Raphael, Sanzio
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
raf'a-el, Sanzio (1483-1520), the greatest of Italian and of all painters. Like Michelangelo he won reputation as an architect. He designed certain portions of the Vatican and painted two series of wall decorations for this famous building. First is a series of fifty-two pictures, representing the principal events of sacred history. They are sometimes called "Raphael's Bible." The other series includes the Coronation of Charlemagne, the School of Athens, Parnassus, Jurisprudence, the Deliverance of St. Peter, and many subjects drawn from papal history. Michelangelo worked in solitude. Raphael delighted to go to his work with a host of students whom he employed in executing the less critical parts of his paintings. In this way, although he died young, Raphael left scores of paintings, any one of which would have made the reputation of an inferior artist. Raphael is known best by two famous Madonnas. His Madonna of the Chair sits clasping her chubby child. Her cheek rests on its curly head, and her eyes look straight forward in a wistful, womanly way. The child's face is burdened, as if a forecast of his life as a "Man of Sorrows" already weighs heavily. The other painting, The Sistine Madonna , was secured by purchase for the Dresden gallery in 1753 for $45,000. This picture is eight feet by four feet in size. It is surrounded by a heavy gilt frame and is shown in a room by itself. A curtain, seemingly drawn aside, reveals the mother issuing forth from the clouds of heaven with the infant Christ in her arms. Two saints in rapt adoration gaze upon the apparition, and two innocent cherub faces at the foot of the picture add a third horizon giving the Madonna and Child the effect of distance. The Madonna's large awe-stricken eyes and modest, serious, lovely face are the highest expression of womanly purity and the solemn joy of young motherhood. Visitors may chatter in other parts of the gallery, but even the thoughtless feel the influence of The Sistine Madonna. Both of these Madonnas are well known through inexpensive prints. Raphael's supremacy in the world of painting has been undisputed for four centuries. See Painting ; Dresden
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's confidence in 1910 that Raphael's "supremacy in the world of painting has been undisputed for four centuries" no longer holds: modernist and later taste pushed him behind Leonardo, Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Vermeer in popular esteem, and his sweet Madonnas were for much of the twentieth century dismissed as sentimental, while the two cherubs at the foot of the Sistine Madonna became one of the most reproduced images in commercial kitsch. The Sistine Madonna itself was removed from Dresden by Soviet troops in 1945 and returned in 1955; it hangs again in the Gemaeldegalerie Alte Meister. Scholarship has also worked hard at exactly the point the entry notes approvingly, the crowd of assistants: many works once given wholly to Raphael are now credited in large part to Giulio Romano and other workshop hands. The 500th anniversary of his death in 2020 brought a major Rome retrospective, curtailed by the COVID-19 closures, and a renewed serious reassessment of him as draughtsman, portraitist and architect rather than only as a painter of Madonnas.
Written for this edition, 2026.