And with all this vast creative activity, he recognized only one self-imposed limitation--beauty. Hence, though his span of life was short, his work is imperishable. He steadily progressed: but he was ever true, beautiful and pure, and freer than any other master from superficiality and mannerism. He produced a vast number of pictures, elevating to men of every race and of every age, and before whose immortal beauty artists of every school unite in common homage.
---Wilhelm Lubke The term "Preraphaelite" traces a royal lineage to William Morris. Just what the word really meant, William Morris was not sure, yet he once expressed the hope that he would some day know, as a thousand industrious writers were laboring to make the matter plain.
Seven men helped William Morris to launch the phrase, by forming themselves into an organization which they were pleased to call the "Preraphaelite Brotherhood."
The word "brotherhood" has a lure and a promise for every lonely and tired son of earth. And Burne-Jones pleaded for the prefix because it was like holy writ: it gave everybody an opportunity to read anything into it that he desired.
Of this I am very sure, in the Preraphaelite Brotherhood there was no lack of appreciation for Raphael. In fact, there is proof positive that Burne-Jones and Madox Brown studied him with profit, and loved him so wisely and well that they laid impression-paper on his poses. This would have been good and sufficient reason for hating the man; and possibly this accounts for their luminous flashes of silence concerning him. The Preraphaelite Brotherhood, like all other liberal organizations, was quite inclined to be illiberal. And the prejudice of this clanship, avowedly founded without prejudice, lay in the assumption that life and art suffered a degeneration from the rise of Raphael. In art, as in literature, there is overmuch tilting with names--so the Preraphaelites enlisted under the banner of Botticelli.
Raphael marks an epoch. He did what no man before him had ever done, and by the sublimity of his genius placed the world forever under obligations to him. In fact, the art of the Preraphaelites was built on Raphael, with an attempt to revive the atmosphere and environment that belonged to another. Raphael mirrored the soul of things--he used the human form and the whole natural world as symbols of spirit. And this is exactly what Burne-Jones did, and the rest of the Brotherhood tried to do. The thought of Raphael and of Burne- Jones often seems identical; in temperament, disposition and aspiration they were one. That poetic and fervid statement of Mrs. Jameson, that Burne-Jones is the avatar of Raphael, contains the germ of truth. The dream-women of Burne-Jones have the same haunting and subtle spiritual wistfulness that is to be seen in the Madonnas of Raphael. Each of these men loved a woman--and each pictured her again and again. Whether this woman had an existence outside the figment of the brain matters not: both painted her as they saw her-- tender, gentle and trustful.
When jealous and o'erzealous competitors made the charge against Raphael that he was lax in his religious duties, Pope Leo the Tenth waived the matter by saying, "Well, well, well!--he is an artistic Christian!" As much as to say, he works his religion up into art, and therefore we grant him absolution for failure to attend mass: he paints and you pray--it is really all the same thing. Good work and religion are one.
The busy and captious critics went away, but came back next day with the startling information that Raphael's pictures were more Pagan than Christian. Pope Leo heard the charge, and then with Lincoln- like wit said that Raphael was doing this on his order, as the desire of the Mother Church was to annex the Pagan art-world, in order to Christianize it.
The charges of Paganism and Infidelity are classic accusations. The gentle Burne-Jones was stoutly denounced by his enemies as a Pagan Greek. I think he rather gloried in the contumely, but fifty years earlier he might have been visited by a "lettre de cachet," instead of a knighthood; for we can not forget how, in Eighteen Hundred Fifteen, Parliament refused to pay for the Elgin Marbles because, as Lord Falmouth put it, "These relics will tend to prostitute England to the depth of unbelief that engulfed Pagan Greece." The attitude of Parliament on the question of Paganism finds voice occasionally even yet by Protestant England making darkness dense with the asseveration that Catholics idolatrously worship the pictures and statues in their churches.
