work, its sense of music as something almost celestial, its St. Paul in a “brown study,” its St. John in almost girlish ecstasy, its lovely Cecilia, its still lovelier Magdalen—here transformed into charming innocence—and the living lights and shadows on the drapery and on Magdalen’s feet.
Now, too, came some masterly portraits. The Baldassare Castiglione (Louvre) is one of Raphael’s most conscientious efforts, endlessly enticing, among his portraits second only to the Julius II. One sees first the strange fluffy headdress, then the furry robe and profuse beard, and imagines the man to be some Moslem poet or philosopher, or a rabbi seen by Rembrandt; then the soft eyes and mouth and clasped hands reveal the tender-minded, sentimental, bereaved minister of Isabella at Leo’s court; one should linger over this portrait before reading The Courtier. The Bibbiena shows the Cardinal in his later years, tired of his Venuses and reconciled to Christianity.
La donna velata is not incontestably Raphael’s, yet it is almost certainly the picture that Vasari describes as a portrait of Raphael’s mistress. Her features are those that he used for the Magdalen, even the Cecilia, of St. Cecilia, perhaps for the Sistine Madonna—here dark and demure, a long veil falling from her head, a circlet of gems around her neck, and lucious robes wrapped loosely about her form. Probably by Raphael, but not so clearly representing his mistress as older views claimed, is La Fornarina in the Borghese Gallery. The word means a woman baker, or a baker’s wife or daughter; but such names, like Smith or Carpenter, prove nothing of the bearer’s occupation. This lady is not especially attractive; one misses in her the modest look that makes more charming such immodest revelations.* It seems incredible that the modest Veiled Lady should be the same person as this bold dispenser of hurried joys; but, after all, Raphael had more mistresses than one.
Yet he was more faithful to his mistress than artists—who are more sensitive to beauty than to reason—can be expected to be. When Cardinal Bibbiena urged him to marry Maria Bibbiena, the Cardinal’s niece, Raphael, indebted to him for rich commissions, gave unwilling consent (1514); but he delayed from month to month and from year to year the keeping of this troth; and tradition relates that Maria, so repeatedly put off, died of a broken heart.87 Vasari suggests that Raphael delayed in hope of being made a cardinal; to such an elevation marriage was a major—a mistress a negligible —impediment. Meanwhile the artist seems to have kept his mistress within close reach of wherever he was working. When the distance between the Villa Chigi, where Raphael was designing the History of Psyche, and his mistress’ dwelling led to much loss of time, the banker had the lady installed in an apartment of the villa; “that,” says Vasari, “is why the work was finished.”88 We do not know if it was with this mistress that Raphael indulged in the “unusually wild debauch” to which Vasari ascribes his death.89
His last picture was one of his supreme interpretations of the Gospel story. In 1517 Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici commissioned both Raphael and Sebastiano del Piombo to paint altarpieces for the cathedral of Narbonne, of which Francis I had made him bishop. Sebastiano had long felt that his talent was at least equal to Raphael’s though so much less recognized; here was his chance to prove himself. He chose as subject the raising of Lazarus, and secured the help of Michelangelo in making his design. Spurred by the competition, Raphael rose to his final triumph. He took for his theme Matthew’s account of the episode on Mt. Tabor:
And after six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, and brought them up into a high mountain apart, and was transfigured before them; and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light. And behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him…. And when they returned to the multitude there came to him a certain man, kneeling down to him and saying, Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is a lunatic, and sore vexed; for ofttimes he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water. And I brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him.90