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[rhythmic music begins]

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Raphael was one of the most prolific and influential artists in history.

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One of the “Big Three” of the High
Renaissance,

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together with Michelangelo
and Leonardo da Vinci,

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his total artistic output
considerably exceeded both,

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despite the fact that he died
at only 37 years of age:

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30 years younger than Leonardo and more than 50 than Michelangelo.

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But today, more than 500 years later,

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how many of us have a clear sense of what
Raphael really accomplished and how?

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Aside from the School of Athens and one or two
particularly memorable angelic figures,

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what can most of us say about this
remarkably prolific genius

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who somehow managed to single handedly transform himself from relative obscurity

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to the very pinnacle of one of the most competitive and innovative

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periods of artistic accomplishment that there has ever been?

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Beloved by popes and princes,

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leader of an extensive workshop,

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famous architect,

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budding archeologist,

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close friend with many of the leading literary and cultural figures of the day

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and much, much more besides:

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This is his story.

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[rhythmic music ends]

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[intriguing background music begins]

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Raphael's short 37-year life,

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from 1483 to 1520,

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spanned a particularly tumultuous period
in the Italian Renaissance.

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He was born at the end of the reign of Pope Sixtus IV:

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driving force behind the Sistine Chapel,

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Sistine Bridge,

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development of the Vatican Library,

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and a torrent of unprecedented nepotism

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as he vigorously placed as many relatives as he could find

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in key positions in the Church;

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such as his nephew Giuliano della Rovere,

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the future Pope Julius II.

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Sixtus IV was followed by Innocent VIII,

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who married off his eldest illegitimate son

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Lorenzo de Medici’s daughter, in exchange

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in exchange for a cardinal's hat for Lorenzo's 13-year-old son Giovanni.

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While Innocent VIII’s successor was the infamous Rodrigo de Borgia,

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Pope Alexander VI,

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himself made a cardinal at the age of 25 by his uncle,

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Pope Callixtus III;

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and two of Alexander's many illegitimate offspring:

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Cesare Borgia and Lucrezia Borgia,

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went on to play a dominant role in Italian power politics of the day:

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Lucrezia, through her high-profile marriages and affairs,

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and Cesare, for his intense flurry of conquests as captain of the papal army

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with the explicit support of his father.

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Cesare Borgia’s military triumphs came in the broader context of the Italian Wars

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begun by France’s King Charles VIII’s quest for Naples in 1494

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that shattered the 40-year balance between Italy's five major powers:

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Florence, Milan, Venice, Naples and the Papal States,

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and its many local mercenary military rulers, known as condottieri, that dotted the landscape.

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The French army quickly cut through the Italian peninsula,

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passing through Florence and Rome

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before Charles marched, unopposed, into Naples in early 1495.

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His rapid conquest alarmed the other major Italian powers sufficiently

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to make them temporarily unite and force the French back over the Alps.

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But the invasion forever changed the political landscape

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by illustrating just how susceptible Italy was to foreign intervention.

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Charles's successor, Louis XII,

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allied himself with both the Papacy and Venice

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and returned to capture Milan in 1499,

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accompanied by Cesare Borgia,

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whom he’d recently made a Duke as part of a secret deal with Alexander

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that enabled him to annul his marriage to his current wife

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so that he could marry Anne of Brittany, Charles’ widow.

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Louis’ rapid conquest of Milan not only drove out Milan's ruler Ludovico Sforza,

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but also Leonardo da Vinci,

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who had been based at his Milanese court.

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Meanwhile,

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supported by both the French and his father, Alexander VI,

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Cesare Borgia went on to conquer a string of towns over the next several years

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and became the talk of all of Italy.

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Leondardo ended up spending a brief period as his military engineer and architect:

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developing plans for draining the marshlands near Piombino,

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creating a hugely innovative map of the town of Imola,

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and possibly making sketches of Borgia himself,

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while Niccolò  Machiavelli,

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a senior official in the Florentine Republic,

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was sent by his superiors to meet with Borgia on several occasions

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in the hopes of deciphering his intentions towards Florence;

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experiences that Machiavelli would later explicitly draw upon in his most famous work,

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The Prince.

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Cesare Borgia's exploits came to a crashing halt when his father died in mid-1503

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and after the scant 26-day reign of Pius III,

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the new pope was Julius II,

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a sworn enemy of the Borgias who quickly engineered Cesare's imprisonment and removal to Spain.

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Julius, known as The Warrior Pope for reasons which will soon become obvious,

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focused his attention on re-exerting control over territories in the Romagna region

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led by independent-minded condottieri

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shocking even the jaded Renaissance world by personally leading the papal armies on several occasions,

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which soon brought him into direct conflict with the Venetian Republic,

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which had also taken advantage of the power vacuum left by Cesare Borgia’s sudden demise

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to significantly extend its influence southward into the area.

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In 1509, he joined the anti-Venetian alliance of France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire,

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all anxious to claim territory currently ruled by Venice,

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using his papal authority to excommunicate the entire city and its inhabitants.

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But once Venice had been beaten back and he'd reasserted direct rule over his lost territories,

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Julius promptly switched sides and sought to form a military alliance with Venice against the French,

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now viewed as the greater danger.

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He formally absolved the Venetians of their sins

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and turned his attention towards Ferrara,

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a staunch French ally ruled by Alfonso D’Este,

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who only a few months earlier had been instrumental
in reclaiming papal territory from Venice.

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Now excommunicating both Alfonso and all of Ferrara,

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Julius plunged back into the military fray and led an attack against the city,

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but Alfonso, with French help,successfully defended it;

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and although Papal and Venetian forces did manage to occupy nearby Modena,

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Ferrara remained stubbornly elusive.

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And it was at this point that the dispirited Julius,

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now seriously ill in Bologna,

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began to grow the beard with which,

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thanks to Raphael's famous portrait, along with numerous fresco images,

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he is so constantly associated;

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vowing not to shave it off until he’d driven the French “barbarians” from the entire Italian peninsula.

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Recovering from his illness, the now-bearded Julius struggled on:

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capturing the nearby town of Mirandola,

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and sending his phenomenally wealthy personal banker Agostino Chigi,

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whom he had formally adopted a few years earlier, in recognition of both his power and fidelity,

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to Venice - to arrance for a loan to bolster the Republic's sagging military efforts.

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The French, however, refused to go away,

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recapturing Bologna and Mirandola

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and provocatively organizing a church council at Pisa

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designed to depose what they viewed as this clearly out-of-control Pope.

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But the indomitable Julius once again fought back strongly on both the spiritual and secular fronts:

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announcing his own formal, papally-sanctioned Lateran Council for the spring of 1512,

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and putting together a military “Holy League” against the French,

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including Venice, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and the Swiss Confederacy,

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all now particularly keen to knock France down to size.

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The French rebel church council turned out to be conspicuously poorly attended,

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and despite winning the Battle of Ravenna in 1512

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and looking like they would soon march on to Rome to finally rid themselves of this most intransigent pope,

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their military position suddenly collapsed

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due to the pressure from facing so many different hostile forces simultaneously,

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and they withdrew once again - temporarily at least - over the Alps,

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providing Julius with a seemingly miraculous victory,

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a triumph that Raphael would emphatically reference in the series of frescoes he painted

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in the second room of the Pope's new private apartments.

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Julius died a few months later.

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And his successor,

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the Medici Pope, Leo X,

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that same son of Lorenzo the Magnificent who’d become a cardinal at the age of 13,

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was also inevitably sucked into the ongoing Italian Wars:

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forced to navigate between the growing tensions of France -

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now under their new king, François I,

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which had once more teamed up with Venice to recapture Milan -

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and Charles V,

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the powerful Hapsburg monarch who inherited direct rule over roughly one fifth of Europe,

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not to mention the Spanish-controlled lands of the New World

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and a few other places as well for good measure.

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But while François and Charles were clearly determined to fight for European supremacy

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through control over the Italian peninsula,

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Leo's core priorities were elsewhere:

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the musical, artistic and intellectual life of his papal court

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and promoting the advancement of his family,

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both of which were largely funded by the now-standard sale of indulgences and other dubious practices

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that led an enraged Martin Luther to announce his famed 95 theses in the fall of 1517,

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a month or so after Leo had finally concluded a costly war to extend the realm of his nephew Lorenzo,

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ruler of Florence, to Urbino -

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ousting the previous Duke of Urbino, Julius’ nephew,

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who would quickly retake the Duchy a few years later,

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after the deaths of both Lorenzo and Leo.

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and Leo.

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But the unceasing wars and shifting political alliances of Renaissance statecraft

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was only one part of what defined these fascinating times.

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Equally significant, was the intense preoccupation with ancient Greek and Roman cultural accomplishments

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through the movement known as Renaissance Humanism,

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whose quiet beginnings in the late 13th century

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was emphatically extended by Petrarch in the 14th,

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before exploding in the 15th in an unprecedented literary and artistic awakening.

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It was an age of rediscovery -

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both literally, through a steady unearthing of a succession of beautiful masterpieces from the ancient world -

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and conceptually, through a constant invocation of classical values

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that were enthusiastically refashioned within a contemporary Christian worldview.

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There was a seemingly limitless demand for intricate church frescoes and exquisite altarpieces,

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often constructed with a series of related
smaller works below them called predelle,

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that represented a range of standard iconographic topics,

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along with more personalized “sacre conversazione” settings:

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images of the Virgin and Child surrounded by saints of particular interest to the patrons -

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and sometimes with those patrons included as well.

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The market for portable art had exploded too,

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with the production of thousands of private devotional works,

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secular portraits,

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and various mythological and literary scenes.

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Throughout Italy,

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a torrent of breathtakingly beautiful art was appearing at a positively astounding rate.

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at a positively astounding rate.

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And not just in Italy.

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The 15th and early 16th centuries also witnessed a steady stream of masterpieces coming from northern Europe:

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remarkably detailed images exploiting the new medium of oil paints,

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literary humanist bestsellers churned out by the new mechanical printing technology,

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and the pioneering development of woodcut prints and engravings.

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The so-called “Northern European Renaissance” had an enormous impact throughout all of Europe.

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But Italy was clearly the artistic epicenter,

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led by an array of rulers intent on harnessing the greatest creative minds to enhance their own image,

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and a thriving infrastructure of guilds and workshops

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to ensure continuous artistic production at the highest possible levels.

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And so it was that Sixtus IV didn't just build a new chapel in the Vatican.

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He had it decorated but the leading painters of his day:

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Botticelli, Perugino, Ghirlandaio and Rosselli -

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while Alexander VI hired Pinturicchio to paint a series of frescoes in his papal apartments

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to forever enshrine his legacy for posterity -

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a move which decidedly backfired when Julius,

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unwilling to be physically confronted by images of his hated predecessor,

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moved upstairs to create his own, soon to be much more famous, apartments:

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the now called “Raphael Rooms”.

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Indeed, the unstoppable Julius was determined to transform Rome into the world’s undisputed cultural capital:

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engaging the architect Donato Bramante to carry out a number of transformative urban planning projects

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including the construction of a new Saint Peter's Basilica;

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meanwhile hiring Michelangelo to both construct his tomb

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and paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

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His hedonistic successor, Leo X,

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fervently kept the aesthetic ball rolling,

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basking in a glittering circle of poets, musicians and scholars,

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and even managing to make his own contribution to the artistically-overloaded Sistine Chapel

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by comissioning Raphael to create ten scenes from the Acts of the Apostles to be woven into tapestries

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and hung on the bottom portion of the walls on special occasions.

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But popes were hardly the only influential patrons of the age,

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with sponsorship of the arts a popular way for highly successful members of the rapidly-rising merchant class

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to establish their aristocratic credentials,

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such as Julius’ banker and officially adopted son Agostino Chigi,

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who took every opportunity available to demonstrate his now-formal link to the della Rovere family,

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and who was a particularly enthusiastic participant in what was by then a long tradition of vigorous artistic patronage

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that included the Medicis in Florence,

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the Gonazagas in Mantua,

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The D’Estes in Ferrara

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and the Sforzas in Milan.

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One of the most celebrated examples of such a sophisticated Renaissance patron

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was Federico da Montefeltro,

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ruler of Urbino from 1444 to 1482

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and widely respected for his unique combination of military accomplishment,

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Christian piety

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and cultural awareness.

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Federico spent his youth in Venice and Mantua,

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where he studied with the celebrated humanist teacher

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Vittorino da Feltre.

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Notwithstanding his lifelong interests in philosophy,

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classical literature,

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and mathematics,

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he followed in the family business of becoming a successful mercenary commander, or condottiero.

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Despite having lost his right eye during a jousting tournament -

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which is why images of him are almost always in left profile -

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Federico developed a reputation as a highly effective and trustworthy military leader;

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and his ducal palace at Urbino became a well-recognized hub of painters, architects, playwrights and poets from far and wide.

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And as he diligently educated his son and heir Guidobaldo in the best humanist tradition,

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Federico built himself a beautiful study with images of 28 famous men to inspire him;

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all of whom were notably pictured with a book -

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except Moses, who’s depicted with the Ten Commandments.

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Of the many glowing tributes to Federico,

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a particularly revealing one was written by his court painter and theater designer,

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whose long biographical poem contains an intriguing digression on the contemporary art scene,

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singing the praises of a diverse array of artists,

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including Mantegna, Botticelli, Signorelli, and “two young men alike in fame and years”:

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Leonardo da Vinci and Pietro Perugino, “a divine painter”.

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It's an extremely important summary for anyone interested in appreciating the artistic world of late 15th-century Italy

00:18:43.489 --> 00:18:47.626
from an astute observer on the ground actively contributing to it.

00:18:47.626 --> 00:18:51.563
But for our purposes it holds an even greater value.

00:18:51.563 --> 00:18:56.201
For the author of this poem was none other than Giovanni Santi:

00:18:56.201 --> 00:18:58.403
Raphael’s father.

00:19:06.011 --> 00:19:09.615
Raphael was born in Urbino in 1483,

00:19:09.615 --> 00:19:13.118
one year after the death of Federico da Montefeltro,

00:19:13.118 --> 00:19:16.455
and his father Giovanni was a major influence on him,

00:19:16.455 --> 00:19:19.124
both as a role model for a professional artist

00:19:19.124 --> 00:19:22.494
and, more generally, by demonstrating how to successfully participate in a Renaissance court -

00:19:22.494 --> 00:19:25.097
how to successfully participate
in a Renaissance court -

00:19:25.097 --> 00:19:29.268
a skill the genial and popular Raphael would notably excel at

00:19:29.268 --> 00:19:35.574
throughout his meteoric rise to the very heart of the inner circle of both Julius II and Leo X.

00:19:36.441 --> 00:19:39.311
His father, Giovanni, for his part,

00:19:39.311 --> 00:19:42.781
was not only a popular figure among the Urbino elite,

00:19:42.781 --> 00:19:45.450
he also managed, quite unusually,

00:19:45.450 --> 00:19:50.289
to be on extremely good personal terms with many of Italy's leading artists,

00:19:50.289 --> 00:19:53.859
some of whom had spent time at Federico’s Urbino court

00:19:53.859 --> 00:19:57.996
and others he’d actively collaborated with outside of it;

00:19:57.996 --> 00:20:05.704
including “the divine Perugino”, universally admired for the pious, angelic air of his figures,

00:20:05.704 --> 00:20:09.408
his personal hero Andrea Mantegna,

00:20:09.408 --> 00:20:13.645
longtime court painter and eminent engraver at Mantua,

00:20:13.645 --> 00:20:19.384
the innovative sculptor, decorative artist and architect, Ambrogio Barocci,

00:20:19.384 --> 00:20:23.789
the renowned mathematician and painter Piero della Francesca,

00:20:23.789 --> 00:20:28.260
author of a hugely influential treatise on the theory of perspective,

00:20:28.260 --> 00:20:31.930
Piero's fellow perspectivist Melozzo da Forlì,

00:20:31.930 --> 00:20:38.637
who famously applied those concepts, and more, to the vault in the sacristy of San Marco in Loreto,

00:20:38.637 --> 00:20:45.911
and the celebrated architect, painter, military engineer, sculptor and writer

00:20:45.911 --> 00:20:48.380
Francesco de Giorgio Martini.

00:20:49.681 --> 00:20:53.952
Santi’s own artistic style was a particularly diverse mix,

00:20:53.952 --> 00:20:58.757
not only incorporating, most notably, many features of Perugino,

00:20:58.757 --> 00:21:01.860
but also aspects of della Francesca,

00:21:01.860 --> 00:21:03.262
Giovanni Bellini,

00:21:03.262 --> 00:21:05.497
Florentine sculptors,

00:21:05.497 --> 00:21:09.434
various Northern European artists and others.

00:21:10.035 --> 00:21:15.374
Even more than introducing Raphael to the everyday aspects of running a professional workshop:

00:21:15.374 --> 00:21:19.578
mixing paints, preparing canvases, delegating duties,

00:21:19.578 --> 00:21:26.551
it was this determination to continually study and incorporate different insights from a wide range of artistic traditions

00:21:26.551 --> 00:21:30.789
that likely made the strongest impression on his remarkably gifted son.