The Romans tumbled the Athenian marbles from their pedestals, on the assumption that the statues represented gods that were idolatrously worshiped by the Greeks. And they continued their work of destruction until a certain Roman general (who surely was from County Cork) stopped the vandalism by issuing an order, coupled with the dire threat that any soldier who stole or destroyed a statue should replace it with another equally good.
Lord Elgin bankrupted himself in order to supply the British Museum its crowning glory, and for this he achieved the honor of getting himself poetically damned by Lord Byron. Monarchies, like republics, are ungrateful. Lord Elgin defended himself vigorously against the charge of Paganism, just as Raphael had done three hundred years before. But Burne-Jones was silent in the presence of his accusers, for the world of buyers besieged his doors with bank-notes in hand, demanding pictures. And now today we find Alma-Tadema openly and avowedly Pagan, and with a grace and loveliness that compel the glad acclaim of every lover of beautiful things.
We are making head. We have ceased to believe that Paganism is "bad." All the men and women who have ever lived and loved and hoped and died, were God's children, and we are no more. With the nations dead and turned to dust, we reach out through the darkness of forgotten days and touch friendly hands. Some of these people that existed two, three or four thousand years ago did things so marvelously grand and great that in presence of the broken fragments of their work we stand silent, o'erawed and abashed. We realize, too, that long before the nations lived that have left a meager and scattered history hewn in stone, lived still other men, possibly greater far than we; and no sign or signal comes to us from those whose history, like ours, is writ in water.
Yet we are one with them all. The same Power that brought them upon this stage of Time brought us. As we were called into existence without our consent, so are we being sent out of it, day by day, against our will. The destiny of all who live or have lived, is one; and no taunt of "paganism," "heathenism" or "infidelity" escapes our lips. With love and sympathy, we salute the eternity that lies behind, realizing that we ourselves are the oldest people that have tasted existence--the newest nation lingers away behind Assyria and Egypt, back of the Mayas, lost in continents sunken in shoreless seas that hold their secrets inviolate. Yes, we are brothers to all that have trod the earth; brothers and heirs to dust and shade-- mayhap to immortality!
In the story of "John Ball," William Morris pictured what to him was the Ideal Life. And Morris was certainly right in this: The Ideal Life is only the normal or natural life as we shall some day know it. The scene of Morris' story was essentially a Preraphaelite one. It was the great virtue (or limitation) of William Morris that the Dark Ages were to him a time of special light and illumination. Life then was simple. Men worked for the love of it, and if they wanted things they made them. "Every trade exclusively followed means a deformity," says Ruskin. Division of labor had not yet come, and men were skilled in many ways. There was neither poverty nor riches, and the idea of brotherhood was firmly fixed in the minds of men. The feverish desire for place, pelf and power was not upon them. The rise of the barons and an entailed aristocracy were yet to come.
Governments grant men immunity from danger on payment of a tax. Thus men cease protecting themselves, and so in the course of time lose the ability to protect themselves, because the faculty of courage has atrophied through disuse. Brooding apprehension and crouching fear are the properties of civilized men--men who are protected by the State. The joy of reveling in life is not possible in cities. Bolts and bars, locks and keys, soldiers and police, and a hundred other symbols of distrust, suspicion and hate, are on every hand, reminding us that man is the enemy of man, and must be protected from his brothers. Protection and slavery are near of kin.
Before Raphael, art was not a profession--the man did things to the glory of God. When he painted a picture of the Holy Family, his wife served as his model, and he grouped his children in their proper order, and made the picture to hang on a certain spot on the walls of his village church. No payment was expected nor fee demanded--it was a love-offering. It was not until ecclesiastics grew ambitious and asked for more pictures that bargains were struck. Did ever a painter of that far-off day marry a maid, and in time were they blessed with a babe, then straightway the painter worked his joy up into art by painting the Mother and Child, and presenting the picture as a thank-offering to God. The immaculate conception of love and the miracle of birth are recurring themes in the symphony of life. Love, religion and art have ever walked and ever will walk hand in hand. Art is the expression of man's joy in his work; and art is the beautiful way of doing things. Pope Julius was right-- work is religion when you put your soul into your task.
