History of the Life and Works of Raffaello by Quatremere de Quincy

Author:Quatremere de Quincy [Quincy, Quatremere de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367191313
Google: FSnTygEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Incorporated
Published: 2020-09-09T15:57:05+00:00

Michel Angelo, independently of the enormous learning of his drawings, had doubtless astonished men by the grandeur and daring of some of his conceptions in the ceilings of the Sistine chapel, where he ventured to become the painter of the Creation, and to rival the text of Genesis in the description of its marvels. Now, it is difficult not to believe that here, also, Raffaello had Michel Angelo and the Sistine chapel in view, by taking similar subjects as his themes in the Loggie. Such, for example, are those where, reproducing the same ideas in his own manner, he painted the Eternal Being creating light, dispersing chaos, hurling, with each hand, into space, the sun and the moon, forming the earth and its inhabitants, animating man with his breath, and ordaining woman to be an inseparable part of him.

There is not, indeed, any comparison to be drawn between the works of the two painters, if we consider the difference of dimension which each locality prescribed to its artist. Michel Angelo, in the vast spaces he had to fill, could not be otherwise than colossal in his productions. Raffaello, confined by his site, could only give to his compositions the dimensions of easel pieces. But there is in painting a sort of grandeur which cannot be measured by the compass, and whose limits no comparison can fix. On this principle, we may say that Michel Angelo never produced anything so great in thought, character, and action as the figure of the Eternal Father dispersing chaos; and it is by this kind of grandeur that Raffaello has shown himself superior to his rival in all the subjects which, after his example, he has taken from the Bible.

When men speak of what Raffaello owed to Michel Angelo, they do not adduce any real or positive evidence of the alleged debt. When, therefore, we admit in this place, as we have admitted before, that he owed to Michel Angelo an enlargement of his manner, nothing is to be understood from this, but that Michel Angelo, by his works, acted as that exalted stimulant which, in everything, incites great men to equal and surpass the great men who have preceded them.

If Raffaello seemed to have raised himself by the example, and from seeing the works of Michel Angelo, it was not that factitious and borrowed height, which makes itself a pedestal of the knowledge of another. The increase of all the qualities developed in him was, on the contrary, similar in its nature to that which takes place in all men endowed with that faculty. I compare Raffaello to one of those trees, the privileged children of the forest, which appropriate to themselves all the juices of a favourable soil, all the favours of heaven, and profit by all the influences that surround them, but which also find in their own sap the virtue which makes them grow, ramify, and extend without limit.

The series of fifty-two subjects from the Bible and New Testament, is one

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