00:21:31.456 --> 00:21:34.393
Raphael was only 11 when his father died,

00:21:34.393 --> 00:21:36.995
but the message had clearly been learned by then.

00:21:36.995 --> 00:21:39.631
Throughout his entire artistic career

00:21:39.631 --> 00:21:45.170
he displayed an almost superhuman ability to blend key aspects of other masters’ styles

00:21:45.170 --> 00:21:47.205
in his own unique fashion.

00:21:47.205 --> 00:21:51.877
So it's hardly a surprise to learn that Raphael later straightforwardly declared,

00:21:51.877 --> 00:21:54.313
in a 1511 Vatican document,
that his father was his sole artistic

00:21:54.313 --> 00:21:57.416
that his father was his sole artistic mentor;

00:21:57.416 --> 00:22:02.321
simply describing himself as “the pupil of Giovanni Santi”.

00:22:04.623 --> 00:22:12.230
This jars considerably, however, with the account given by the influential 16th-century writer and artist, Giorgio Vasari.

00:22:12.230 --> 00:22:15.701
whose biography of Raphael, whom he never met,

00:22:15.701 --> 00:22:20.172
considerably downplayed the role of Giovanni in his son's creative development;

00:22:20.172 --> 00:22:25.977
insstead declaring that Raphael was sent away to apprentice in Perugino’s workshop  in Perugia

00:22:25.977 --> 00:22:28.947
once he had “learned everything that his father could teach him”.

00:22:28.947 --> 00:22:35.854
There are a number of aspects of Vasari’s account that have led scholars to be increasingly skeptical of this claim -

00:22:35.854 --> 00:22:39.991
like his detailed description of Raphael's mother crying at his departure,

00:22:39.991 --> 00:22:43.261
despite the fact that he was only eight years old when she died -

00:22:43.261 --> 00:22:48.567
which is awfully young to have learned everything possible from a father who was a professional court painter,

00:22:48.567 --> 00:22:52.804
even for a remarkably precocious genius like he clearly was.

00:22:53.138 --> 00:22:56.608
But perhaps the clearest indication of Raphael's early training

00:22:56.608 --> 00:23:00.579
comes from a careful examination of his first known works,

00:23:00.912 --> 00:23:05.317
which, while obviously strongly influenced by Perugino,

00:23:05.317 --> 00:23:07.486
just like those of his father,

00:23:07.486 --> 00:23:11.556
are quite distinct from the much stronger Perugino resemblance,

00:23:11.556 --> 00:23:13.992
both stylistically and technically,

00:23:13.992 --> 00:23:17.129
of those that were to come just a few years later.

00:23:17.696 --> 00:23:22.534
The earliest fully-documented painting we know of was completed in 1501,

00:23:22.534 --> 00:23:24.970
when Raphael was just 18,

00:23:24.970 --> 00:23:27.973
in the Umbrian town of Città di Castello:

00:23:27.973 --> 00:23:32.744
an altarpiece for the Baronci Chapel in the church of Sant’Agostino.

00:23:33.078 --> 00:23:36.782
Although severely damaged in an earthquake several centuries later

00:23:36.782 --> 00:23:39.117
and then cut into several pieces,

00:23:39.117 --> 00:23:41.253
through examining each segment,

00:23:41.253 --> 00:23:44.256
several of the available preparatory sketches,

00:23:44.256 --> 00:23:49.327
and a partial copy of the entire altarpiece composed a few years after the earthquake,

00:23:49.327 --> 00:23:53.665
we can get a reasonably good understanding of what it must have looked like.

00:23:54.065 --> 00:23:58.670
The Baronci altarpiece has many obviously Perugino-like features,

00:23:58.670 --> 00:24:02.507
but also contains some of Giovanni Santi’s standard devices,

00:24:02.507 --> 00:24:06.411
a strongly foreshortened figure inspired by Luca Signorelli,

00:24:06.411 --> 00:24:10.816
and even examples of the ancient Roman decorations known as “grotesques”,

00:24:10.816 --> 00:24:15.320
after their recent discovery in the underground Roman caves, or grottoes,

00:24:15.320 --> 00:24:17.923
that contained Nero's famous Golden House

00:24:17.923 --> 00:24:20.826
and that had become the rage throughout all of Italy.

00:24:21.359 --> 00:24:26.298
it’s only with Raphael's next major commissions that we begin to see works that,

00:24:26.298 --> 00:24:27.899
as Vasari says,

00:24:27.899 --> 00:24:32.471
“Everyone would have assumed were by Perugino, had Raphael not signed them.”

00:24:32.471 --> 00:24:37.509
leading several experts to suspect that any sort of official relationship with Perugino

00:24:37.509 --> 00:24:41.980
might have happened quite a bit later - perhaps in 1502 or so,

00:24:41.980 --> 00:24:49.621
around the time when Cesare Borgia had conquered Urbino and driven Guidobaldo Montefeltro and his court into exile.

00:24:49.621 --> 00:24:54.259
Of course, it's possible that Raphael never formally worked with Perugino at all,

00:24:54.259 --> 00:24:57.762
and his early patrons simply demanded that he paint his works

00:24:57.762 --> 00:25:02.100
explicitly in the style of the then wildly popular Perugino.

00:25:02.100 --> 00:25:04.035
But however, it came about,

00:25:04.035 --> 00:25:07.906
the culmination of Raphael's intensely Perugino-like phase

00:25:07.906 --> 00:25:11.243
was unquestionably his altarpiece of The Marriage of the Virgin,

00:25:11.243 --> 00:25:16.681
where he emphatically outshone a recent effort by Perugino on exactly the same theme -

00:25:16.681 --> 00:25:23.088
itself, structurally similar to Perugino’s Delivery of the Keys, already hanging in the Sistine Chapel -

00:25:23.088 --> 00:25:29.427
all while giving us a concrete indication of the young Raphael’s burgeoning architectural interests.

00:25:31.596 --> 00:25:37.969
But while Perugino clearly played a very strong role in Raphael’s early artistic development

00:25:37.969 --> 00:25:41.106
a detailed examination of his early works

00:25:41.106 --> 00:25:44.409
reveals a number of other artistic influences:

00:25:45.143 --> 00:25:48.146
portraits by the Northern European artist Hans Memling,

00:25:48.446 --> 00:25:51.917
with their intriguing background landscapes,

00:25:51.917 --> 00:25:54.219
had created quite a stir throughout Italy for many years,

00:25:54.219 --> 00:25:56.788
and various specific aspects of them, such
as the famously stippled leaves of his

00:25:56.788 --> 00:26:00.091
such as the famously stippled leaves of his trees,

00:26:00.091 --> 00:26:03.528
can be found in several of Raphael's first paintings.

00:26:04.195 --> 00:26:08.934
And then there is the unquestionable impact of two other leading painters of the time:

00:26:08.934 --> 00:26:13.071
Pinturicchio, the brightest star in Perugino’s circle,

00:26:13.071 --> 00:26:15.240
and Luca Signorelli.

00:26:15.240 --> 00:26:18.910
Signorelli, originally from Cortona,

00:26:18.910 --> 00:26:24.082
had spent considerable time in Città di Castello until the late 1490s,

00:26:24.082 --> 00:26:29.888
whereupon he relocated to a monastery near Siena to paint a series on the life of Saint Benedict

00:26:29.888 --> 00:26:33.758
before moving on to produce what most consider his masterpiece:

00:26:33.758 --> 00:26:36.261
the frescoes in the Orvieto Cathedral

00:26:36.261 --> 00:26:39.831
that would later so strongly influence Michelangelo

00:26:39.831 --> 00:26:43.401
in his Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.

00:26:43.868 --> 00:26:46.671
They seem to have strongly influenced Raphael, too,

00:26:46.671 --> 00:26:52.110
as experts believe that he not only visited Orvieto to study Signorelli's paintings,

00:26:52.110 --> 00:26:56.448
but later sketched on the back of a drawing coming from Signorelli's workshop,

00:26:56.448 --> 00:27:01.519
illustrating the strong likelihood of direct contact between the two artists.

00:27:01.519 --> 00:27:06.725
But the most explicit proof we have of the young Raphael's intense interest in Signorelli

00:27:06.725 --> 00:27:09.427
derives from one of his earliest commissions:

00:27:09.427 --> 00:27:14.265
a two sided processional banner he made for officials in Città di Castello.

00:27:14.265 --> 00:27:16.868
In a preparatory drawing for one of them

00:27:16.868 --> 00:27:23.341
we can clearly see a figure he copied from Signorelli’s famous altarpiece, The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian,

00:27:23.341 --> 00:27:27.012
then prominently on display in a nearby church.

00:27:28.079 --> 00:27:33.451
Meanwhile, aspects of Pinturicchio’s characteristically intricate decorative detail

00:27:33.451 --> 00:27:36.955
are also emulated in several early Raphaels,

00:27:36.955 --> 00:27:39.257
and even more significantly

00:27:39.257 --> 00:27:43.695
there's concrete evidence of several artistic collaborations with Pinturicchio

00:27:43.695 --> 00:27:45.830
during Raphael's early years,

00:27:45.830 --> 00:27:50.502
most notably for the frescoes in Siena's Piccolomini Library,

00:27:50.502 --> 00:27:54.272
where Raphael supplied some of the main conceptual drawings.

00:27:54.706 --> 00:27:59.110
That such a supremely well established artist as Pinturicchio,

00:27:59.110 --> 00:28:02.180
who had been the favorite of Pope Alexander VI,

00:28:02.180 --> 00:28:05.750
and was one of the most sought-after painters in Rome,

00:28:05.750 --> 00:28:10.455
would have engaged a relatively unknown artist almost 30 years younger than him

00:28:10.455 --> 00:28:13.758
to develop principal drawings for a major commission

00:28:13.758 --> 00:28:15.894
is almost inconceivable.

00:28:15.894 --> 00:28:17.996
But clearly he did;

00:28:17.996 --> 00:28:23.768
and Pinturicchio made no secret of acknowledging Raphael's contribution in the finished work.

00:28:25.370 --> 00:28:27.772
Because even at this early stage

00:28:27.772 --> 00:28:29.874
it was apparent to everyone

00:28:29.874 --> 00:28:34.112
that Raphael of Urbino possessed something very special:

00:28:34.112 --> 00:28:38.450
an extraordinary ability to draw like nobody else,

00:28:38.450 --> 00:28:43.354
and a deep instinct for a strikingly coherent and balanced composition.

00:28:45.323 --> 00:28:50.695
Those first few years also revealed another hallmark of Raphael's entire career:

00:28:50.695 --> 00:28:53.531
his enormous capacity for work.

00:28:54.265 --> 00:28:57.368
In addition to producing four major altarpieces

00:28:57.368 --> 00:28:59.337
and many accompanying predelle,

00:28:59.337 --> 00:29:01.005
two processional banners

00:29:01.005 --> 00:29:03.842
and a number of smaller devotional works,

00:29:03.842 --> 00:29:09.981
he also created several portraits and a number of mythological and literary scenes.

00:29:09.981 --> 00:29:12.751
such as his painting of The Three Graces,

00:29:12.751 --> 00:29:17.522
surely influenced by having seen an ancient group of statues firsthand

00:29:17.522 --> 00:29:21.159
while working on the frescoes for Siena's Piccolomini Library,

00:29:21.159 --> 00:29:23.728
where they can still be found today.

00:29:23.728 --> 00:29:26.731
But despite his outstanding productivity -

00:29:26.731 --> 00:29:30.568
and these are just the works that have come down to us 500 years later

00:29:30.568 --> 00:29:33.505
that we can be fairly certain he actually created -

00:29:33.505 --> 00:29:40.011
at this point, there was little to suggest the monumental achievements of what was to come.

00:29:40.011 --> 00:29:42.514
By the fall of 1504,

00:29:42.514 --> 00:29:48.019
Rafael was a 21 year old, energetic, highly socially adept artist

00:29:48.520 --> 00:29:50.789
equipped with prodigious drawing skills

00:29:50.789 --> 00:29:53.792
and a passionate determination to learn from those around him.

00:29:54.425 --> 00:29:58.363
And then he went to Florence to learn considerably more.

00:30:00.532 --> 00:30:05.003
Art historians often divide Raphael’s career into three periods:

00:30:05.003 --> 00:30:06.137
Umbria

00:30:06.137 --> 00:30:07.505
Florence

00:30:07.505 --> 00:30:08.606
and Rome;

00:30:08.606 --> 00:30:13.044
despite the fact that there's no evidence that he was actually living in Florence

00:30:13.044 --> 00:30:15.280
for any prolonged period of time.

00:30:15.280 --> 00:30:20.118
A 1505 contract he signed for an altarpiece in Monteluce, near Perugia -

00:30:20.118 --> 00:30:24.889
that, as it happened, he never completed and was finished five years after his death

00:30:24.889 --> 00:30:26.658
by two of his former students -

00:30:26.658 --> 00:30:30.094
listed a range of cities for a possible consultation:

00:30:30.094 --> 00:30:34.566
Perugia, Assisi, Gubbio, Urbino,

00:30:34.566 --> 00:30:39.170
Siena, Florence, Rome and Venice,

00:30:39.170 --> 00:30:42.040
clearly demonstrating that, in 1505,

00:30:42.040 --> 00:30:44.776
Raphael wasn't fully settled anywhere;

00:30:44.776 --> 00:30:49.647
and he's on record as being in several
different cities over the next few years.

00:30:49.881 --> 00:30:52.016
But however much he was then traveling,

00:30:52.016 --> 00:30:55.753
it's clear that he spent a considerable amount of time in Florence;

00:30:55.753 --> 00:31:03.294
and it’s even clearer that those Florentine experiences had a simply enormous impact on his art.

00:31:07.398 --> 00:31:10.368
His first visit in the fall of 1504

00:31:10.368 --> 00:31:15.773
was particularly well-timed, as that was when Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci

00:31:15.773 --> 00:31:18.743
were engaged in a sort of artistic head-to-head,

00:31:18.743 --> 00:31:21.980
painting different scenes of Florentine military victories

00:31:21.980 --> 00:31:26.484
on opposite walls of the Grand Council Chamber of the Palazzo della Signoria,

00:31:26.484 --> 00:31:30.121
the old town hall that is today's Palazzo Vecchio.

00:31:30.121 --> 00:31:32.423
While neither painting survives -

00:31:32.423 --> 00:31:37.695
Leonardo’s was ruined by a disastrous experimentation with a new type of oil paint,

00:31:37.695 --> 00:31:40.231
while Michelangelo's was never finished -

00:31:40.231 --> 00:31:43.167
from various copies and preparatory sketches,

00:31:43.167 --> 00:31:45.236
we can get a good sense of the excitement

00:31:45.236 --> 00:31:49.207
that this “Battle of the Artistic Titans” generated throughout Florence.

00:31:50.842 --> 00:31:53.144
For Raphael, meanwhile,

00:31:53.144 --> 00:31:56.014
the opportunity to rub shoulders with Leonardo

00:31:56.014 --> 00:31:59.584
was nothing short of a transformative experience.

00:32:00.084 --> 00:32:02.120
Then in his early 50s,

00:32:02.120 --> 00:32:04.789
Leonardo was at the height of his powers,

00:32:04.789 --> 00:32:08.960
and his pioneering use of light and shading

00:32:08.960 --> 00:32:10.528
and deeply innovative composition arrangements
were eagerly gobbled up by Raphael,

00:32:10.528 --> 00:32:12.864
were eagerly gobbled up by Raphael,

00:32:12.864 --> 00:32:17.335
whose copies of Leonardo's
now lost painting of Leda and the Swan,

00:32:17.335 --> 00:32:20.672
a preparatory sketch for the Battle of Anghiari,

00:32:20.672 --> 00:32:23.174
and an early version of the Mona Lisa,

00:32:23.174 --> 00:32:27.879
demonstrate that he must have had direct access to the master’s studio at the time.

00:32:29.948 --> 00:32:32.116
Leonardo's famous pyramidal structure

00:32:32.116 --> 00:32:34.986
for both devotional scenes and personal portraits

00:32:34.986 --> 00:32:38.323
was enthusiastically embraced by the young Raphael,

00:32:38.756 --> 00:32:41.192
while many specific additional similarities

00:32:41.192 --> 00:32:44.462
can be seen in a number of Raphael's works from this time:

00:32:44.462 --> 00:32:49.200
like how the Christ Child plays with flowers in the so-called Madonna of the Pinks,

00:32:49.200 --> 00:32:52.670
a clear reference to Leonardo's Benois Madonna,

00:32:52.670 --> 00:32:57.709
or the Christ Child's interaction with a lamb in an  intimate scene with Mary and Joseph,

00:32:57.709 --> 00:33:02.280
strongly related to Leonardo's painting of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne,

00:33:02.280 --> 00:33:04.849
for which a now lost preliminary cartoon

00:33:04.849 --> 00:33:07.852
had then been the talk of all of Florence.