Giotto painted the "Mother and Child," and the mother was his wife, and the child theirs. Another child came to them, and Giotto painted another picture, calling the older boy Saint John, and the wee baby Jesus. The years went by and we find still another picture of the Holy Family by this same artist, in which five children are shown, while back in the shadow is the artist himself, posed as Joseph. And with a beautiful contempt for anachronism, the elder children are called Isaiah, Ezekiel and Elijah. This fusing of work, love and religion gives us a glimpse into the only paradise mortals know. It is the Ideal--and the Natural.
The swift-passing years have lightly touched the little city of Urbino, in Umbria. The place is sleepy and quiet, and you seek the shade of friendly awnings to shield you from the fierce glare of the sun. Standing there you hear the bells chime the hours, as they have done for four hundred years; and you watch the flocks of wheeling pigeons, the same pigeons that Vasari saw when he came here in Fifteen Hundred Forty-one, for the birds never grow old. Vasari tells of the pigeons, the old cathedral--old even then--the flower- girls and fruit-sellers, the passing black-robed priests, the occasional soldier, and the cobbler who sits on the curbstone and offers to mend your shoes while you wait.
The world is debtor to Vasari. He was not much of a painter and he failed at architecture, but he made up for lack of skill by telling all about what others were doing; and if his facts ever faltered, his imagination bridged the break. He is as interesting as Plutarch, as gossipy as Pepys, and as luring as Boswell.
A slim slip of a girl, selling thyme and mignonette out of a reed basket, offered to show Vasari the birthplace of Raphael; and a brown-cheeked, barefoot boy, selling roses on which the dew yet lingered, volunteered a like service for me, three hundred years later.
The house is one of a long row of low stone structures, with the red-tile roof everywhere to be seen. Above the door is a bronze tablet which informs the traveler that Raphael Sanzio was born here, April Sixth, Fourteen Hundred Eighty-three. Herman Grimm takes three chapters to prove that Raphael was not born in this house, and that nothing is so unreliable as a bronze tablet, except figures. Grimm is a painstaking biographer, but he fails to distinguish between fact and truth. Of this we are sure, Giovanni di Sanzio, the father of Raphael, lived in this house. There are church records to show that here other children of Giovanni were born, and this very naturally led to the assumption that Raphael was born here, also.
Just one thing of touching interest is to be seen in this house, and that is a picture of a Mother and Child painted on the wall. For many years this picture was said to be the work of Raphael; but there is now very good reason to believe it was the work of Raphael's father, and that the figures represent the baby Raphael and his mother. The picture is faded and dim, like the history of this sainted woman who gave to earth one of the gentlest, greatest and best men that ever lived. Mystery enshrouds the early days of Raphael. There is no record of his birth. His father we know was a man of decided power, and might yet rank as a great artist, had he not been so unfortunate as to have had a son that outclassed him. But now Giovanni Sanzio's only claim to fame rests on his being the father of his son. Of the boy's mother we have only obstructed glances and glimpses through half-flung lattices in the gloaming. Raphael was her only child. She was scarce twenty when she bore him. In a sonnet written to her, on the back of a painting, Raphael's father speaks of her wondrous eyes, slender neck, and the form too frail for earth's rough buffets. Mention is also made of "this child born in purest love, and sent by God to comfort and caress."
The mother grew aweary and passed away when her boy was scarce eight years old, but his memories of her were deeply etched. She told him of Cimabue, Giotto, Ghirlandajo, Leonardo and Perugino, and especially of the last two, who were living and working only a few miles away. It was this spiritual and loving mother who infused into his soul the desire to do and to become. That hunger for harmony which marked his life was the heritage of mother to child.
