Raphael took both of these scenes and united them, with excessive strain on the unities of time and place. Above the mountain top the figure of Christ appears soaring in the air, His face transfigured with ecstasy, His garments made shining white by light from heaven; on one side of Him Moses, on the other Elias; and beneath them, lying on a plateau, the three favored Apostles. At the foot of the mountain a desperate father pushes forward his insane boy; the mother and another woman, both of them classic in their beauty, kneel beside the boy and beg a cure from the nine Apostles who are gathered at the left. One of these is startled out of his concentration on a book; another points to the transfigured Christ, and suggests that only He can cure the boy. It is usual to praise the splendor of the upper part of the picture, presumably finished by Raphael, and to deprecate a certain coarseness and violence in the lower group, which was painted by Giulio Romano; but two of the finest figures are in the lower foreground—the disturbed reader, and a kneeling woman with bare shoulder and gleaming drapery.
Raphael began work on the Transfiguration in 1517, but had not finished it when he died. We cannot say how much truth there is in Vasari’s account, written some thirty years after the event:
Raphael continued his secret pleasures beyond all measure. After an unusually wild debauch he returned home with a severe fever, and the doctors believed him to have caught a chill. As he did not confess the cause of his disorder, the doctors imprudently let blood, thus enfeebling him when he needed restoratives. Accordingly he made his will, first sending his mistress out of the house like a Christian, leaving her the means to live honestly. He then divided his things among his pupils, Giulio Romano, of whom he was always very fond, Giovanni Francesco Penni of Florence, and some priest of Urbino, a relation…. Having confessed and shown penitence, he finished the course of his life on the day of his birth, Good Friday, at the age of thirty-seven (April 6, 1520).91
The priest who had come to shrive him refused to enter the sick room until Raphael’s mistress had left the house; perhaps the priest felt that her continued presence would suggest on Raphael’s part a lack of the contrition required before absolution. Driven away even from the funeral cortege, she fell into a melancholy that threatened insanity; and Cardinal Bibbiena persuaded her to become a nun. All the artists of Rome followed the dead youth to his grave. Leo mourned the loss of his beloved painter; and a papal secretary and poet, the Bembo who could be so eloquent in both Latin and Italian, put aside all rhetoric in writing an epitaph for Raphael’s tomb in the Pantheon:
ILLE HIC EST RAPHAEL
—”He who is here is Raphael.” It was enough.
In the opinion of his contemporaries he was the greatest painter of his age. He produced nothing equal in sublimity to the Sistine ceiling, but Michelangelo produced nothing equal in total beauty to the fifty Madonnas of Raphael. Michelangelo was the greater artist, because great in three fields, and deeper in-thought and art. When he said of Raphael, “He is an example of what profound study can bring forth,”92 he probably meant that Raphael had acquired by imitation the excellences of many other painters, and had combined them with assiduous talent into a perfected style; he did not feel, in Raphael, the creative fury that soon throws off guidance and cuts a path almost violently for its own way. Raphael appeared too happy to be a genius in the traditional frenzied sense; he had so solved his inner conflicts that he showed few signs of the demonic spirit or force that moves the greatest souls to creation and tragedy. Raphael’s work was the product of finished skill, not of profound feeling or conviction. He adjusted himself to the needs and moods of Julius, then of Leo, then of Chigi, but remained always the guileless youth cheerfully oscillating between Madonnas and mistresses; this was his blithe way of reconciling paganism and Christianity.
As artist in the sense of technician, no one surpassed him; in the arrangement of elements in a picture, the rhythm of masses, the smooth flow of line, no one has equaled him. His life was a devotion to form. Consequently he tended to remain on the surface of things. Except in his portrait of Julius II, he did not probe into the mysteries or contradictions of life or creed; Leonardo’s subtlety and Michelangelo’s sense of tragedy were alike meaningless to him; the lust and joy of life, the creation and possession of beauty, the loyalty of friend and lover, were enough. Ruskin was right: there was now and then in Gothic sculpture and the “Pre-Raphaelite” painting of Italy and Flanders a simplicity, sincerity, and sublimity of faith and hope that sink deeper into the soul than the pretty Madonnas and voluptuous Venuses of Raphael. And yet the Julius II and the Pearl Madonna are anything but superficial; they reach to the heart of male ambition and female tenderness; the Julius is greater and profounder than the Mona Lisa.
Leonardo puzzles us, Michelangelo frightens us, Raphael gives us peace. He asks no questions, raises no doubts, evokes no terrors, but offers us the loveliness of life like an ambrosial drink. He admits no conflict between intellect and feeling, nor between body and soul; everything in him is a harmony of opposites, making a Pythagorean music. His art idealizes all that it touches: religion, woman, music, philosophy, history, even war. Himself fortunate and happy, he radiated serenity and grace. In the arbitrary analogies of genius he finds his place just below the greatest, but with them: Dante, Goethe, Keats; Beethoven, Bach, Mozart; Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael.
X. LEO POLITICUS
It was a pity that amid all this art and literature Leo had to play politics. But he was head of a state, and lived at a time when the powers beyond the Alps had ambitious leaders, large armies, and lusty generals; at any moment Louis XII of France and Ferdinand the Catholic might agree to divide Italy as they had agreed to divide the Kingdom of Naples. To meet these threats—and incidentally to strengthen the Papal States and aggrandize his family—Leo planned to combine Florence (which he already ruled through his brother Giuliano and his nephew Lorenzo) with Milan, Piacenza, Parma, Modena, Ferrara, and Urbino into a new and powerful federation to be ruled by loyal Medici; to unite these with the existing States of the Church as a barrier to aggression from the north; if possible, to secure by marriage, for some member of his house, the succession to the throne of Naples; and, with an Italy so welded into strength, to lead Europe in one more crusade against the ever threatening Turks. Machiavelli, who had no prejudice in favor of Christianity or the popes, warmly approved of this plan, at least so far as concerned the unification and protection of Italy; this was the leading idea of The Prince.
Pursuing these aims with very limited military means at his disposal, Leo used all the methods of statecraft and diplomacy employed by the princes of his day. It was inconvenient that the head of a Christian Church should have to lie, break faith, steal, and kill; but by the common consent of kings these procedures were indispensable to the preservation of a state. Leo, a Medici first and a pope afterward, played the game as well as his corpulence, his fistula, his hunts, his liberalities, and his finances would allow. All the kings denounced him, disappointed that he would not behave like a saint; “Leo,” said Guicciardini, “deceived the expectations conceived of him at his accession, since he appeared to be endowed with greater prudence, but with much less goodness, than all had imagined.”93 For a long time his enemies thought that his Machiavellian subtlety was due to the influence of his cousin Giulio (the future Clement VII), or to Cardinal Bibbiena; but as events matured it became clear that they had to deal with Leo himself, not a lion but a fox, suave and slippery, cunning and incalculable, grasping and devious, sometimes frightened and often hesitant, but, in the last resort, capable of decision, resolution, and persistent policy.