00:33:07.852 --> 00:33:14.292
Even Raphael's drawing technique suddenly begins to adopt a particularly Leonardesque type of dynamism

00:33:14.292 --> 00:33:17.528
to suitably convey the vital movement of his figures.

00:33:18.429 --> 00:33:20.198
But once again,

00:33:20.198 --> 00:33:23.768
however, significant Leonardo's impact obviously was,

00:33:23.768 --> 00:33:29.207
it was hardly the only one Raphael picked up on during his Florentine experiences,

00:33:29.207 --> 00:33:32.510
some of which can only be seen in his later works,

00:33:32.510 --> 00:33:36.581
like the influence of Masaccio’s Holy Trinity on the School of Athens,

00:33:36.581 --> 00:33:42.653
or the stylistic similarities of the Brancacci Chapel frescoes of Masaccio and Filippino Lippi

00:33:42.653 --> 00:33:45.023
with the Sistine tapestries.

00:33:45.023 --> 00:33:50.328
The drawing shown earlier that was composed on the back of one coming from Signorelli’s workshop

00:33:50.328 --> 00:33:55.366
features three figures surrounding one clearly copied from Donatello's Saint George,

00:33:55.366 --> 00:33:59.270
then in an external niche of the Orsanmichele Church.

00:33:59.270 --> 00:34:02.206
And there are striking similarities between the poses

00:34:02.206 --> 00:34:06.210
and movements of the Christ Child in his many Madonnas from those years,

00:34:06.210 --> 00:34:11.082
and the popular sculptures of Luca della Robbia on display throughout the city.

00:34:11.916 --> 00:34:13.251
More personally,

00:34:13.251 --> 00:34:16.621
Raphael developed a close friendship with Fra Barolomeo

00:34:16.621 --> 00:34:19.023
soon after arriving in Florence,

00:34:19.023 --> 00:34:21.759
which also left a mark on his painting style,

00:34:21.759 --> 00:34:26.164
as reflections of Bartolomeo’s monumentally solid, fully-draped figures

00:34:26.164 --> 00:34:28.800
began to emerge in his own works,

00:34:28.800 --> 00:34:34.105
such as the upper level of the Holy Trinity fresco in the San Severo Chapel in Perugia -

00:34:34.105 --> 00:34:37.375
the lower part was finished years later by Perugino -

00:34:37.375 --> 00:34:39.610
and the Colonna Altarpiece,

00:34:39.610 --> 00:34:43.381
a work begun before his first formative trip to Florence,

00:34:43.381 --> 00:34:49.287
and whose captivating images of Saints Peter and Paul contrast so strongly with the others

00:34:49.287 --> 00:34:55.393
and clearly illustrate the influence of both Leonardo and Fra Bartolomeo.

00:34:59.764 --> 00:35:01.499
And then there was Michelangelo.

00:35:01.499 --> 00:35:03.634
Eight years older than Raphael,

00:35:03.634 --> 00:35:08.439
with already a formidable reputation as one of Italy's great creative forces,

00:35:08.439 --> 00:35:13.878
we can only imagine the impact his powerful male nudes might have had on the young Raphael,

00:35:13.878 --> 00:35:16.347
who made several sketches of fighting warriors

00:35:16.347 --> 00:35:18.983
associated with both the Battle of Cascina

00:35:18.983 --> 00:35:23.321
and Antonio Pollaiuolo’s famous engraving created decades earlier,

00:35:23.321 --> 00:35:28.259
together with various drawings inspired by the monumental statue of David,

00:35:28.259 --> 00:35:32.530
then prominently displayed in Florence's Piazza della Signoria.

00:35:33.931 --> 00:35:37.435
Michelangelo clearly captivated Raphael,

00:35:37.435 --> 00:35:42.740
who also made copies of two more of his sculptures that were to remain unfinished:

00:35:42.740 --> 00:35:44.408
the Saint Matthew

00:35:44.408 --> 00:35:46.644
and the Taddei Tondo,

00:35:46.644 --> 00:35:52.950
key aspects of which Raphael would later smoothly incorporate into his Bridgewater Madonna.

00:35:54.118 --> 00:35:56.354
But it's important to remember that,

00:35:56.354 --> 00:35:58.089
as he rapidly developed,

00:35:58.089 --> 00:36:02.660
Raphael never simply exchanged new influences for old,

00:36:02.660 --> 00:36:06.230
and never simply copied the prevailing fashions,

00:36:06.230 --> 00:36:10.768
but instead continued to build and refine his own unique style

00:36:10.768 --> 00:36:15.273
by continually striving to incorporate the best ideas of those around him,

00:36:15.273 --> 00:36:19.610
as can be seen by one of his latest devotional works of this period,

00:36:19.610 --> 00:36:23.915
the so-called Large Cowper Madonna,

00:36:23.915 --> 00:36:27.919
whose Virgin Mary bearus an uncanny resemblance to the one in Perugino’s Certosa Altarpiece,

00:36:27.919 --> 00:36:30.388
or the one on his Madonna del Sacco,

00:36:30.388 --> 00:36:32.990
or the one in one of his many other Madonnas,

00:36:32.990 --> 00:36:35.993
all painted at roughly the turn of the 16th century,

00:36:35.993 --> 00:36:39.263
demonstrating that the standard account that by 1508

00:36:39.263 --> 00:36:43.668
Raphael had simply outgrown the now unfashionable Perugino

00:36:43.668 --> 00:36:46.103
hardly tells the full story.

00:36:46.103 --> 00:36:49.740
Instead, his goal was always the same:

00:36:49.740 --> 00:36:54.879
the single-minded pursuit of artistic perfection by whatever means necessary.

00:36:54.879 --> 00:36:56.447
So yes,

00:36:56.447 --> 00:37:02.920
if you look closely at the woman twisting around to catch the fainting Mary in his Borghese Entombment altarpiece,

00:37:02.920 --> 00:37:09.060
you can certainly see the influence of the turning Virgin Mary of Michelangelo's famous Doni Tondo.

00:37:09.060 --> 00:37:10.528
And yes,

00:37:10.528 --> 00:37:14.465
the leitmotif of transporting a dead body with an arm hanging down

00:37:14.465 --> 00:37:20.771
was a common scene on ancient sarcophagi that Renaissance artists had been carefully studying for decades.

00:37:20.771 --> 00:37:25.643
But that hardly diminishes from the breathtaking originality of this masterpiece,

00:37:25.643 --> 00:37:31.415
which seamlessly combines the dynamic new iconography of the dead Christ being taken for burial

00:37:31.415 --> 00:37:37.388
with a mother's memorialization of her young son killed in an internal feud of the Baglioni clan,

00:37:37.388 --> 00:37:39.190
Perugia’s ruling family.

00:37:39.857 --> 00:37:44.862
Not to mention his new-found desire to invoke vividly contrasting colors,

00:37:44.862 --> 00:37:48.866
a feature also present in his stunning painting of Saint Catherine,

00:37:48.866 --> 00:37:51.869
produced at roughly the same time.

00:37:51.869 --> 00:37:56.307
It's this constant, restless searching for the perfect balance,

00:37:56.307 --> 00:38:03.247
the most emotionally evocative and intellectually meaningful creation to best fit the particular circumstances,

00:38:03.247 --> 00:38:06.450
that most appropriately characterizes Raphael

00:38:06.450 --> 00:38:09.620
throughout all of his prodigious output of paintings and sketches.

00:38:10.388 --> 00:38:14.425
Where, exactly, all the ideas came from was secondary.

00:38:15.126 --> 00:38:19.430
What mattered was how to successfully fit them all together.

00:38:21.198 --> 00:38:23.434
But no matter where he went,

00:38:23.434 --> 00:38:26.103
he never outgrew his Urbino roots.

00:38:26.671 --> 00:38:29.974
He would forever be “Raphael Urbinas”,

00:38:29.974 --> 00:38:32.410
Raphael from Urbino.

00:38:32.410 --> 00:38:38.783
And if you look closely, you can sometimes see famous Urbino landmarks smuggled into his paintings,

00:38:38.783 --> 00:38:42.420
perhaps subtle signs of patronage from the Urbino court

00:38:42.420 --> 00:38:48.092
with which he was in regular contact throughout those early years of intense artistic development.

00:38:50.628 --> 00:38:53.397
And then, in 1508,

00:38:53.397 --> 00:38:57.068
as he was working on his first major Florentine commission,

00:38:57.068 --> 00:39:01.872
a chapel altarpiece in the Brunelleschi-designed Santo Spirito Basilica,

00:39:01.872 --> 00:39:07.878
Pope Julius II invited him to participate in decorating his new Vatican apartments

00:39:07.878 --> 00:39:10.715
as one of a select number of top artists,

00:39:10.715 --> 00:39:12.383
including Perugino,

00:39:12.383 --> 00:39:19.757
who'd recently finished a series of frescoes begun by Filippino Lippi  that lay unfinished after his death in 1504,

00:39:19.757 --> 00:39:21.692
Bartolomeo Suardi,

00:39:21.692 --> 00:39:27.331
called Bramantino because of his training by Julius’ chief architect Donato Bramante,

00:39:27.331 --> 00:39:29.100
and Giovanni Bazzi,

00:39:29.100 --> 00:39:31.369
commonly known as “Il Sodoma”,
who’d continued the fresco series

00:39:31.369 --> 00:39:36.140
who’d continued the fresco series of Saint Benedict in Monte Oliveto Maggiore

00:39:36.140 --> 00:39:39.610
that had been so impressive, begun by Luca Signorelli.

00:39:39.610 --> 00:39:44.515
As soon as he got word of the Pope's official invitation,

00:39:44.515 --> 00:39:47.451
Raphael put down his brushes and rushed to Rome,

00:39:47.451 --> 00:39:49.019
leaving the work,

00:39:49.019 --> 00:39:53.657
now known as the Madonna del Baldacchino, forever unfinished.

00:39:53.657 --> 00:39:57.495
For this was the big chance he'd been waiting for.

00:40:06.504 --> 00:40:11.409
We've seen how Julius II was an extremely forceful and dynamic pope,

00:40:11.409 --> 00:40:13.511
particularly in the military arena

00:40:13.511 --> 00:40:18.048
where he played such a conspicuously active role in the power politics of the day.

00:40:18.048 --> 00:40:21.886
But it would be a grave mistake to conclude that he was merely a warrior

00:40:21.886 --> 00:40:25.356
with no broader intellectual or cultural interests.

00:40:25.356 --> 00:40:27.525
Everything Julius did,

00:40:27.525 --> 00:40:32.096
from his bold decision to tear down and rebuild Saint Peter's Basilica,

00:40:32.096 --> 00:40:35.966
to persuading Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling,

00:40:35.966 --> 00:40:39.804
to his constant political scheming and military adventures,

00:40:39.804 --> 00:40:43.607
was linked through one constant overriding fixation:

00:40:44.175 --> 00:40:47.678
to dramatically elevate the power and influence of the church;

00:40:47.678 --> 00:40:50.514
which meant, among other things,

00:40:50.514 --> 00:40:56.020
vigorously transforming its Roman base from its current position of faded glory

00:40:56.020 --> 00:41:00.591
into an overwhelmingly beautiful intellectual and spiritual epicenter,

00:41:00.591 --> 00:41:04.128
a combined New Athens and New Jerusalem.

00:41:04.628 --> 00:41:08.699
The famously quick-tempered Julius was certainly no quiet scholar

00:41:08.699 --> 00:41:10.901
like some of his humanist predecessors,

00:41:10.901 --> 00:41:14.104
such as Nicholas V or Pius II.

00:41:14.104 --> 00:41:17.208
But that hardly meant that he didn't care about ideas,

00:41:17.208 --> 00:41:20.444
and it hardly meant that he didn't care about books.

00:41:20.444 --> 00:41:21.612
In particular,

00:41:21.612 --> 00:41:28.152
he was known to have played a key role in his uncle, Pope Sixtus IV’s, development of the Vatican Library.

00:41:28.152 --> 00:41:32.590
And his own papal court was filled with many highly educated and charismatic advisors,

00:41:32.590 --> 00:41:37.228
such as the personable Tommaso Inghirami,

00:41:37.528 --> 00:41:41.332
celebrated poet, orator, chief Vatican librarian,

00:41:41.332 --> 00:41:42.967
and nicknamed Phaedra,

00:41:42.967 --> 00:41:49.273
in reference to his highly memorable youthful performance as the central character of Seneca's famous play;

00:41:49.273 --> 00:41:51.642
and Egidio da Viterbo,

00:41:51.642 --> 00:41:53.744
head of the Augustinian Order

00:41:53.744 --> 00:41:57.615
and a passionate adherent to the Renaissance neo-Platonist philosophy

00:41:57.615 --> 00:42:01.585
that maintained that a rigorous study of ancient Greek and Roman wisdom

00:42:01.585 --> 00:42:06.857
provided a vital avenue towards a deeper understanding of true Christian faith.

00:42:07.191 --> 00:42:10.594
And all of this is particularly relevant to our story,

00:42:10.594 --> 00:42:13.430
because the first room of Julius's new apartments

00:42:13.430 --> 00:42:17.234
that Raphael found himself painting in upon his arrival in Rome

00:42:17.234 --> 00:42:20.337
was where all of these ideas, and more,

00:42:20.337 --> 00:42:23.440
would be on full and glorious display.

00:42:25.910 --> 00:42:28.812
This Stanza della Segnatura,

00:42:28.812 --> 00:42:30.548
as it has long been called,

00:42:30.548 --> 00:42:33.117
actually means “a signing room”,

00:42:33.117 --> 00:42:37.388
the room where papal bulls and other documents were formally authorized.

00:42:37.388 --> 00:42:42.126
But scholars have long established that it took on that function only decades later.

00:42:42.126 --> 00:42:46.297
Its original purpose was for Julius’ private library.

00:42:46.297 --> 00:42:49.667
Not so much a library the way we would imagine it today -

00:42:49.667 --> 00:42:55.139
a place for quiet contemplation and uninterrupted reading, with books piled up to the ceiling -

00:42:55.139 --> 00:43:00.578
but instead a room for both personal reflection and active discussion,

00:43:00.578 --> 00:43:05.883
with a few hundred books in shelving cabinets that stopped just below the paintings.

00:43:07.418 --> 00:43:13.257
The Stanza della Segnatura is one of four rooms of Julius’ new apartment complex,

00:43:13.257 --> 00:43:18.329
directly above those of his hated Borgia predecessor, Alexander VI,

00:43:18.329 --> 00:43:24.768
and it's not entirely clear how Raphael got the invitation to participate in their decoration in the first place.

00:43:24.768 --> 00:43:29.139
Some say it was through Julius’ chief architect Bramante,

00:43:29.139 --> 00:43:33.611
who was also from Urbino and possibly a distant relative of Raphael.

00:43:33.611 --> 00:43:38.515
Others think it might have been suggested by high-placed members of the court of Urbino.

00:43:38.515 --> 00:43:42.987
Or perhaps it was simply an idea of the well-traveled Julius himself.

00:43:42.987 --> 00:43:45.489
The only thing we can be quite confident of

00:43:45.489 --> 00:43:51.629
is that Raphael began working in the Stanza della Segnatura in the second half of 1508;

00:43:51.629 --> 00:43:54.898
and then, at sometime later,

00:43:54.898 --> 00:43:56.367
based on what he produced,

00:43:56.367 --> 00:44:02.406
Julius decided to award him the commission for all the paintings throughout all four rooms -

00:44:02.406 --> 00:44:06.710
simply a breathtaking accomplishment for a young artist who,

00:44:06.710 --> 00:44:08.579
so far as we can tell,

00:44:08.579 --> 00:44:11.649
had only completed half a fresco before coming to Rome.

00:44:21.091 --> 00:44:27.398
The best way to begin to appreciate the stunningly unified visual display of the Stanza della Segnatura

00:44:27.398 --> 00:44:29.800
is to start with its ceiling.

00:44:29.800 --> 00:44:35.939
At the very apex, we find a series of playful angels holding up Julius' papal coat of arms

00:44:35.939 --> 00:44:40.911
that combines the Della Rovere oak tree with the papal tiara.

00:44:40.911 --> 00:44:42.413
Moving outwards,

00:44:42.413 --> 00:44:47.017
we’re then presented with the four fundamental realms of worthy human inquiry,

00:44:47.017 --> 00:44:53.323
each personified by a circular, faux-mosaic painting of a beautiful woman perched on clouds:

00:44:53.624 --> 00:44:55.459
theology,

00:44:55.459 --> 00:44:57.161
philosophy,

00:44:57.161 --> 00:44:58.729
poetry

00:44:58.729 --> 00:45:00.330
and justice.

00:45:01.098 --> 00:45:04.568
And underneath each of those female representations

00:45:04.568 --> 00:45:08.739
lies a detailed fresco of the corresponding theme on the wall below.