When an artist paints a portrait, he paints two--himself and the sitter. Raphael gave himself; and as his father more than once said the boy was the image of his mother, we have her picture, too. Father and son painted the same woman. Their hearts went out to her with a sort of idolatrous love. The sonnets indited to her by her husband were written after her death, and after his second marriage. Do then men love dead women better than they do the living? Perhaps. And then a certain writer has said: "To have known a great and exalted love, and have had it flee from your grasp--flee as a shadow before it is sullied by selfishness or misunderstanding--is the highest good. The memory of such a love can not die from out the heart. It affords a ballast 'gainst all the sordid impulses of life, and though it gives an unutterable sadness, it imparts an unspeakable peace."
Raphael's father followed the boy's mother when the lad was eleven years old. We know the tender, poetic love this father had for the child, and we realize somewhat of the mystical mingling in the man's heart of the love for the woman dead and her child alive. Reverencing the mother's wish that the boy should be an artist, Giovanni Sanzio, proud of his delicate and spiritual beauty, took the lad to visit all the other artists in the vicinity. They also visited the ducal palace, built by Federigo the Second, and lingered there for hours, viewing the paintings, statuary, carvings, tapestries and panelings.
The palace still stands, and is yet one of the most noble in Italy, vying in picturesqueness with those marble piles that line the Grand Canal at Venice. We know that Giovanni Sanzio contributed by his advice and skill to the wealth of beauty in the palace, and we know that he was always a welcome visitor there. From his boyhood Raphael was familiar with these artistic splendors, and how much this early environment contributed to his correct taste and habit of subdued elegance, no man can say. When Giovanni Sanzio realized that death was at his door, he gave Raphael into the keeping of the priest Bartolomeo and the boy's stepmother. The typical stepmother lives, moves and has her being in neurotic novels written by very young ladies.
Instances can be cited of great men who were loved and nurtured and ministered to by their stepmothers. I think well of womankind. The woman who abuses a waif that Fate has sent into her care would mistreat her own children, and is a living libel on her sex.
Let Lincoln and Raphael stand as types of men who were loved with infinite tenderness by stepmothers. And then we must not forget Leonardo da Vinci, who never knew a mother, and had no business to have a father, but who held averages good with four successive stepmothers, all of whom loved him with a tender, jealous and proud devotion.
Bartolomeo, following the wish of the father, continued to give the boy lessons in drawing and sketching. This Bartolomeo must not be confused with the Bartolomeo, friend of Savonarola, who was largely to influence Raphael later on. It was Bartolomeo, the priest, that took Raphael to Perugino, who lived in Perugia. Perugino, although he was a comparatively young man, was bigger than the town in which he lived. His own name got blown away by a high wind, and he was plain Perugino--as if there was only one man in Perugia, and he were that one. "Here is a boy I have brought you as a pupil," said the priest to Perugino. And Perugino glancing up from his easel answered, "I thought it was a girl!"
The priest continued, "Here is a boy I have brought you for a pupil, and your chief claim to fame may yet be that he worked here with you in your studio." Perugino parried the thrust with a smile. He looked at the boy and was impressed with his beauty. Perugino afterwards acknowledged that the only reason he took him was because he thought he would work in well as a model.
Perugino was the greatest master of technique of his time. He had life, and life in abundance. He reveled in his work, and his enthusiasm ran over, inundating all those who were near. Courage is a matter of the red corpuscle. It is oxygen that makes every attack; without oxygen in his blood to back him, a man attacks nothing--not even a pie, much less a blank canvas. Perugino was a success; he had orders ahead; he matched his talent against titles; power flowed his way. Raphael's serious, sober manner and spiritual beauty appealed to him. They became as father and son. The methodical business plan, which is a prime aid to inspiration; the habit of laying out work and completing it; the high estimate of self; the supreme animation and belief in the divinity within--all these Raphael caught from Perugino. Both men were egotists, as are all men who do things. They had heard the voice--they had had a "call." The talent is the call, and if a man fails to do his work in a masterly way, make sure he has mistaken a lazy wish for a divine passion. There is a difference between loving the muse and lusting after her.
