Florence: Raphael in the Pitti Palace

There was so much to see in the Uffizi gallery that Edward Hutton could do little more, except in the case of Botticelli, than divide the collection into the schools of Florence, Siena, Umbria, and Venice and then offer just a sentence or two to each painting. Even Michelangelo's Doni Tondo, for example, was only described as a "very splendid Holy Family, splendid perhaps rather than beautiful..." But in the Pitti Palace he took notice of its great Raphael collection, and the influence of Florence on the young painter from Umbria.

 

And it is in this mystical and smiling country, where the light is so soft and tender, softer than on any Tuscan hills, that the most perfect if not the greatest painter of the Renaissance grew up. You may find some memory of that beautiful land of hills and quiet valleys even in his latest work, after he had learned from every master, and summed up, as it were, the whole Renaissance in his achievement. But in the four pictures here in the Pitti, it is the influence of Florence you find imposing itself upon the art of Umbria, transforming it, strengthening it, and suggesting, it may be, the way of advance. Something of the art of Pietro [Perugino] you see in the portraits of Maddalena Doni, Angelo Doni, and La Donna Gravida…It is the influence of Florence we seem to find too in the simplicity of the Madonna del Granduca. Here is a picture certainly in the manner of Perugino, but with something lost, some light, some beatitude, yet with something gained also, if only in a certain measure of restraint, a real simplicity that is foreign to that master.

And then, if we compare it with the Madonna della Sedia, which is said to have been painted on the lid of a wine cask, we shall find, I think, that however many new secrets he may learn Raphael never forgot a lesson. It is Perugino who has taught him to compose so perfectly, that the space, small or large, of the picture itself becomes a means of beauty. How perfectly he has placed Madonna with her little Son, and St. John praying beside them, so that until you begin to take thought you are not aware how difficult that composition must have been, and indeed you never remember how small that tondo really is. How eagerly those easel pictures of Madonna have ben loved, and yet to-day how little they mean to us; some virtue seems to have gone out of them, so that they move us no longer, and we are indeed a little impatient at their fame, and ready to accuse Raphael of I know not what insincerity or dreadful facility.

Yet we have only to look at the portraits to know we are face to face with one of the greatest and most universal of painters. Consider then, La Donna Veleta, or the Pope Julius II, or the Leo X with the two Cardinals, how splendid they are, how absolutely characterized and full of life, life seen in the tranquillity of the artist, who has understood everything, and with whom truth has become beauty. In the Leo X with the Cardinals, Guilio de’ Medici and Lorenzo dei Rossi, how tactfully Raphael has contrived the light and shadow so that the fat heavy face of the Pope is not overemphasized, and you discern perfectly the beauty of the head, the delicacy of the nostrils, the clever, sensual, pathetic, witty mouth. And the hands seem about to move, to be a little tremulous with life, to be on the verge of a gesture, to have only just become motionless on the edge of the book. It is in these portraits that the art of Raphael is at its greatest, becomes universal, achieves, immortality.

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Edward Hutton: Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa, second edition, London, 1908. Pp. 340-341.