00:45:08.739 --> 00:45:14.912
Under theology, there's the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament, or Disputa,

00:45:14.912 --> 00:45:18.482
under poetry, the Parnassus;

00:45:19.183 --> 00:45:22.720
under philosophy is The School of Athens;

00:45:23.253 --> 00:45:29.293
while under justice, we find a composite scene of two specific instances of jurisprudence

00:45:29.293 --> 00:45:32.596
below three personifications of Cardinal Virtues.

00:45:33.464 --> 00:45:37.568
But before we explore each of these four main frescoes in more detail,

00:45:38.135 --> 00:45:40.771
we need to return to the ceiling to point out that,

00:45:40.771 --> 00:45:45.743
between every two female idealization of these four fundamental categories

00:45:45.743 --> 00:45:48.512
lies a rectangular, faux-mosaic painting

00:45:48.512 --> 00:45:52.249
representing a theme or concept that overlaps with both.

00:45:53.183 --> 00:45:55.586
Between theology and justice

00:45:55.586 --> 00:45:58.255
is a painting of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden

00:45:58.255 --> 00:46:01.425
just before they disobey God's instructions.

00:46:01.859 --> 00:46:03.927
Between philosophy and justice

00:46:03.927 --> 00:46:06.230
we find The Judgement of Solomon.

00:46:06.730 --> 00:46:08.799
Between theology and poetry

00:46:08.799 --> 00:46:13.504
there's a scene from the mythological competition between Apollo and Marsyas,

00:46:13.504 --> 00:46:17.775
which intriguingly extends the notion of theology to the pagan realm.

00:46:17.775 --> 00:46:22.546
While the painting bridging poetry and philosophy is a depiction of Urania,

00:46:22.546 --> 00:46:24.314
the muse of astronomy,

00:46:24.314 --> 00:46:28.318
whose final version was modified from the more general original plan

00:46:28.318 --> 00:46:34.625
to subtly highlight a particular configuration that could only be seen in Rome at the end of October,

00:46:34.625 --> 00:46:38.295
which is when Julius’ 1503 Papal Coronation occurred.

00:46:39.563 --> 00:46:41.265
The core message,

00:46:41.265 --> 00:46:44.701
repeatedly reinforced throughout all the works of the room,

00:46:44.701 --> 00:46:47.905
is that these four principal categories -

00:46:47.905 --> 00:46:52.476
theology, poetry, justice and philosophy -

00:46:52.476 --> 00:46:56.246
that span the full range of meritorious intellectual inquiries

00:46:56.246 --> 00:47:00.617
and so represent the ideal catalog system for the Pope's private library,

00:47:00.617 --> 00:47:04.488
are all overlapping parts of one conceptual whole,

00:47:04.488 --> 00:47:09.126
since - again, in keeping with the Renaissance neo-Platonist tradition -

00:47:09.126 --> 00:47:15.866
the attainment of all worthy knowledge leads directly to a deeper understanding and appreciation of God.

00:47:19.570 --> 00:47:21.672
While there’s been a longstanding debate

00:47:21.672 --> 00:47:25.976
about which of Raphael's major frescoes in the room was finished first,

00:47:25.976 --> 00:47:30.247
most now believe that he began, at least, with the Disputa -

00:47:30.247 --> 00:47:34.618
it's the one for which the largest number of preparatory sketches survive -

00:47:34.618 --> 00:47:37.354
and while this might be a historical accident,

00:47:37.354 --> 00:47:39.723
it’s more likely a straightforward reflection

00:47:39.723 --> 00:47:43.727
of the daunting complexity of such a hugely ambitious masterpiece

00:47:43.727 --> 00:47:49.466
for a 25-year-old artist without any comparable experience in such compositions.

00:47:53.837 --> 00:47:58.675
We’re presented with a dazzling panorama of several simultaneous levels.

00:47:59.109 --> 00:48:03.780
At the very top, we glimpse the lower portion of the Golden Vault of Heaven,

00:48:03.780 --> 00:48:05.916
where God the Father reigns,

00:48:05.916 --> 00:48:10.621
surrounded by a glittering array of angels and streams of golden light.

00:48:10.787 --> 00:48:17.861
Directly below that, we find a resurrected Jesus displaying his wounds in a smaller circular golden throne,

00:48:17.861 --> 00:48:20.497
flanked by Mary and Saint John the Baptist,

00:48:20.497 --> 00:48:26.069
with a wide array of figures from both the Old and New Testaments behind and slightly below him.

00:48:26.203 --> 00:48:31.108
Immediately below Jesus, and placed in a still smaller golden disk,

00:48:31.108 --> 00:48:35.212
is the dove of the Holy Spirit, surrounded by four angels,

00:48:35.212 --> 00:48:38.882
each one holding up one of the four books of the Gospels.

00:48:39.816 --> 00:48:45.122
Golden light streams directly from the dove of the Holy Spirit to the last of our golden disks,

00:48:45.122 --> 00:48:48.325
the ring of the host, representing the Body of Christ,

00:48:48.325 --> 00:48:51.128
prominently mounted on a rectangular altar

00:48:51.128 --> 00:48:54.231
around which the four Fathers of the early Church -

00:48:54.231 --> 00:48:55.966
Saint Gregory the Great,

00:48:55.966 --> 00:48:57.401
Saint Jerome,

00:48:57.401 --> 00:48:59.002
Saint Ambrose

00:48:59.002 --> 00:49:00.637
and Saint Augustine -

00:49:00.637 --> 00:49:02.072
sit on thrones,

00:49:02.072 --> 00:49:04.942
themselves surrounded by numerous other figures,

00:49:04.942 --> 00:49:07.911
including Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Bonaventure,

00:49:07.911 --> 00:49:11.515
who extend to both sides of the lower register of the painting.

00:49:12.449 --> 00:49:15.018
The common title that has come down to us,

00:49:15.018 --> 00:49:18.755
“The Disputation of the Holy Sacrament” or “Disputa”

00:49:18.755 --> 00:49:20.557
is somewhat misleading,

00:49:20.557 --> 00:49:25.729
as the work is primarily concerned with illustrating our human interaction with the divine

00:49:25.729 --> 00:49:29.199
rather than any argument or disputation per se.

00:49:30.000 --> 00:49:34.638
A dominant theme throughout, intriguingly, is what can't be seen.

00:49:34.972 --> 00:49:37.975
The center of attention on the earthly level,

00:49:37.975 --> 00:49:41.545
aptly represented as the painting's vanishing point,

00:49:41.545 --> 00:49:43.647
is the consecrated host,

00:49:43.647 --> 00:49:47.818
our mode of engaging with Christ through the miracle of communion,

00:49:47.818 --> 00:49:51.755
direct visual perception of him being clearly impossible.

00:49:52.956 --> 00:49:55.625
Even the painting itself explicitly highlights

00:49:55.625 --> 00:49:59.463
the impossibility of providing a full depiction of the unknowable,

00:49:59.463 --> 00:50:03.300
with the upper vault of heaven, where God the Father stands,

00:50:03.300 --> 00:50:05.569
only roughly alluded to us;

00:50:05.569 --> 00:50:10.007
the impenetrable source of its streaming golden, cherub-laden rays

00:50:10.007 --> 00:50:13.410
beyond our direct perception or understanding.

00:50:14.578 --> 00:50:17.581
One of the most striking aspects of this work

00:50:17.581 --> 00:50:23.520
is how Raphael manages to so smoothly combine the unambiguous with the suggestive,

00:50:23.520 --> 00:50:27.391
the stridently symbolic, with the whispery nuanced,

00:50:27.391 --> 00:50:33.697
to produce an image that can somehow feel both dogmatically orthodox and deeply personal.

00:50:33.697 --> 00:50:40.637
So it is that we can confidently declare that the cascading series of progressively smaller golden disks

00:50:40.637 --> 00:50:44.975
is an explicit visual reference of the link between the human and the divine,

00:50:44.975 --> 00:50:49.913
fully resonant with the dominant neo-Platonist  philosophy of Julius's court,

00:50:49.913 --> 00:50:57.554
and that the church under construction n the background

00:50:57.554 --> 00:51:02.192
both literally - with the recently begun building of the new Saint Peter’s Basilica,

00:51:02.192 --> 00:51:03.527
and figuratively.

00:51:04.761 --> 00:51:09.766
Similarly, we can be certain that the many explicit references to Pope Julius

00:51:09.766 --> 00:51:12.869
from his likeness in the figure of Saint Gregory,

00:51:12.869 --> 00:51:15.906
to his name inscribed twice on the altar,

00:51:15.906 --> 00:51:19.543
to the prominent portrayal of his uncle, Pope Sixtus IV,

00:51:19.543 --> 00:51:23.814
who wrote a treatise on Holy Communion that he's likely holding in his hand,

00:51:23.814 --> 00:51:27.317
and even the inclusion of his favorite poet, Dante -

00:51:27.317 --> 00:51:30.353
conveniently placed on the right hand side of the painting

00:51:30.353 --> 00:51:34.024
and thus closer to the Parnassus, where he also makes an appearance,

00:51:34.024 --> 00:51:36.159
is hardly an accident.

00:51:37.194 --> 00:51:41.098
But who’s that guy with the multicolored cap leaning over the balustrade

00:51:41.098 --> 00:51:45.068
that was cleverly inserted to diminish the impact of the doorframe below?

00:51:45.068 --> 00:51:49.072
And then, on the other symmetrically-designed side,

00:51:49.072 --> 00:51:53.143
what's in that book held by the figure who looks suspiciously like Bramante,

00:51:53.143 --> 00:51:56.780
that's causing so much interest in those two fellows behind him?

00:51:57.547 --> 00:52:01.118
It's fairly clear that the saintly figure pointing to the altar

00:52:01.118 --> 00:52:04.888
is telling the Bramante lookalike that he should seek the answer there,

00:52:04.888 --> 00:52:06.690
rather than in his book.

00:52:06.690 --> 00:52:08.792
But who is that, anyway?

00:52:08.792 --> 00:52:14.431
Some say the miraculously talented humanist writer Pico della Mirandola;

00:52:14.431 --> 00:52:17.467
others, “an angel without wings”.

00:52:17.467 --> 00:52:20.904
But whoever he, or perhaps she, is,

00:52:20.904 --> 00:52:24.508
he certainly seems to have got the attention of Saint Francis

00:52:24.508 --> 00:52:26.243
or Saint Lawrence

00:52:26.243 --> 00:52:28.011
or Saint Stephen,

00:52:28.011 --> 00:52:30.280
or perhaps someone else entirely.

00:52:30.280 --> 00:52:34.351
And what’s Saint Peter saying to Adam there, that's keeping him so intrigued?

00:52:34.818 --> 00:52:37.888
And what's Abraham looking at exactly?

00:52:38.321 --> 00:52:41.958
This constant tension between the known and the unknown,

00:52:41.958 --> 00:52:44.227
the obvious and the speculative,

00:52:44.227 --> 00:52:49.299
naturally produces a vigorous sense of personal engagement in the viewer.

00:52:49.299 --> 00:52:53.503
While it's safe to say that the many beguiling subtleties in the Disputa

00:52:53.503 --> 00:52:57.374
have launched untold numbers of academic papers over the centuries,

00:52:57.374 --> 00:53:01.912
it's hardly only art historians who benefit from Raphael's unique combination

00:53:01.912 --> 00:53:06.349
of strong programmatic coherence and tantalizing ambiguity.

00:53:06.349 --> 00:53:10.253
By generating constant debate about its contents,

00:53:10.253 --> 00:53:16.993
the painting itself subtly reinforces a central theme of the importance of learned interaction in general:

00:53:16.993 --> 00:53:18.762
that by discussing,

00:53:18.762 --> 00:53:19.829
debating,

00:53:19.829 --> 00:53:22.866
and unceasingly questing for understanding,

00:53:22.866 --> 00:53:26.036
we propel ourselves, however indirectly,

00:53:26.036 --> 00:53:28.371
towards enlightenment -

00:53:28.371 --> 00:53:34.611
a conviction that profoundly resonates with all the paintings on the walls of Julius’ personal library,

00:53:34.611 --> 00:53:40.684
but nowhere more conspicuously than in the next fresco we’ll examine in this remarkable room:

00:53:40.684 --> 00:53:42.652
The School of Athens.

00:53:48.291 --> 00:53:52.963
This painting, the detailed representation of philosophy,

00:53:52.963 --> 00:53:55.966
is not only Raphael's most popular work,

00:53:55.966 --> 00:54:02.339
it’s unquestionably one of the most celebrated multi-person compositions in the entire history of art.

00:54:02.339 --> 00:54:05.475
But before we examine some of its details,

00:54:05.475 --> 00:54:09.012
it’s important to start by pointing out that the word “philosophy”

00:54:09.012 --> 00:54:13.283
meant something rather different in the early 16th century than it does today,

00:54:13.283 --> 00:54:18.188
encompassing investigations into both the human and natural worlds.

00:54:18.188 --> 00:54:23.927
This can be clearly seen by an examination of philosophy's female personification on the ceiling

00:54:23.927 --> 00:54:25.962
who wears a four-colored garment

00:54:25.962 --> 00:54:31.268
reflective of the four primordial elements of earth, air, fire, and water,

00:54:31.268 --> 00:54:36.873
and holds two books -  one on moral issues and another on the natural world -

00:54:36.873 --> 00:54:41.244
as two cherubs behind her hoist the phrase “Causarum Cognitio”,

00:54:41.244 --> 00:54:43.446
the knowledge of causes.

00:54:45.515 --> 00:54:50.420
The first thing that strikes anyone looking at The School of Athens after the Disputa,

00:54:50.420 --> 00:54:54.824
is how all of the many figures are grouped together in the lower portion of the painting;

00:54:54.824 --> 00:54:58.061
and, relatedly, how remarkably imposing

00:54:58.061 --> 00:55:00.930
the architecture and surrounding statues are.

00:55:00.930 --> 00:55:04.267
This is, of course, hardly an accident,

00:55:04.267 --> 00:55:10.140
and once again reflects the coherent, fully-integrated nature of all the works in the Stanza.

00:55:10.140 --> 00:55:13.843
While philosophy is clearly the subject of the painting,

00:55:13.843 --> 00:55:16.880
there are obvious reflections of poetry and justice

00:55:16.880 --> 00:55:21.084
in the prominent statues of Apollo and Athena or Minerva,

00:55:21.084 --> 00:55:24.487
while theological themes are particularly dominant,

00:55:24.487 --> 00:55:27.657
with several explicit references to the Trinity,

00:55:27.657 --> 00:55:31.895
such as the three-sided upper opening to the highest portion of the sky

00:55:31.895 --> 00:55:34.764
and the series of three imposing arches.

00:55:35.298 --> 00:55:40.437
Those arches not only illustrate Raphael's burgeoning architectural interests,

00:55:40.437 --> 00:55:41.938
which we'll get to later,

00:55:41.938 --> 00:55:47.344
but also subtly reinforce Julius’ determination to make Rome a new Athens

00:55:47.344 --> 00:55:51.348
by placing a dynamic assembly of legendary Greek thinkers

00:55:51.348 --> 00:55:56.820
in a building whose barrel-vault pattern bears a striking similarity to the Roman basilica,

00:55:56.820 --> 00:55:59.856
begun by Maxentius and finished by Constantine,

00:55:59.856 --> 00:56:01.991
that can be found in the nearby Forum

00:56:01.991 --> 00:56:05.362
that Raphael must have personally studied in some detail.

00:56:06.329 --> 00:56:09.866
And then, of course, there are the figures.

00:56:11.301 --> 00:56:16.272
Center stage we have the iconic tandem of Plato and Aristotle,

00:56:16.272 --> 00:56:21.578
each holding a book representative of his core beliefs and gesturing accordingly.

00:56:21.578 --> 00:56:26.516
Plato carries his Timaeus, a meditation on the nature of the universe,

00:56:26.516 --> 00:56:32.622
and points upwards, not unlike one of the central figures in the Disputa as it happens,

00:56:32.622 --> 00:56:35.759
While Aristotle is portrayed with his Ethics,

00:56:35.759 --> 00:56:41.431
holding out his hand as if to direct our attention to more terrestrial, human affairs.

00:56:41.564 --> 00:56:47.203
That both philosophers are so prominently displayed in such an obviously balanced way,

00:56:47.203 --> 00:56:51.841
with the vanishing point of this painting now placed right between the two,

00:56:51.841 --> 00:56:55.478
is surely a statement of their fundamental compatibility:

00:56:55.478 --> 00:56:58.681
that a sophisticated philosophical understanding

00:56:58.681 --> 00:57:01.785
must take both of these great thinkers into account,

00:57:01.785 --> 00:57:06.122
rather than dogmatically arguing for the precedence of one over the other

00:57:06.122 --> 00:57:09.092
as many contemporary scholars were determined to do.

00:57:10.226 --> 00:57:11.428
To the left of Plato

00:57:11.428 --> 00:57:13.630
is the snub-nosed Socrates,

00:57:13.630 --> 00:57:15.799
deep in discussion with others -

00:57:15.799 --> 00:57:19.269
commonly believed to be Alcibiades and Xenophon.