Perugino had been called, and before Raphael had worked with him a year, he was sure he had been called, too. The days in Perugia for Raphael were full of quiet joy and growing power. He was in the actual living world of men, and things, and useful work. Afternoons, when the sun's shadows began to lengthen towards the east, Perugino would often call to his helpers, especially Raphael, and Pinturicchio, another fine spirit, and off they would go for a tramp, each with a stout staff and the inevitable portfolio. Out along the narrow streets of the town, across the Roman arched bridge, by the market-place to the terraced hillside that overlooked the Umbrian plain, they went; Perugino stout, strong, smooth-faced, with dark, swarthy features; Pinturicchio with downy beard, merry eyes and tall, able form; and lingering behind, came Raphael. His small black cap fitted closely on his long bronze-gold hair; his slight, slender and graceful figure barely suggested its silken strength held in fine reserve--and all the time the great brown eyes, which looked as if they had seen celestial things, scanned the sky, saw the tall cedars of Lebanon, the flocks on the slopes across the valley, the scattered stone cottages, the fleecy clouds that faintly flecked the deep blue of the sky, the distant spire of a church. All these treasures of the Umbrian landscape were his. Well might he have anticipated, four hundred years before he was born, that greatest of American writers, and said, "I own the landscape!" In frescos signed by Perugino in the year Fourteen Hundred Ninety- two--a date we can not forget--we see a certain style. In the same design duplicated in Fourteen Hundred Ninety-eight, we behold a new and subtle touch--it is the stroke and line of Raphael.
The "Resurrection" by Perugino, in the Vatican, and the "Diotalevi Madonna" signed by the same artist, in the Berlin Museum, show the touch of Raphael, unmistakably. The youth was barely seventeen, but he was putting himself into Perugino's work--and Perugino was glad. Raphael's first independent work was probably done when he was nineteen, and was for the Citta di Castello. These frescos are signed, "Raphael Urbinas, 1502." Other lesser pictures and panels thus signed are found dated Fifteen Hundred Four. They are all the designs of Perugino, but worked out with the painstaking care always shown by very young artists; yet there is a subtle, spiritual style that marks, unmistakably, Raphael's Perugino period.
The "Sposalizio," done in Fifteen Hundred Four, now in the Brera at Milan, is the first really important work of Raphael. Next to this is the "Connestabile Madonna," which was painted at Perugia and remained there until Eighteen Hundred Seventy-one, when it was sold by a degenerate descendant of the original owner to the Emperor of Russia for sixty-five thousand dollars. Since then a law has been passed forbidding any one on serious penalty to remove a "Raphael" from Italy. But for this law, that threat of a Chicago syndicate to buy the Pitti Gallery and move its contents to the "lake front" might have been carried out.
The Second Period of Raphael's life opens with his visit to Florence in Fifteen Hundred Four. He was now twenty-one years of age, handsome, proud, reserved. Stories of his power had preceded him, and the fact that for six years he had worked with Perugino and been his confidant and friend made his welcome sure.
Leonardo and Michelangelo were at the height of their fame, and no doubt they stimulated the ambition of Raphael more than he ever admitted. He considered Leonardo the more finished artist of the two. Michelangelo's heroic strength and sweep of power failed to win him. The frescos of Masaccio in the Church of Santa Carmine in Florence he considered better than any performance of Michelangelo: and as a Roland to this Oliver, we have a legend to the effect that Raphael once called upon Michelangelo and the master sent down word from the scaffold, where he was at work, that he was too busy to see visitors, and anyway, he had all the apprentices that he could look after!
How much this little incident biased Raphael's opinion concerning Michelangelo's art we can not say: possibly Raphael could not have told, either. But such things count, I am told, for even Doctor Johnson thought better of Reynolds' work after they had dined together.
