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22
that of Heaven. The perspective of the squares in the piazza moves through the open doors of the
building to the point of infinity.
About 1505 Raphael arrived in Florence and achieved immediate success. Leonardo and
Michelangelo, who were working there on the murals for the council chamber in the Palazzo Vec-
chio, had establislied the High Renaissance style. Raphael met the demand with ease and grace.
Having absorbed Perugino's feeling for light and colour, Leonardo's composition, Michelangelo's
strength and power, Raphael put his personal stamp on everything he did; he was called the
"Apostle of Beauty".
During his three-year stay in Florence he painted a great number of portraits and Madonnas.
The loveliest of which is the Madonna of the Meadows dated 1505. The pyramidal group was
influenced by Leonardo's composition of the Madonna and Saint Anna. But Raphael's picture is
simpler. The Virgin sits before an airy landscape with a lake in the distance. The Child stands in
front of her. Kneeling before Him is child St John the Baptist, holding the reed Cross. The bodies
and heads of the children, the Virgin and the background landscape are full of harmony. To Raphael
harmony was the basic purpose of any composition.
In 1508 Julius II invited twenty-six-year-old Raphael to paint the Stanze (chambers) of the
Vatican. Raphael retained the position as court painter until his early death. His ideals of figural and
compositional harmony came to be recognized as the High Renaissance principles. Classical artists
of succeeding centuries (Poussin in the 17-th century and Ingres in the 19-th century) turned to
Raphael as the messiah of their art and doctrine. The first room frescoed by Raphael was Stanza
della Segnatura. From the complex iconographic programme, it is possible to single out two
frescoes on the opposite walls: they typify the Classical and Christian elements reconciled in the
synthesis of the High Renaissance. The Disputa (Disputation over the Sacrament), the most
complete expression of the doctrine of the Eucharist in Christian art, faces the School of Athens, an
equally encyclopaedic presentation of the philosophers of pagan antiquity. In the 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. The saint's
bearded face is a portrait of the aged pontiff. Saint Barbara, patron saint of the hour of death, looks
down at his coffin, on which the papal tiara rests. The Virgin, showing the Child, walks toward the
observers on the luminous clouds. In harmonizing form and movement this painting represents the
pinnacle of Raphael's achievements. The Virgin and Child in their perfect beauty represent the
ultimate in the High Renaissance vision of the nobility of the human countenance and form.
After the death of the warrior pope Julius II Giovanni de Medici became Roman pope. Raphael
painted the portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de'Medici and Luigi de'Rossi in 1517 (the
fateful year when Martin Luther, whom the Pope excommunicated in 1520, nailed his theses to the
door of the castle church in Wittenburg). Raphael has shown Leo X as he was in an unsparing
portrait - corpulent, shrewd, pleasure-looking. Raphael endowed his subject with a new mass and
volume. 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. The lowei section is composed of the agitated figures of the
Apostles and the youth plunged into semidarkness. The upper loop is composed of Christ, Moses,
Elijah, and three Apostles. Christ and the prophets fly in the air as if lifted up by the spiritual
experience. 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 funeral
was held in the Pantheon and the Transfiguration was placed above his bier.