00:57:19.269 --> 00:57:22.272
In the left foreground is Pythagoras,

00:57:22.272 --> 00:57:26.209
clearly identifiable through the chalkboard a young student holds,

00:57:26.209 --> 00:57:29.012
describing the link between numbers and musical harmony.

00:57:29.612 --> 00:57:33.516
And splayed out on the steps lies the cynic Diogenes,

00:57:33.516 --> 00:57:36.386
equipped with only his customary begging bowl

00:57:36.386 --> 00:57:38.388
and fully immersed in his reading,

00:57:38.388 --> 00:57:41.591
completely indifferent to the actions of those around him.

00:57:42.325 --> 00:57:43.893
In the right foreground

00:57:43.893 --> 00:57:48.598
Euclid demonstrates some geometrical claim to an impassioned group of students;

00:57:48.598 --> 00:57:50.767
and the two figures behind him,

00:57:50.767 --> 00:57:54.170
one holding a globe and the other a celestial sphere,

00:57:54.170 --> 00:57:57.941
are generally believed to be Ptolemy and Zoroaster;

00:57:58.608 --> 00:58:01.277
while the brooding figure in the foreground -

00:58:01.277 --> 00:58:04.380
a late addition to the painting, we now know,

00:58:04.380 --> 00:58:08.084
from his notable absence on the preliminary cartoon -

00:58:08.084 --> 00:58:14.491
is commonly believed to be the notoriously cryptic and truculent pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus.

00:58:15.625 --> 00:58:19.295
That much, at least, seems fairly clear.

00:58:19.295 --> 00:58:21.865
But just as in the Disputa,

00:58:21.865 --> 00:58:28.037
layered upon all of that are many additional images of Raphael's contemporaries.

00:58:28.037 --> 00:58:31.040
Julius's chief architect Bramante,

00:58:31.040 --> 00:58:34.477
who we saw earlier leaning over the balustrade in the Disputa,

00:58:34.477 --> 00:58:39.182
once again seems to make an appearance, this time as Euclid.

00:58:39.182 --> 00:58:43.086
The blue-clad figure wearing a laurel crown and immersed in a book,

00:58:43.086 --> 00:58:45.488
who most have taken for Epicurus,

00:58:45.488 --> 00:58:48.558
looks for all the world to be the genial papal insider

00:58:48.558 --> 00:58:51.761
Tommaso, or Phaedra, Inghirami,

00:58:51.761 --> 00:58:55.932
likely a key personal adviser to Raphael throughout the project.

00:58:56.332 --> 00:58:59.969
While the Zoroaster character on the other side of the painting,

00:58:59.969 --> 00:59:05.375
is claimed by some to represent Raphael's friend and scholar Baldassare Castiglione,

00:59:05.375 --> 00:59:08.344
whom he would later make a famous portrait of,

00:59:08.344 --> 00:59:11.981
and by others to be a portrait of Egidio da Viterbo,

00:59:11.981 --> 00:59:15.685
the highly influential member of Julius's inner circle,

00:59:15.685 --> 00:59:17.453
whose strident Neoplatonism

00:59:17.453 --> 00:59:22.392
played such a strong role in the development of the room's entire program in the first place.

00:59:23.393 --> 00:59:24.561
Meanwhile,

00:59:24.561 --> 00:59:28.598
Plato bears a distinct resemblance to Leonardo da Vinci,

00:59:28.598 --> 00:59:33.937
and the figure of Heraclitus may or may not represent Michelangelo himself,

00:59:33.937 --> 00:59:38.308
but is unquestionably constructed in a way that immediately brings to mind

00:59:38.308 --> 00:59:42.712
the powerful figures that he was currently creating on the Sistine Chapel ceiling

00:59:42.712 --> 00:59:44.514
just around the corner.

00:59:44.514 --> 00:59:49.018
So it's perhaps not so much of a surprise to find Raphael himself

00:59:49.018 --> 00:59:51.054
placed at the far right of the picture,

00:59:51.054 --> 00:59:53.089
staring straight out at us,

00:59:53.089 --> 00:59:58.561
while standing next to what experts used to think was his fellow artist and collaborator Il Sodoma,

00:59:58.561 --> 01:00:00.930
but now believe is either Perugino,

01:00:00.930 --> 01:00:04.767
or his father's old pupil and Urbino court painter successor,

01:00:04.767 --> 01:00:06.803
Timoteo Viti.

01:00:06.803 --> 01:00:11.407
And then, just like in the Disputa, things get fuzzier still.

01:00:11.941 --> 01:00:15.278
Is the turbaned fellow looking over Pythagoras's shoulder

01:00:15.278 --> 01:00:17.280
meant to be Averroes?

01:00:17.280 --> 01:00:22.518
Is the charismatic figure turning towards Pythagoras the philosopher Parmenides?

01:00:22.518 --> 01:00:25.321
Well, we'll likely never know for certain.

01:00:25.321 --> 01:00:28.224
And it's worth pointing out that over the centuries

01:00:28.224 --> 01:00:30.560
opinions have shifted considerably.

01:00:30.927 --> 01:00:34.464
The fellow we're now confident is Euclid, for example,

01:00:34.464 --> 01:00:37.433
was once believed to represent Archimedes;

01:00:37.433 --> 01:00:40.803
while the fair youth staring out at us at the left hand side

01:00:40.803 --> 01:00:44.273
is now commonly regarded as Francesco della Rovere,

01:00:44.273 --> 01:00:47.343
Julius's nephew, and the new Duke of Urbino,

01:00:47.343 --> 01:00:51.714
but for a time was asserted to be the ancient Greek mathematician Hypatia.

01:00:53.750 --> 01:00:56.919
Even Vasari muddled the waters considerably

01:00:56.919 --> 01:00:59.722
when he confidently asserted that Pythagoras,

01:00:59.722 --> 01:01:04.827
one of the few figures we can actually be quite certain about from the accompanying diagram,

01:01:04.827 --> 01:01:07.130
was meant to represent Saint Matthew -

01:01:07.130 --> 01:01:10.433
presumably since he met the standard contemporary idiom

01:01:10.433 --> 01:01:13.536
off being an old, bearded fellow writing something down,

01:01:13.536 --> 01:01:17.640
despite the conspicuous lack of an accompanying inspiring angel.

01:01:18.574 --> 01:01:22.879
In short, yet again Raphael seems to have opted for a

01:01:22.879 --> 01:01:27.550
provocative mix of the clearly delineated and the downright ambiguous

01:01:27.550 --> 01:01:30.219
in order to keep us constantly guessing,

01:01:30.219 --> 01:01:32.889
discussing and conjecturing.

01:01:33.056 --> 01:01:35.692
And this very same interpretive tension

01:01:35.692 --> 01:01:40.129
continues with the Parnassus, the detailed exposition of poetry.

01:01:40.697 --> 01:01:41.998
Apollo,

01:01:41.998 --> 01:01:45.702
intriguingly playing an early 16th century type of violin

01:01:45.702 --> 01:01:48.805
and not an ancient lyre, as we might expect,

01:01:48.805 --> 01:01:53.309
fittingly sits at the center of the scene on his sacred Mount Parnassus,

01:01:53.309 --> 01:01:56.479
surrounded on both sides by the nine Greek muses

01:01:56.479 --> 01:01:59.749
and an ensemble of history's greatest poets;

01:01:59.749 --> 01:02:04.053
led by Homer, whose head notably resembles that of Laocoön

01:02:04.053 --> 01:02:08.991
from the famous statue with his sons that was unearthed in Rome only a few years earlier,

01:02:08.991 --> 01:02:11.928
and who is flanked by Vergil and Dante.

01:02:13.596 --> 01:02:15.565
Petrarch also appears,

01:02:15.565 --> 01:02:19.168
as does, it seems, his friend Boccaccio,

01:02:19.168 --> 01:02:24.640
ensuring that all three of the so-called “crowns of Italian literature” are present.

01:02:25.208 --> 01:02:27.543
But then, as usual,

01:02:27.543 --> 01:02:30.413
things get very murky indeed,

01:02:30.413 --> 01:02:33.616
with precise identification of the Parnassus figures

01:02:33.616 --> 01:02:38.621
becoming one of the most famous art history parlor games there has ever been.

01:02:38.621 --> 01:02:42.859
The Greek lyric poet Sappho is at least a sure thing,

01:02:42.859 --> 01:02:45.528
given her uniquely explicit name tag,

01:02:45.528 --> 01:02:48.731
perhaps created to avoid confusing her with a muse.

01:02:49.665 --> 01:02:51.234
Significantly,

01:02:51.234 --> 01:02:54.337
unlike the Disputa and The School of Athens,

01:02:54.337 --> 01:02:59.275
where some of Raphael's contemporaries are grafted onto other historical figures,

01:02:59.275 --> 01:03:03.813
this time they appear as genuine participants in their own right,

01:03:03.813 --> 01:03:05.481
whose identities can be determined

01:03:05.481 --> 01:03:08.818
by comparing them with other known images from the time,

01:03:08.818 --> 01:03:11.120
and whose presence in the painting

01:03:11.120 --> 01:03:15.358
emphasizes how the new Rome that Julius was so determined to create

01:03:15.358 --> 01:03:18.694
amounted to nothing less than a new golden age -

01:03:18.694 --> 01:03:23.199
a notion vigorously reinforced by the compelling pointing action

01:03:23.199 --> 01:03:25.735
of the remarkably constructed Pindar -

01:03:25.735 --> 01:03:28.538
- or is it Antonio Tebaldeo? -

01:03:28.538 --> 01:03:30.473
who leaps out of the painting

01:03:30.473 --> 01:03:37.246
to dramatically redirect our attention to the current action taking place around us in our very room,

01:03:37.246 --> 01:03:40.116
a room whose window, framed by the painting,

01:03:40.116 --> 01:03:46.923
looks out over both the distant courtyard hosting the Apollo Belvedere and Laocoön statues

01:03:46.923 --> 01:03:48.457
and Vatican Hill,

01:03:48.457 --> 01:03:50.993
the new Parnassus.

01:03:54.263 --> 01:03:56.666
And then, most intriguingly,

01:03:56.666 --> 01:04:00.036
there is the figure sandwiched between Vergil and a muse,

01:04:00.036 --> 01:04:03.306
who looks suspiciously like Raphael himself,

01:04:03.306 --> 01:04:06.242
once again staring right out at us.

01:04:06.242 --> 01:04:09.178
Coincidence? Perhaps.

01:04:09.178 --> 01:04:14.350
Or perhaps he's making a statement about the artistic overlap between poetry and painting?

01:04:14.350 --> 01:04:17.553
Or maybe he's convinced that the few sonnets that he wrote

01:04:17.553 --> 01:04:19.956
were much better than they actually were.

01:04:19.956 --> 01:04:22.124
We'll likely never know.

01:04:23.326 --> 01:04:26.696
The final main painting in this remarkable room,

01:04:26.696 --> 01:04:29.565
and one that we're certain was finished last,

01:04:29.565 --> 01:04:32.468
is the detailed representation of Justice,

01:04:32.468 --> 01:04:35.304
sometimes called jurisprudence,

01:04:35.304 --> 01:04:38.808
with its combination of three linked smaller works.

01:04:39.075 --> 01:04:43.079
Some scholars believe that the original design for this fresco

01:04:43.079 --> 01:04:46.482
was much more in keeping with the style of those on the other walls:

01:04:46.482 --> 01:04:50.720
a cascade of characters flanked around one or two central figures.

01:04:50.720 --> 01:04:52.321
And as it happens,

01:04:52.321 --> 01:04:57.293
there does exist what looks to be a detailed sketch of precisely such a scenario,

01:04:57.293 --> 01:05:00.630
depicting the opening of the Seventh Seal from the Book of Revelation,

01:05:00.630 --> 01:05:03.566
an image that combines notions of justice,

01:05:03.566 --> 01:05:06.235
albeit exclusively its divine version,

01:05:06.235 --> 01:05:09.639
with a portrait of Julius II on the lower left.

01:05:09.639 --> 01:05:12.341
But if that was  the original plan,

01:05:12.341 --> 01:05:14.877
it’s not what was eventually created.

01:05:14.877 --> 01:05:21.117
Instead, we're presented with two scenes detailing pivotal moments in the history of jurisprudence:

01:05:21.117 --> 01:05:23.085
one secular,

01:05:23.085 --> 01:05:29.625
the VI century Byzantine emperor Justinian I receiving the civil law code known as the Pandects;

01:05:29.625 --> 01:05:31.227
and one spiritual,

01:05:31.227 --> 01:05:38.501
the 13th century Pope Gregory IX, formally approving the canon law code known as the Decretals.

01:05:38.501 --> 01:05:44.740
with Justinian appropriately placed on the side of the wall nearest the more secular-oriented School of Athens,

01:05:44.740 --> 01:05:49.445
and Gregory correspondingly adjacent to the Disputa.

01:05:49.445 --> 01:05:52.915
Julius still makes a personal appearance, however,

01:05:52.915 --> 01:05:56.118
now represented in his new beard as Gregory

01:05:56.118 --> 01:05:59.188
duly flanked by three of his trusted cardinals:

01:05:59.188 --> 01:06:03.225
Giovanni de Medici, the future Pope Leo X,

01:06:03.225 --> 01:06:05.895
Alessandra Farnese,

01:06:05.895 --> 01:06:08.164
the future Pope Paul III,

01:06:08.164 --> 01:06:10.666
and Antonio del Monte,

01:06:10.666 --> 01:06:14.203
uncle of the future Pope Julius III.

01:06:15.371 --> 01:06:21.077
The wall’s lunette contains three additional female personifications:

01:06:21.077 --> 01:06:24.814
the Cardinal Virtues of Temperance, Prudence and Fortitude,

01:06:24.814 --> 01:06:30.219
presumably the necessary requirements to appropriately exercise Justice itself,

01:06:30.219 --> 01:06:33.656
the fourth Cardinal Virtue represented on the ceiling.

01:06:33.656 --> 01:06:35.958
In beautifully vivid splendor

01:06:35.958 --> 01:06:38.761
we see Temperance holding her reins,

01:06:38.761 --> 01:06:43.733
the Janus-like Prudence simultaneously glimpsing the present and the future,

01:06:43.733 --> 01:06:45.768
and a helmeted Fortitude

01:06:45.768 --> 01:06:50.139
demonstrating her strength by casually bending a sturdy oak branch,

01:06:50.139 --> 01:06:53.743
the well-recognized symbol of Julius’ family.

01:06:54.777 --> 01:06:58.514
And this final painting of the Stanza della Segnatura,

01:06:58.514 --> 01:07:01.384
we're told by the inscription underneath the window,

01:07:01.384 --> 01:07:03.519
was finished in 1511,

01:07:03.519 --> 01:07:06.956
in the eighth year of Julius's reign.

01:07:11.727 --> 01:07:13.662
And throughout it all,

01:07:13.662 --> 01:07:17.533
Raphael had been working at his usual frenetic pace.

01:07:18.034 --> 01:07:18.067
Not content to limit himself

01:07:18.067 --> 01:07:23.239
Not content to limit himself to creating one of the greatest rooms in the history of art,

01:07:23.239 --> 01:07:28.244
he vigorously capitalized on his new location at the very heart of the papal court

01:07:28.244 --> 01:07:32.014
to produce a mesmerizing array of portraits,

01:07:32.014 --> 01:07:33.349
frescoes

01:07:33.349 --> 01:07:34.950
altarpieces

01:07:34.950 --> 01:07:37.686
and a veritable cascade of Madonnas

01:07:37.686 --> 01:07:40.189
for several key members of the Curia,

01:07:40.189 --> 01:07:44.593
including, most notably, Julius himself,

01:07:44.593 --> 01:07:48.097
with whom he was clearly on exceptionally good terms.

01:07:48.831 --> 01:07:53.135
As he was with Julius’ trusted banker and adopted son,

01:07:53.135 --> 01:07:56.105
the immensely wealthy Agostino Chigi,

01:07:56.105 --> 01:08:03.212
who commissioned Raphael to create his private chapel in Rome’s Santa Maria della Pace church.

01:08:03.212 --> 01:08:07.983
The original plan seems to have been an innovative multi-media design

01:08:07.983 --> 01:08:11.954
consisting of two frescoes above an oil-on-panel altarpiece

01:08:11.954 --> 01:08:15.491
with two round bronze sculptures on either side.

01:08:15.491 --> 01:08:18.160
The altarpiece was never completed,

01:08:18.160 --> 01:08:21.931
but scholars believe they've identified the corresponding bronzes,

01:08:21.931 --> 01:08:23.899
now in a Milanese abbey,

01:08:23.899 --> 01:08:28.003
as well as preliminary sketches for the missing altarpiece.