It seems that Fra Bartolomeo was one of the first and best friends Raphael had at Florence. The monk's gentle spirit and his modest views of men and things won the young Umbrian; and between these two there sprang up a friendship so firm and true that death alone could sever it.
The deep religious devotion of Bartolomeo set the key for the first work done by Raphael at Florence. Most of the time the young man and the monk lived and worked in the same studio. It was a wonderfully prolific period for Raphael; from Fifteen Hundred Four to Fifteen Hundred Eight he pushed forward with a zest and an earnestness he never again quite equaled. Most of his beautiful Madonnas belong to this period, and in them all are a dignity, grace and grandeur that lift them out of ecclesiastic art, and place them in the category of living portraits.
Before this, Raphael belonged to the Umbrian School, but now his work must be classed, if classed at all, as Florentine. The handling is freer, the nude more in evidence, and the anatomy shows that the artist is working from life.
Bartolomeo used to speak of Raphael affectionately as "my son," and called the attention of Bramante, the architect, to his work. The beauty of his Madonnas was being discussed in every studio, and when the "Ansidei" was exhibited in the Church of Santa Croce, such a crowd flocked to see the picture that services had to be dismissed. The rush continued until a thrifty priest bethought him to stand at the main entrance with a contribution-box and a stout stick, and allow no one to enter who did not contribute good silver for "the worthy poor."
Bartolomeo acknowledged that his "pupil" was beyond him. He was invited to add a finishing touch to the Masaccio frescos; Leonardo, the courtly, had smiled a gracious recognition, and Michelangelo had sneezed at mention of his name. Bramante, back at Rome, told Pope Julius the Second, "There is a young Umbrian at Florence we must send for."
Great things were happening at Rome about this time: all roads led thitherward. Pope Julius had just laid the cornerstone of Saint Peter's, and full of ambition was carrying out the dictum of Pope Nicholas the Fifth, that "the Church should array herself in all the beauteous spoils of the world, in order to win the minds of men."
The Renaissance was fairly begun, fostered and sustained by the Church alone. The Quattrocento--that time of homely peace and the simple quiet of John Ball and his fellows--lay behind.
Raphael had begun his Roman Period, which was to round out his working life of barely eighteen years, ere the rest of the Pantheon was to be his.
Before this his time had been his own, but now the Church was his mistress. But it was a great honor that had come to him, greater far than had ever before been bestowed on any living artist. Barely twenty-five years of age, the Pope treated him as an equal, and worked him like a packhorse. "He has the face of an angel," cried Julius, "and the soul of a god!"--when some one suggested his youth.
Pope Leo the Tenth, of the Medici family, succeeded Julius. He sent Michelangelo to Florence to employ his talents upon the Medicean church of San Lorenzo. He dismissed Perugino, Pinturicchio and Piero Delia Francesca, although Raphael in tears pleaded for them all. Their frescos were destroyed, and Raphael was told to go ahead and make the Vatican what it should be.
His first large work was to decorate the Hall of the Signatures (Stanza della Segnatura), where we today see the "Dispute." Near at hand is the famous "School of Athens." In this picture his own famous portrait is to be seen with that of Perugino. The first place is given to Perugino, and the faces affectionately side by side are posed in a way that has given a cue to ten thousand photographers.
The attitude is especially valuable, as a bit of history showing Raphael's sterling attachment to his old teacher. The Vatican is filled with the work of Raphael, and aside from the galleries to which the general public is admitted, studies and frescos are to be seen in many rooms that are closed unless, say, Archbishop Ireland be with you, when all doors fly open at your touch. The seven Raphael tapestries are shown at the Vatican an hour each day; the rest of the time the room is closed to protect them from the light. However, the original cartoons at South Kensington reveal the sweep and scope of Raphael's genius better than the tapestries themselves.