01:08:28.003 --> 01:08:31.774
Both frescoes, however, survive intact:

01:08:31.774 --> 01:08:35.578
a top layer of four Old Testament prophets

01:08:35.578 --> 01:08:39.882
above one of four magnificent Sibyls attended by angels,

01:08:39.882 --> 01:08:43.419
prominently displayed beneath Chigi’s new coat of arms

01:08:43.419 --> 01:08:48.457
that highlight his formal adoption by Julius's della Rovere family.

01:08:48.457 --> 01:08:53.529
Chigi, meanwhile, had returned from his 1511 papal mission to Venice

01:08:53.529 --> 01:08:58.400
with two people in his retinue who will both play a significant role in our story:

01:08:58.400 --> 01:09:00.970
his mistress, Francesca Ordeaschi,

01:09:00.970 --> 01:09:04.773
whom he would eventually marry in a spectacular, tailor-made setting,

01:09:04.773 --> 01:09:07.643
and the painter Sebastiano Luciani,

01:09:07.643 --> 01:09:10.546
later known as Sebastiano del Piombo,

01:09:10.546 --> 01:09:14.783
a student of the great Georgione, who, together with Titian,

01:09:14.783 --> 01:09:16.652
another Giorgione protegé,

01:09:16.652 --> 01:09:20.289
was one of Venice's most exciting young artists.

01:09:20.289 --> 01:09:25.594
Chigi had recently constructed a sumptuous new villa between the Tiber and the new street

01:09:25.594 --> 01:09:27.730
via della Lungara,

01:09:27.730 --> 01:09:32.668
the Julius had built as part of his many Roman urban planning projects.

01:09:32.668 --> 01:09:35.437
And Raphael and Sebastiano worked together

01:09:35.437 --> 01:09:38.040
on one of its early decorative schemes,

01:09:38.040 --> 01:09:42.444
painting a section of the wall across from one of the two open-air logge,

01:09:42.444 --> 01:09:44.680
the one facing the river.

01:09:44.680 --> 01:09:47.249
The loggia has long been covered over,

01:09:47.249 --> 01:09:49.885
and the villa is now called the Villa Farnesina

01:09:49.885 --> 01:09:53.889
after being bought by the Farnese family in 1579,

01:09:53.889 --> 01:09:56.992
but Raphael and Sebastiano paintings remain:

01:09:56.992 --> 01:10:00.863
matching scenes from the myth of Polyphemus and Galatea,

01:10:00.863 --> 01:10:06.135
where the giant cyclops Polyphemus falls in love with the sea nymph Galatea,

01:10:06.135 --> 01:10:08.304
spies her with her shepherd lover,

01:10:08.304 --> 01:10:12.641
and then kills him by jealously hurling a giant rock at him,

01:10:12.641 --> 01:10:18.180
whereupon Galatea memorialized him by turning his blood into a river.

01:10:18.180 --> 01:10:22.218
Sebastiano painted a distraught Polyphemus,

01:10:22.218 --> 01:10:24.486
while Raphael depicted Galatea,

01:10:24.486 --> 01:10:28.157
whose face bears a striking resemblance to his earlier Saint Catherine,

01:10:28.157 --> 01:10:31.727
at the moment of her apotheosis.

01:10:32.027 --> 01:10:38.100
Both Sebastiano and Raphael explicitly invoked a detailed description of their respective characters

01:10:38.100 --> 01:10:43.906
given several decades earlier by the celebrated Florentine poet Angelo Poliziano,

01:10:43.906 --> 01:10:47.476
where Polyphemus, “weakened by weeping and grief,

01:10:47.476 --> 01:10:54.116
sits on a cold stone at the foot of a maple tree with his dog between his feet, singing a mountain tune”,

01:10:54.116 --> 01:10:57.753
while Galatea, “ignoring his rustic song,

01:10:57.753 --> 01:11:02.625
holds the reins to a pair of chariot-pulling dolphins who breathe in unison

01:11:02.625 --> 01:11:09.231
while a spirited crowd circles around them, cavorting and playing amorously”.

01:11:09.231 --> 01:11:13.969
That the entire water-based scene was placed in a loggia facing the river

01:11:13.969 --> 01:11:16.972
was, of course, hardly an accident -

01:11:16.972 --> 01:11:21.577
just like the stunning images of vegetation on display throughout the other loggia

01:11:21.577 --> 01:11:24.780
that opens out on Chigi's gardens that we'll examine later.

01:11:25.314 --> 01:11:27.816
But despite the resonant natural setting

01:11:27.816 --> 01:11:30.019
and their shared literary heritage,

01:11:30.019 --> 01:11:33.656
the two-painting combination doesn't quite work,

01:11:33.656 --> 01:11:36.892
not least because, somewhat strangely,

01:11:36.892 --> 01:11:40.362
the horizon lines between the two don't match.

01:11:40.362 --> 01:11:44.400
This was perhaps the first, although certainly not the last,

01:11:44.400 --> 01:11:48.904
source of tension between Sebastiano and Raphael.

01:11:50.973 --> 01:11:56.412
Yet another important contact made during Raphael's first few years in Rome

01:11:56.412 --> 01:11:59.481
was the printmaker Marcantonio Raimondi,

01:11:59.481 --> 01:12:02.951
who had established himself as both a skilled engraver

01:12:02.951 --> 01:12:04.987
and an opportunistic businessman,

01:12:04.987 --> 01:12:11.860
approaching Raphael in Rome shortly after having illegally copied some of Albrecht Dürer’s famous woodcuts,

01:12:11.860 --> 01:12:14.797
including his celebrated monogram.

01:12:14.797 --> 01:12:17.866
Unlike other early pioneers of the medium,

01:12:17.866 --> 01:12:19.868
such as Andrea Mantegna

01:12:19.868 --> 01:12:22.271
and, of course, Dürer himself,

01:12:22.271 --> 01:12:25.741
Raphael never did any of the actual engravings -

01:12:25.741 --> 01:12:30.012
content to let Raimondi and his associates do what they were best at.

01:12:30.512 --> 01:12:34.083
At first he supplied him with tailor-made drawings,

01:12:34.083 --> 01:12:38.287
but after a short time he got into the habit of simply passing along

01:12:38.287 --> 01:12:40.356
some of his preparatory sketches,

01:12:40.356 --> 01:12:46.261
or simply letting Raimondi and his team copy and engrave his finished works as best they could -

01:12:46.261 --> 01:12:50.733
which is why several prints differ significantly from the finished works,

01:12:50.733 --> 01:12:52.801
like the print of the Parnassus,

01:12:52.801 --> 01:12:56.772
where now Apollo is playing an old-fashioned lyre.

01:12:57.406 --> 01:13:01.009
Either way, the result was enormously successful:

01:13:01.009 --> 01:13:03.579
through the new printing technology,

01:13:03.579 --> 01:13:08.650
vast numbers of people could now own their own version of Italy's hottest painter

01:13:08.650 --> 01:13:12.054
dramatically increasing Raphael's fame and wealth

01:13:12.054 --> 01:13:15.724
so that his star could continue its meteoric rise.

01:13:19.928 --> 01:13:23.732
And rise it most assuredly did.

01:13:23.732 --> 01:13:30.005
By 1511, Raphael had moved on to the next room of Julius’ papal apartments:

01:13:30.005 --> 01:13:34.109
his audience chamber, commonly known as the Stanza di Eliodoro,

01:13:34.109 --> 01:13:39.948
after its most famous painting, The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple.

01:13:39.948 --> 01:13:42.584
Just like the Stanza della Segnatura,

01:13:42.584 --> 01:13:46.088
this room was designed as a comprehensive whole,

01:13:46.088 --> 01:13:49.124
but as befitting a papal audience chamber

01:13:49.124 --> 01:13:55.097
its core message is now emphatically transparent, even blatantly propagandistic:

01:13:55.097 --> 01:14:01.236
how God will always intercede to ensure the protection of His Church.

01:14:01.236 --> 01:14:01.270
to ensure the protection of His Church.

01:14:01.270 --> 01:14:07.242
Once more we’re presented with four main frescoes on each of the room’s four walls,

01:14:07.242 --> 01:14:10.612
now placed overtop a series of grisaille caryatids,

01:14:10.612 --> 01:14:13.615
and connected through images on a partitioned ceiling.

01:14:13.615 --> 01:14:17.753
But this time the ceiling images are painted tent-like,

01:14:17.753 --> 01:14:20.222
as if to represent a stretched canvas,

01:14:20.222 --> 01:14:24.660
and all depict Old Testament images of divine intervention:

01:14:24.660 --> 01:14:26.795
Moses and the Burning Bush,

01:14:26.795 --> 01:14:28.897
God appearing to Noah,

01:14:28.897 --> 01:14:32.734
Abraham's almost sacrifice of his son, Isaac,

01:14:32.734 --> 01:14:34.870
and Jacob's Dream.

01:14:34.870 --> 01:14:41.743
In striking contrast to the more static and serene nature of the frescoes nextt door in the Stanza della Segnatura,

01:14:41.743 --> 01:14:46.048
the main paintings in this room are all vastly more dynamic,

01:14:46.048 --> 01:14:51.753
vividly capturing a specific historical moment of heavenly intercession in human affairs

01:14:51.753 --> 01:14:57.459
that is strongly reinforced through a dramatic use of color, light, and shading -

01:14:57.459 --> 01:15:01.396
none more so than in The Deliverance of Saint Peter,

01:15:01.396 --> 01:15:06.301
where Raphael innovatively opts for the device of continuous narration,

01:15:06.301 --> 01:15:12.674
simultaneously depicting the moments when a captive Saint Peter is freed by a blindingly radiant angel

01:15:12.674 --> 01:15:15.410
and when he is being led to safety.

01:15:16.445 --> 01:15:18.881
In The Miracle at Bolsena,

01:15:18.881 --> 01:15:25.888
a tormented 13th-century priest has his doubts about the truth of transubstantiation summarily dismissed

01:15:25.888 --> 01:15:28.490
when the consecrated host begins to bleed.

01:15:28.857 --> 01:15:31.226
In The Repulse of Attila,

01:15:31.226 --> 01:15:36.131
the scene shifts some 900 year earlier to the time of Pope Leo I,

01:15:36.131 --> 01:15:40.102
when the armies of the seemingly unstoppable Attila the Hun

01:15:40.102 --> 01:15:42.404
suddenly shutter to a halt,

01:15:42.404 --> 01:15:46.041
repulsed by the apparition of Saints Peter and Paul.

01:15:46.041 --> 01:15:50.178
And in The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple,

01:15:50.178 --> 01:15:54.917
we’re presented with a still earlier scene, from the Second Book of Maccabees,

01:15:54.917 --> 01:16:00.989
where the Syrian usurper Heliodorus is driven from the Temple in Jerusalem he’s determined to plunder

01:16:00.989 --> 01:16:07.296
by three particularly aggressive angels who’ve appeared in response to the fervent prayers of the high priest.

01:16:08.497 --> 01:16:13.235
In all four scenes, the message could hardly be clearer:

01:16:13.235 --> 01:16:18.674
God will always procure a resounding triumph of His Church over all enemies:

01:16:18.674 --> 01:16:20.042
spiritual,

01:16:20.042 --> 01:16:21.343
financial

01:16:21.343 --> 01:16:22.477
and military.

01:16:23.345 --> 01:16:25.180
And this message,

01:16:25.180 --> 01:16:30.786
whose fundamental timelessness is reinforced by the diverse array of historical scenes depicted,

01:16:30.786 --> 01:16:33.989
also happens, not coincidentally,

01:16:33.989 --> 01:16:38.427
to be particularly relevant to very recent contemporary events.

01:16:38.660 --> 01:16:43.532
The local rulers in the Papal States who tried to distance themselves from the Church

01:16:43.532 --> 01:16:46.435
had been overthrown or brought to heel.

01:16:46.435 --> 01:16:50.739
The French-sponsored rebel council in Pisa had fizzled out,

01:16:50.739 --> 01:16:54.943
with Julius strongly punishing those who’d organized and attended it.

01:16:54.943 --> 01:17:02.451
While the French “barbarians” had themselves been once again driven out of the entire Italian peninsula.

01:17:02.451 --> 01:17:08.056
So it's with little surprise that Julius once again makes his presence felt throughout this room,

01:17:08.056 --> 01:17:11.026
both implicitly and explicitly.

01:17:11.460 --> 01:17:15.130
Implicitly, in The Deliverance of Saint Peter,

01:17:15.130 --> 01:17:20.035
since Julius’ titular church as cardinal was San Pietro in Vincoli,

01:17:20.035 --> 01:17:22.037
Saint Peter in Chains,

01:17:22.037 --> 01:17:28.443
which claims the relics of the miraculously-fused chains that held Saint Peter in both Rome and Jerusalem,

01:17:28.443 --> 01:17:32.347
and where a scaled-down version of Julius's grandiose tomb

01:17:32.347 --> 01:17:36.118
featuring Michelangelo's Moses and other figures, can now be found;

01:17:37.219 --> 01:17:41.556
and explicitly, in both The Miracle at Bolsena,

01:17:41.556 --> 01:17:45.360
where he is conspicuously placed across from the German priest,

01:17:45.360 --> 01:17:50.065
butressed by both ecclesiastical supporters and members of his Swiss Guard -

01:17:50.065 --> 01:17:52.968
another one of his pioneering initiatives -

01:17:52.968 --> 01:17:55.837
and in The Expulsion of Heliodorus,

01:17:55.837 --> 01:18:00.575
where he grimly observes the scene from a papal throne carried by two people,

01:18:00.575 --> 01:18:05.914
one of whom happens to bear a striking resemblance to Raphael.

01:18:05.914 --> 01:18:10.786
In fact, the only painting where Julius doesn't make any sort of appearance,

01:18:10.786 --> 01:18:13.088
is the one where you'd most expect it:

01:18:13.088 --> 01:18:15.157
The Repulse of Attila,

01:18:15.157 --> 01:18:20.662
where the fifth-century pope is shown sedately overseeing the chaotic reaction of the “barbarians”

01:18:20.662 --> 01:18:24.066
who are driven back by the armed duo of Peter and Paul.

01:18:24.366 --> 01:18:27.169
Surely there was never a more fitting occasion

01:18:27.169 --> 01:18:30.639
than to depict Leo I as Julius the Warrior Pope,

01:18:30.639 --> 01:18:33.275
perhaps now once again beardless,

01:18:33.275 --> 01:18:36.611
after having successfully repelled the invading hordes?

01:18:37.212 --> 01:18:40.482
Well, that likely would have been the case,

01:18:40.482 --> 01:18:45.420
but it turns out that by the time this fresco was completed Julius had died.

01:18:46.722 --> 01:18:49.391
And so the features of Leo I

01:18:49.391 --> 01:18:54.730
became those of his 16th century namesake, and Julius’ Medici successor,

01:18:54.730 --> 01:18:56.698
Leo X.

01:19:04.039 --> 01:19:09.945
If Raphael had any fears that the death of Julius would leave him suddenly pushed aside

01:19:09.945 --> 01:19:13.482
in favor of artists from the new pope's native Florence,

01:19:13.482 --> 01:19:15.417
they were quickly put to rest;

01:19:15.417 --> 01:19:18.420
as it soon became obvious that Leo was determined

01:19:18.420 --> 01:19:22.824
to find a way to capitalize on his skills even more than Julius had done,

01:19:22.824 --> 01:19:25.427
commissioning a breathtaking array of works

01:19:25.427 --> 01:19:31.533
that would dramatically illustrate the new Golden Age he was convinced that his papacy was ushering in.

01:19:35.237 --> 01:19:39.875
And perhaps the most spectacular of all of Leo’s aesthetic ventures

01:19:39.875 --> 01:19:44.379
was the series of large tapestries designed to be hung in the Sistine Chapel,

01:19:44.379 --> 01:19:49.251
below its famous mural sequences on the lives of Moses and Christ.

01:19:49.718 --> 01:19:51.453
Unlike frescoes,

01:19:51.453 --> 01:19:55.524
tapestries were designed to be displayed only on select occasions,

01:19:55.524 --> 01:19:59.261
an opportunity to overwhelm a suitable audience with their unique

01:19:59.261 --> 01:20:04.266
combination of rich, luxuriant fabrics and stunning craftsmanship,

01:20:04.266 --> 01:20:08.370
all of which made them exceptionally expensive.

01:20:08.370 --> 01:20:14.242
Pieter van Aelst, whose world-leading Flemish workshop was chosen to weave the tapestries

01:20:14.242 --> 01:20:17.846
received 15,000 gold ducats for all ten.

01:20:17.846 --> 01:20:23.685
And when you factor in another 1000 paid to Raphael to create the cartoons,

01:20:23.685 --> 01:20:32.160
the entire project cost more than five times as much as was spent on Michelangelo’s recently completed ceiling.

01:20:32.160 --> 01:20:34.362
The goal, clearly,

01:20:34.362 --> 01:20:37.098
was simply to produce a series of tapestries

01:20:37.098 --> 01:20:41.670
more overwhelmingly beautiful and powerful than had ever been created

01:20:41.670 --> 01:20:46.241
in order to triumphantly embellish the most renowned chapel in Christendom

01:20:46.241 --> 01:20:50.212
with dramatic, life-sized scenes of Saints Peter and Paul,

01:20:50.212 --> 01:20:53.949
the two most important figures of the early Church.

01:20:54.416 --> 01:20:59.321
That we still have seven very well-preserved cartoons of the original ten,

01:20:59.321 --> 01:21:02.924
beautifully displayed together in London's V&A museum,

01:21:02.924 --> 01:21:06.261
probably speaks to the nature of the production process.

01:21:07.028 --> 01:21:12.534
Once arrived in Brussels, the cartoons were copied and cut into strips for the weavers,

01:21:12.534 --> 01:21:14.803
who wove them from behind,

01:21:14.803 --> 01:21:19.608
producing a tapestry that was the mirror image of the original cartoon.

01:21:21.243 --> 01:21:24.546
Many believe that those originals were meant to be returned to Rome

01:21:24.546 --> 01:21:27.449
and later converted into paintings,

01:21:27.449 --> 01:21:31.653
which explains why those scenes with writing on them were shown the right way around

01:21:31.653 --> 01:21:33.521
instead of reflected.

01:21:33.521 --> 01:21:39.327
If you were good enough to copy Raphael's cartoons and vividly weave them into lavish tapestries,

01:21:39.327 --> 01:21:41.229
the thinking presumably went,

01:21:41.229 --> 01:21:46.801
you were certainly good enough to switch the occasional bit of writing around as you did so.

01:21:46.801 --> 01:21:52.073
Each tapestry contains a main scene above a faux bronze ancient relief

01:21:52.073 --> 01:21:57.812
that depicts a mixture of further images from the Apostles’ lives, together with Leo's own.

01:21:57.812 --> 01:22:00.749
In addition to the ten main tapestries,

01:22:00.749 --> 01:22:03.385
there are also several separate side borders

01:22:03.385 --> 01:22:08.023
displaying futher allegorical and mythological references to Leo's pontificate

01:22:08.023 --> 01:22:10.792
in a suitably classicizing style.

01:22:11.226 --> 01:22:14.195
The border sections must have had their own cartoons,

01:22:14.195 --> 01:22:16.631
but none have survived.

01:22:17.032 --> 01:22:21.436
Occasionally the Flemish weavers took some liberties with the design,

01:22:21.436 --> 01:22:24.673
like Christ's robe in The Charge to Peter,

01:22:24.673 --> 01:22:28.576
which suddenly becomes studded with golden stars in the tapestry version.

01:22:28.576 --> 01:22:32.647
But for the most part they followed Raphael's designs faithfully.

01:22:32.981 --> 01:22:39.421
And those designs, in striking contrast to the much more dynamic, complex and fluid frescoes

01:22:39.421 --> 01:22:42.324
of the recently completed Stanza di Eliodoro,

01:22:42.324 --> 01:22:45.894
are particularly somber and highly focused,

01:22:45.894 --> 01:22:49.664
with key figures in tense, almost-sculpted poses

01:22:49.664 --> 01:22:53.168
that straightforwardly highlight the pivotal moment of the scene.

01:22:53.802 --> 01:22:58.373
Whether out of respect for the inherent complexities of the tapestry medium

01:22:58.373 --> 01:23:05.680
or out of an explicit desire to portray the early Christians as rugged, no-nonsense followers of the newly revealed Truth,

01:23:05.947 --> 01:23:09.050
Raphael managed, yet again,

01:23:09.050 --> 01:23:15.857
to provide the viewer with a visual and emotional experience fully resonant with the particularities of the occasion,

01:23:15.857 --> 01:23:21.963
this time as an overawed visitor to one of Christianity’s pre-eminent  focal points.

01:23:22.764 --> 01:23:27.035
Despite the rapidly accelerating number of projects he was involved in,

01:23:27.035 --> 01:23:31.473
Raphael worked intently on the tapestry cartoons for a year or two,

01:23:32.007 --> 01:23:37.245
while Raimondi made the occasional print to promote the as-yet-to-be-constructed final product.

01:23:37.445 --> 01:23:39.981
By December 1519

01:23:39.981 --> 01:23:41.649
seven of them were finished

01:23:41.649 --> 01:23:46.321
and sent to Rome to be displayed during a special event in the Sistine Chapel.

01:23:53.828 --> 01:23:56.197
As his workload steadily increased,

01:23:56.197 --> 01:24:01.536
Raphael naturally began to turn to other artists to help him execute his designs.

01:24:01.536 --> 01:24:06.841
Vasari states that the four prophets in Chigi’s chapel in Santa Maria della Pace

01:24:06.841 --> 01:24:08.877
were painted by Timoteo Viti,

01:24:08.877 --> 01:24:13.081
a childhood friend who trained in Giovanni Santi’s Urbino workshop,

01:24:13.081 --> 01:24:16.751
and eventually succeeded him as Urbino court painter;

01:24:16.751 --> 01:24:20.722
and some scholars maintain that Justinian Receiving the Pandects

01:24:20.722 --> 01:24:23.858
was painted by the Venetian artist Lorenzo Lotto,

01:24:23.858 --> 01:24:30.265
whom some believe had been one of the other leading artists first called to Rome by Julius in 1508.

01:24:30.265 --> 01:24:32.834
But those were isolated incidents;

01:24:32.834 --> 01:24:37.505
and while there were obvious practical concerns that needed to be addressed for a creative force

01:24:37.505 --> 01:24:41.709
who lapped up commissions much faster than even he could possibly fulfill them,

01:24:41.709 --> 01:24:49.317
Raphael's unique character eventually gave rise to a very different sort of workshop than that of many other leading artists,

01:24:49.317 --> 01:24:52.954
one where individual initiative was broadly encouraged,

01:24:52.954 --> 01:24:56.157
and mutual respect was the order of the day.

01:24:56.157 --> 01:25:01.229
While he would always be significantly involved in every work that officially bore his name,

01:25:01.229 --> 01:25:05.467
he had the emotional sensitivity to get the most out of his collaborators

01:25:05.467 --> 01:25:09.871
and the confidence to defer to whatever good ideas they might have come up with.

01:25:09.871 --> 01:25:13.708
A good example of this uniquely defining character trait

01:25:13.708 --> 01:25:17.045
is provided long before the establishment of his workshop

01:25:17.045 --> 01:25:19.881
by the ceiling of the Stanza della Segnatura,,

01:25:19.881 --> 01:25:21.950
which had been started by Il Sodoma

01:25:21.950 --> 01:25:25.253
and the decorative expert and cartographer Johannes Ruysch

01:25:25.253 --> 01:25:27.722
before Raphael's arrival in Rome.

01:25:28.089 --> 01:25:34.162
While many of Sodoma’s early efforts were eventually painted over to make way for Raphael’s final design,

01:25:34.162 --> 01:25:37.398
he nonetheless retained Sodoma’s central octagon

01:25:37.398 --> 01:25:39.934
and the eight small scenes clustered around it,

01:25:39.934 --> 01:25:44.639
representing the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water;

01:25:44.639 --> 01:25:50.578
and replicated Sodoma’s innovative faux gold mosaic style throughout his own ceiling frescoes,

01:25:50.578 --> 01:25:52.981
all the while harnessing Ruysch’s ability

01:25:52.981 --> 01:25:56.985
to paint intricate marble-like moldings  and captivating grotesques

01:25:56.985 --> 01:26:00.688
that added essential decorative coherence to the overall design.

01:26:00.688 --> 01:26:05.293
By the time Raphael's workshop was a going concern a few years later,

01:26:05.293 --> 01:26:09.731
he'd cultivated his own decorative specialist, Giovanni da Udine,

01:26:09.731 --> 01:26:13.234
along with dozens of other hardworking young artists,

01:26:13.234 --> 01:26:17.639
including the deeply talented quartet of Giulio Romano,

01:26:17.639 --> 01:26:19.507
Gianfrancesco Penni,

01:26:19.507 --> 01:26:21.743
Perin del Vaga,

01:26:21.743 --> 01:26:24.546
and Polidoro da Caravaggio,

01:26:24.546 --> 01:26:30.385
all of whom went on to become highly accomplished artists in their own right.

01:26:30.385 --> 01:26:34.022
Being a member of Raphael's burgeoning workshop

01:26:34.022 --> 01:26:37.458
became a key rite of passage for many young artists,

01:26:37.458 --> 01:26:39.661
and he certainly needed them all

01:26:39.661 --> 01:26:45.934
because the requests for large-scale decorative projects were coming fast and furious from every direction,

01:26:45.934 --> 01:26:50.104
most conspicuously from the new Pope himself.

01:26:59.113 --> 01:27:04.219
The first major decorative project on Raphael's busy agenda

01:27:04.219 --> 01:27:07.255
was the third room of the new Vatican apartments,

01:27:07.255 --> 01:27:10.892
what came to be called the Stanza dell’Incendio di Borgo,

01:27:10.892 --> 01:27:13.094
the room of The Fire in the Borgo,

01:27:13.094 --> 01:27:20.134
after the most famous of its four main works - the Borgo, is a neighborhood of Rome between the Vatican and the Tiber,

01:27:20.134 --> 01:27:22.070
where Raphael himself lived,

01:27:22.070 --> 01:27:24.839
as we’ll later see in more detail.

01:27:24.839 --> 01:27:28.543
Now believed to have been Leo's private dining room,

01:27:28.543 --> 01:27:35.416
each wall is covered with a scene involving his namesake predecessors Leo III or Leo IV,

01:27:35.416 --> 01:27:38.119
who are consistently given his features.

01:27:38.119 --> 01:27:45.994
Leo III is shown publicly swearing an oath on the Bible to underscore his claim that the Pope only answers to God,

01:27:45.994 --> 01:27:52.600
and officially crowning Charlemagne, as an implicit act of papal authority over the new Holy Roman Empire,

01:27:52.600 --> 01:28:00.675
while Leo IV is depicted giving thanks to God for the victory over the Saracens in the 849 naval Battle of Ostia,

01:28:00.675 --> 01:28:06.881
and miraculously quenching the deadly Roman fire that appeared two years earlier, with a benediction.

01:28:07.282 --> 01:28:13.921
While this room generally holds the reputation of being the least impressive and coherent of all four Vatican Stanze

01:28:13.921 --> 01:28:19.627
with most, if not all, of the frescoes being executed by Raphael’s assistants,

01:28:19.627 --> 01:28:27.035
and the ceiling by Perugino, likely painted round about when Raphael was starting out in the Stanza della Segnatura next door

01:28:27.035 --> 01:28:30.138
left somewhat incongruously in place,

01:28:30.138 --> 01:28:34.342
The Fire in the Borgo is nonetheless a particularly striking work

01:28:34.342 --> 01:28:39.614
that has strongly influenced a number of major artists over the centuries.

01:28:41.549 --> 01:28:45.687
Then there was the new private quarters of Bernardo Dovizi,

01:28:45.687 --> 01:28:49.090
called Il Bibbiena, after his hometown.

01:28:49.090 --> 01:28:53.094
A renowned playwright, diplomat and classical scholar,

01:28:53.094 --> 01:28:56.064
Bibbiena was elevated to a cardinal by Leo

01:28:56.064 --> 01:28:59.367
and quickly became one of his most trusted advisors;

01:28:59.367 --> 01:29:03.905
whereupon it was decided to create a separate apartment for him in the Vatican,

01:29:03.905 --> 01:29:09.143
featuring, among other things, a small loggia or loggetta,

01:29:09.143 --> 01:29:12.313
and a heated bathroom or stufetta.

01:29:12.313 --> 01:29:15.583
In keeping with Bibbiena’s literary inclinations,

01:29:15.583 --> 01:29:19.420
the decorative program was emphatically classical in orientation,

01:29:19.420 --> 01:29:26.094
with a wide array of grotesques and other ancient-style decorations executed by Giovanni da Udine,

01:29:26.094 --> 01:29:31.132
together with a series of eight frescoes of The Life of Venus by Giulio Romano.

01:29:31.132 --> 01:29:37.038
We have a revealing letter from Raphael's good friend and leading humanist, Pietro Bembo, to Bibbiena,

01:29:37.038 --> 01:29:41.476
who was away on a diplomatic mission while his apartment was being constructed.

01:29:41.476 --> 01:29:46.981
After describing Raphael's recent portraits of their mutual friends Baldassare Castiglione

01:29:46.981 --> 01:29:49.751
and the renowned poet Antonio Tebaldeo,

01:29:49.751 --> 01:29:51.285
Bembo then adds,

01:29:51.285 --> 01:29:57.091
“Raphael just came up to me to ask you to send us any more stories you'd like painted in your stufetta,

01:29:57.091 --> 01:30:00.995
since the ones you’ve requested earlier will be finished this week”.

01:30:00.995 --> 01:30:03.765
By its breathtaking informality,

01:30:03.765 --> 01:30:08.369
we’re suddenly catapulted back to the intimate inner circle of Leo's new Rome,

01:30:08.369 --> 01:30:12.340
when it seemed possible to create the most beautiful things imaginable

01:30:12.340 --> 01:30:14.842
with remarkable speed.

01:30:16.310 --> 01:30:20.548
Yet another Vatican project charged to Raphael's workshop

01:30:20.548 --> 01:30:24.118
was the decoration of the Sala dei Palafrenieri,

01:30:24.118 --> 01:30:26.821
often called the Sala dei Chiaroscuri,

01:30:26.821 --> 01:30:30.291
with its faux statues of evangelists and apostles,

01:30:30.291 --> 01:30:36.264
most of which were destroyed and remodeled several decades later in the latter part of the 16th century,

01:30:36.264 --> 01:30:39.834
but we have many of Giulio Romano's preparatory drawings,

01:30:39.834 --> 01:30:43.037
which were likely done in close collaboration with Raphael.

01:30:45.473 --> 01:30:48.643
A much longer-lasting accomplishment, however,

01:30:48.643 --> 01:30:52.713
was the comprehensive decorative scheme for Leo's magnificent loggia,

01:30:52.713 --> 01:30:57.452
the second of three successive levels of porticos in the Apostolic Palace

01:30:57.452 --> 01:31:02.857
that combines a wide array of antique-inspired images for Leo and his humanist court

01:31:02.857 --> 01:31:06.494
with an extensive series of 52 biblical scenes,

01:31:06.494 --> 01:31:10.364
four in each of the thirteen ceiling bays formed by the arches

01:31:10.364 --> 01:31:13.301
that are now known as “Raphael's Bible”.

01:31:13.935 --> 01:31:17.104
The loggia was open to the outside for centuries,

01:31:17.104 --> 01:31:20.675
which must have given it a uniquely light and airy feel,

01:31:20.675 --> 01:31:23.244
but that inevitably came at a cost,

01:31:23.244 --> 01:31:27.448
as the rectangular, grisaille paintings lining the bottom of the interior wall

01:31:27.448 --> 01:31:30.585
depicting additional images linked to the bay above,

01:31:30.585 --> 01:31:33.321
are now, sadly, gone,

01:31:33.321 --> 01:31:36.757
erased by prolonged exposure to the elements.

01:31:36.757 --> 01:31:38.159
But even without them,

01:31:38.159 --> 01:31:42.763
a few copies of which were thankfully preserved from a number of later prints,

01:31:42.763 --> 01:31:49.203
the Vatican Loggia is a stunning display of both artistic vision and managerial excellence,

01:31:49.203 --> 01:31:54.976
combining the rapidly developing executional skills of dozens of many motivated artists

01:31:54.976 --> 01:31:57.745
into one beautifully coherent whole.

01:31:58.079 --> 01:32:03.918
But perhaps the loggia’s most striking impact comes through its personal touches,

01:32:03.918 --> 01:32:07.054
in particular its many references to Leo,

01:32:07.054 --> 01:32:11.826
both generally - through a constant use of standard Medici symbols:

01:32:11.826 --> 01:32:13.628
the shield with six balls,

01:32:13.628 --> 01:32:17.198
the Medici yoke that Leo adopted for his papal emblem,

01:32:17.198 --> 01:32:19.734
and the Medici ring with three feathers -

01:32:19.734 --> 01:32:25.206
and specifically, with representations of both lions and Leo himself,

01:32:25.206 --> 01:32:30.411
including one where he's giving a private benediction right in this very loggia.

01:32:30.912 --> 01:32:33.714
And then there's the mention of his favorite pet,

01:32:33.714 --> 01:32:37.618
the elephant Hanno, who died suddenly in 1516

01:32:37.618 --> 01:32:42.623
and was buried in a Raphael-designed tomb in the nearby Vatican Gardens.

01:32:42.623 --> 01:32:48.029
Such captivating details are easy to overlook when faced with the sheer extent of the works

01:32:48.029 --> 01:32:49.897
coming from Raphael's workshop,

01:32:49.897 --> 01:32:53.167
but it's important to step back and appreciate them

01:32:53.167 --> 01:32:56.604
to get a clear sense of the full extent of what was being created.