Work, unceasing work, filled his days. The ingenuity and industry of the man were marvelous. Upwards of eighty portraits were painted during the Roman Period, besides designs innumerable for engravings, and even for silver and iron ornaments required by the Church. Pupils helped him much, of course, and among these must be mentioned Giulio Romano and Gianfrancesco Penni. These young men lived with Raphael in his splendid house that stood halfway between Saint Peter's and the Castle Angelo. Fire swept the space a hundred years later, and the magnificence it once knew has never been replaced. Today, hovels built from stone quarried from the ruins mark the spot. But as one follows this white, dusty road, it is well to remember that the feet of Raphael, passing and repassing, have, more than any other one street of Rome, made it sacred soil.
We have seen that Bramante brought Raphael to Rome, and Pope Leo the Tenth remembered this when the first architect of Saint Peter's passed away. Raphael was appointed his successor. The honor was merited, but the place should have gone to one not already overworked. In Fifteen Hundred Fifteen Raphael was made Director of Excavations, another office for which his esthetic and delicate nature was not fitted. In sympathy, of course, his heart went out to the antique workers of the ancient world, on whose ruins the Eternal City is built; but the drudgery of overseeing and superintendence belonged to another type of man.
The stress of the times had told on Raphael; he was thirty-five, rich beyond all Umbrian dreams of avarice, on an equality with the greatest and noblest men of his time, honored above all other living artists. But life began to pall; he had won all--and thereby had learned the worthlessness of what the world has to offer. Dreams of rest, of love and a quiet country home, came to him. He was betrothed to Maria di Bibbiena, a niece of Cardinal Bibbiena. The day of the wedding had been set, and the Pope was to perform the ceremony.
But the Pope regarded Raphael as a servant of the Church: he had work for him to do, and moreover he had fixed ideas concerning the glamour of sentimentalism, so he requested that the wedding be postponed for a space.
A request from the Pope was an order, and so the country house was packed away with other dreams that were to come true all in God's good time.
But the realization of love's dream did not come true, for Raphael had a rival. Death claimed his bride.
She was buried in the Pantheon, where within a year Raphael's wornout body was placed beside hers; and there the dust of both mingle.
The history of this love-tragedy has never been written; it lies buried there with the lovers. But a contemporary said that the fear of an enforced separation broke the young woman's heart; and this we know, that after her death, Raphael's hand forgot its cunning, and his frame was ripe for the fever that was so soon to burn out the strands of his life.
Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Perugino and Fra Bartolomeo had all made names for themselves before Raphael appeared upon the scene. Yet they one and all profited by his example, and were the richer in that he had lived.
Michelangelo was born nine years before Raphael and survived him forty-three years.
Titian was six years old when Raphael was born, and he continued to live and work for fifty-six years after Raphael had passed away.
It was a cause of grief to Michelangelo, even to the day of his death, that he and Raphael had not been close, personal and loving friends, as indeed they should have been.
The art-world was big enough for both. Yet Rome was divided into two hostile camps: those who favored Raphael; and those who had but one prophet, Michelangelo. Busybodies rushed back and forth, carrying foolish and inconsequential messages; and these strong yet gentle men, both hungering for sympathy and love, were thrust apart.
When Raphael realized the end was nigh, he sent for Perugino, and directed that he should complete certain work. His career had begun by working with Perugino, and now this friend of a lifetime must finish the broken task and make good the whole. He bade his beloved pupils, one by one, farewell; signed his will, which gave most of his valuable property to his fellow-workers; and commended his soul to the God who gave it. He died on his birthday, Good Friday, April Sixth, Fifteen Hundred Twenty, aged thirty-seven years. Michelangelo wore mourning upon his sleeve for a year after Raphael's death. And once Michelangelo said, "Raphael was a child, a beautiful child, and if he had only lived a little longer, he and I would have grasped hands as men and worked together as brothers."
[The end]
Elbert Hubbard's Writings: Raphael