01:32:56.604 --> 01:33:02.877
Look, for example, at this exceptionally designed sketch of a putto holding a Medici ring and feathers

01:33:02.877 --> 01:33:05.813
that's widely attributed to Raphael himself.

01:33:05.813 --> 01:33:10.685
It turns out that the final version of this image appears in the Vatican Stanze,

01:33:10.685 --> 01:33:16.657
and you might well think that such a beautiful and symbolically important figure created by the master himself

01:33:16.657 --> 01:33:19.894
would have a prominent place in one of the main frescoes.

01:33:19.894 --> 01:33:21.729
But you'd be wrong.

01:33:21.729 --> 01:33:25.533
The putto can be found, after much searching,

01:33:25.533 --> 01:33:30.237
just to the right of The Repulse of Attila in the Stanza di Eliodoro,

01:33:30.237 --> 01:33:34.675
subtly reinforcing Leo's recent succession to the papacy.

01:33:34.675 --> 01:33:37.712
Talk about attention to detail.

01:33:39.580 --> 01:33:46.621
Before we move on to another particularly significant large-scale design project outside the Vatican,

01:33:46.621 --> 01:33:51.025
it's worth mentioning that the famous Sistine tapestries weren't the only ones

01:33:51.025 --> 01:33:54.662
the insatiable Leo commissioned from Raphael and his workshop,

01:33:54.662 --> 01:33:59.634
as he also ordered an additional tapestry series of so-called grotesques,

01:33:59.634 --> 01:34:02.036
mythological and allegorical figures

01:34:02.036 --> 01:34:05.640
in the highly fashionable antique style of Leo's papal court,

01:34:05.640 --> 01:34:10.111
resulting in yet another productive collaboration between Raphael,

01:34:10.111 --> 01:34:11.746
Giovanni da Udine

01:34:11.746 --> 01:34:16.384
and many more in his increasingly frantic workshop.

01:34:16.384 --> 01:34:16.417
his increasingly frantic workshop.

01:34:17.018 --> 01:34:23.190
Meanwhile, Agostino Chigi, still very much a force in Roman high society,

01:34:23.190 --> 01:34:27.194
but now much more concentrated on extravagantly spending his wealth

01:34:27.194 --> 01:34:29.363
rather than rigorously acquiring it,

01:34:29.363 --> 01:34:34.669
had decided to flaunt convention by marrying his lowborn mistress and mother of his children,

01:34:34.669 --> 01:34:36.604
Francesca Ordeaschi,

01:34:36.604 --> 01:34:39.840
and had engaged Raphael to celebrate the occasion

01:34:39.840 --> 01:34:43.044
by creating an extensive decorative program for the ceiling

01:34:43.044 --> 01:34:46.580
of his sumptuous new villa’s main open-air entrance area,

01:34:46.580 --> 01:34:48.949
now known as the Psyche Loggia.

01:34:49.450 --> 01:34:54.221
The story of Psyche and Cupid was an obviously appropriate literary precedent

01:34:54.221 --> 01:34:58.959
of a seemingly mismatched couple boldly overcoming sociological divisions,

01:34:58.959 --> 01:35:03.364
a classical myth that relates how Cupid's love for the mortal Psyche

01:35:03.364 --> 01:35:05.700
is eventually sanctioned by the gods,

01:35:05.700 --> 01:35:09.670
who then offer her ambrosia to be elevated to the ranks of the Immortals

01:35:09.670 --> 01:35:13.174
so that she can finally marry Cupid in a splendid ceremony.

01:35:13.507 --> 01:35:18.846
The loggia’s ceiling harmoniously and joyously plays upon both classical motifs

01:35:18.846 --> 01:35:21.482
and the proximity to the adjacent garden,

01:35:21.482 --> 01:35:24.185
while the two climactic scenes at the center,

01:35:24.185 --> 01:35:27.922
the Council of the Gods and the ensuing wedding festivities,

01:35:27.922 --> 01:35:32.293
are presented as if painted on the stretched canvases of an outdoor wedding tent,

01:35:32.293 --> 01:35:36.931
on either side of an explicit reference to Chigi’s own supreme status:

01:35:36.931 --> 01:35:39.166
the Della Rovere coat of arms

01:35:39.166 --> 01:35:43.471
that he gained access to through his formal adoption by Julius.

01:35:44.038 --> 01:35:50.511
The Psyche Loggia naturally provided the perfect backdrop for the real wedding of Agostino and Francesca,

01:35:50.511 --> 01:35:54.248
which was said to have been officiated by Pope Leo himself.

01:35:54.582 --> 01:36:02.022
It was yet another completely original and magnificently coordinated large-scale decorative project of Raphael’s workshop

01:36:02.022 --> 01:36:09.330
involving a variety of young artists combining forces towards the production of a compelling, overarching theme.

01:36:09.330 --> 01:36:11.999
But one familiar name stands out:

01:36:11.999 --> 01:36:16.036
Giovanni da Udine, fresh from his triumphs at the Vatican,

01:36:16.036 --> 01:36:19.073
was obviously having the time of his life,

01:36:19.073 --> 01:36:24.278
painting hundreds of botanical details with so much power and accuracy

01:36:24.278 --> 01:36:29.183
that they are now actively studied by biologists as well as art historians,

01:36:29.183 --> 01:36:34.722
as they vividly reveal the enormous variety of plants from all over the known world

01:36:34.722 --> 01:36:37.992
that somehow made it into Chigi’s adjacent gardens,

01:36:37.992 --> 01:36:40.394
including several from America,

01:36:40.394 --> 01:36:44.365
only some 25 years after Columbus’ first voyage.

01:36:45.232 --> 01:36:47.001
As for Raphael,

01:36:47.001 --> 01:36:50.805
while he seemed to have occasionally dipped directly into the fray,

01:36:50.805 --> 01:36:54.475
he was once again largely content to limit his involvement

01:36:54.475 --> 01:36:57.878
to that of overall designer and general manager.

01:36:57.878 --> 01:37:01.081
But then, he was particularly busy.

01:37:01.081 --> 01:37:04.185
But not, interestingly enough,

01:37:04.185 --> 01:37:06.587
in the way that you might think.

01:37:12.960 --> 01:37:18.365
Out of all the projects that Raphael was involved in during the last years of his life -

01:37:18.365 --> 01:37:22.903
including the vast number of movable paintings that we haven't even touched on yet -

01:37:22.903 --> 01:37:27.508
unquestionably one of his greatest passions was architecture.

01:37:27.508 --> 01:37:30.444
This might seem astounding for many reasons,

01:37:30.444 --> 01:37:32.913
not least of which because these days

01:37:32.913 --> 01:37:37.184
architecture and painting are completely non-overlapping activities.

01:37:37.184 --> 01:37:40.721
But in Renaissance Italy things were quite different.

01:37:40.721 --> 01:37:46.694
Filippo Brunelleschi, who famously found a way to designand build the dome of Florence’s cathedral,

01:37:46.694 --> 01:37:49.697
was originally trained as a goldsmith and sculptor.

01:37:49.697 --> 01:37:54.668
Leon Battista Alberti only fully turned his attention to architecture

01:37:54.668 --> 01:37:59.773
after having first established himself as a writer and theorist on the nature of painting.

01:37:59.773 --> 01:38:04.044
Michelangelo, of course, was primarily known as a sculptor -

01:38:04.044 --> 01:38:06.480
who would occasionally paint when pressed -

01:38:06.480 --> 01:38:10.851
before becoming one of the most renowned architects of his age,

01:38:10.851 --> 01:38:16.624
and Donato Bramante, Raphael's influential predecessor as chief Vatican architect,

01:38:16.624 --> 01:38:19.360
began his career as a painter.

01:38:19.360 --> 01:38:26.333
But the point isn't simply that Raphael possessed the necessary technicacl qualifications of the time to become an architect,

01:38:26.333 --> 01:38:31.972
it's that architecture had consistently played a central role in Raphael’s creative vision

01:38:31.972 --> 01:38:36.944
well before he actually found himself in charge of designing actual buildings -

01:38:36.944 --> 01:38:42.549
from his frequent architectural musings on preliminary sketches for commissioned paintings

01:38:42.549 --> 01:38:46.754
to his detailed landscape scenes of buildings and cityscapes,

01:38:46.754 --> 01:38:52.726
to the uniquely powerful and innovative temple that enjoys such a prominent place in The Marriage of the Virgin.

01:38:52.726 --> 01:38:59.266
By the time he reached Rome, his architectural inclinations and convictions were on full display,

01:38:59.266 --> 01:39:04.371
both directly, in The School of Athens and The Expulsion of Heliodorus;

01:39:04.371 --> 01:39:12.813
and indirectly, by creatively remodeling the rooms themselves to present the thematic ideas in the most spatially appealing way.

01:39:13.480 --> 01:39:15.082
Because for Raphael,

01:39:15.082 --> 01:39:18.686
perhaps more than any other artist before or since,

01:39:18.686 --> 01:39:23.190
architecture wasn't so much a separate activity in itself,

01:39:23.190 --> 01:39:29.363
but simply a natural component of producing the most coherent and integrated work of art imaginable.

01:39:29.363 --> 01:39:33.033
And nowhere is this attitude more vividly on display

01:39:33.033 --> 01:39:39.340
than in the second chapel he designed for Agostino Chigi
in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo.

01:39:39.340 --> 01:39:43.610
Like its counterpart we saw earlier in Santa Maria della Pace,

01:39:43.610 --> 01:39:48.849
it’s a striking multimedia effort that combines Christian and classical iconography.

01:39:48.849 --> 01:39:52.586
But this chapel's most famous feature is not a fresco,

01:39:52.586 --> 01:39:58.158
but its remarkable pantheon-like dome in gold mosaic above four symmetrical arches

01:39:58.158 --> 01:40:03.297
that seamlessly merge to once again present a continuous, unified space -

01:40:03.297 --> 01:40:09.003
that, and the riveting sculptures by Bernini that were created almost 150 years later.

01:40:09.003 --> 01:40:13.841
The chapel was uncompleted at Raphael's sudden death in 1520,

01:40:13.841 --> 01:40:16.577
a few days before Chigi’s as it happens,

01:40:16.577 --> 01:40:21.382
with the main altarpiece and other features later created by an assembly of others,

01:40:21.382 --> 01:40:25.252
culminating with Bernini’s stunning work
in the mid-17th century.

01:40:25.252 --> 01:40:27.354
But the overall layout -

01:40:27.354 --> 01:40:31.325
from the mesmerizing dome to the pyramid-shaped tombs,

01:40:31.325 --> 01:40:33.027
to two of the statues,

01:40:33.027 --> 01:40:36.597
one of Jonah and the Whale and another of the prophet Elijah,

01:40:36.597 --> 01:40:44.238
explicitly reflect Raphael's vision of combining a wide range of different luxurious materials and artistic forms

01:40:44.238 --> 01:40:46.774
into one compelling whole.

01:40:46.774 --> 01:40:52.346
Which is not to say, of course, that Raphael didn't design and build entire buildings -

01:40:52.346 --> 01:40:54.081
he most certainly did.

01:40:54.081 --> 01:40:58.752
But one reason why his architectural skills are so frequently overlooked today

01:40:58.752 --> 01:41:03.524
is that many of those structures are no longer standing 500 years later.

01:41:03.524 --> 01:41:08.562
During his lifetime, however, his architectural reputation was quite different,

01:41:08.562 --> 01:41:11.098
as witnessed by his epitaph in the Pantheon,

01:41:11.098 --> 01:41:13.400
which explicitly states that he

01:41:13.400 --> 01:41:19.473
“enhanced the glory of Popes Julius and Leo with his works in painting and architecture”.

01:41:19.473 --> 01:41:25.479
Perhaps his first full architectural commission was also from the everpresent Chigi,

01:41:25.479 --> 01:41:27.848
not for his spectacular new villa,

01:41:27.848 --> 01:41:30.651
which was designed by Baldassare Peruzzi -

01:41:30.651 --> 01:41:33.153
who was also a wonderful painter, by the way,

01:41:33.153 --> 01:41:36.790
as any visitor to the Villa Farnesina can readily see,

01:41:36.790 --> 01:41:40.561
but its adjacent stables - now mostly destroyed -

01:41:40.561 --> 01:41:45.732
that were once sufficiently grand to hold sumptuous parties attended by Leo himself.

01:41:45.732 --> 01:41:48.602
Raphael was also, it appears,

01:41:48.602 --> 01:41:53.006
the first architect of the Roman Church of Sant’Eligio degli Orefici,

01:41:53.006 --> 01:41:59.379
but the final result, completed well after his death, is quite different
from his original plans.

01:41:59.379 --> 01:42:01.415
And then there are the palazzi:

01:42:01.415 --> 01:42:05.752
two in the Borgo area of Rome next to the Vatican, where he was living -

01:42:05.752 --> 01:42:09.490
both of which, sadly, have been subsequently demolished -

01:42:09.490 --> 01:42:11.959
and two more that are still extant:

01:42:11.959 --> 01:42:18.332
one across the Tiber in the city's then financial district that he likely worked with Giulio Romano on,

01:42:18.332 --> 01:42:23.537
and a fourth one in Florence in collaboration with Giovanni Francesco da Sangallo,

01:42:23.537 --> 01:42:27.441
a Florentine-based architect who could supervise its construction.

01:42:27.441 --> 01:42:31.845
Meanwhile, he produced competition designs for two churches:

01:42:31.845 --> 01:42:34.815
San Giovanni de Fiorentini inRome,

01:42:34.815 --> 01:42:39.386
and the facade for San Lorenzo in Florence, the main Medici church,

01:42:39.386 --> 01:42:42.089
neither one of which were accepted.

01:42:42.089 --> 01:42:45.025
San Lorenzo was awarded to Michelangelo,

01:42:45.025 --> 01:42:47.194
who never completed it.

01:42:47.494 --> 01:42:52.933
Raphael was also planning on moving from his luxurious home in the Borgo

01:42:52.933 --> 01:42:57.971
into an even larger complex of two adjoining townhouses on the other side of the Tiber

01:42:57.971 --> 01:43:03.143
that he personally designed to meet his own particular private and professional needs.

01:43:03.143 --> 01:43:07.347
But that, too, he never had a chance to build.

01:43:07.347 --> 01:43:11.185
Architecture, clearly, was in his blood,

01:43:11.185 --> 01:43:15.822
yet another overlapping aspect of his all consuming creative drive.

01:43:15.822 --> 01:43:23.630
So it was hardly a surprise when he was appointed as the Vatican's chief architect in 1514 upon the death of Bramante,

01:43:23.630 --> 01:43:28.468
strongly recommended, we're told, by the dying Bramante himself.

01:43:28.468 --> 01:43:31.238
We saw earlier how Raphael was involved

01:43:31.238 --> 01:43:35.209
in coordinating several interior-design projects in the Vatican.

01:43:35.209 --> 01:43:41.648
But it's certainly worth mentioning that he was also deeply involved in creating those spaces to begin with:

01:43:41.648 --> 01:43:44.751
carving out Cardinal Bibbiena’s private apartment,

01:43:44.751 --> 01:43:49.523
while substantially modifying the Vatican Loggia from Bramante’s original design

01:43:49.523 --> 01:43:53.327
of a straightforward imitation of the ancient Roman Tabularium,

01:43:53.327 --> 01:43:55.796
to a stunning series of archways and light

01:43:55.796 --> 01:43:59.566
that would perfectly resonate with his unique decorative program.

01:43:59.566 --> 01:44:05.272
Of course, by far his most significant responsibility as Chief Vatican architect

01:44:05.272 --> 01:44:07.808
was that of the new Saint Peter's Basilica,

01:44:07.808 --> 01:44:10.911
the most important church in all of Christendom;

01:44:10.911 --> 01:44:16.650
and, it seems, a correspondingly large architectural headache for Raphael

01:44:16.650 --> 01:44:21.188
He spent a considerable amount of his customary energy on the project,

01:44:21.188 --> 01:44:25.025
replacing Bramante’s plan of a circular style Greek cross

01:44:25.025 --> 01:44:27.694
with a more traditional longitudinal one,

01:44:27.694 --> 01:44:30.497
but he hardly had the time to implement it.

01:44:30.497 --> 01:44:32.199
In the end,

01:44:32.199 --> 01:44:35.702
he became merely one of a long line of chief architects

01:44:35.702 --> 01:44:43.076
to wrestle with the challenge of the new Saint Peter's complex over its 160-year construction odyssey.

01:44:43.877 --> 01:44:48.081
But the architectural effort that is widely viewed as his masterpiece

01:44:48.081 --> 01:44:50.617
was one that was never fully completed:

01:44:50.617 --> 01:44:52.986
the remarkable Villa Madama,

01:44:52.986 --> 01:44:57.724
named, just like Chigi’s Villa Farnesina, after a later owner,

01:44:57.724 --> 01:45:01.595
this time Margaret of Austria or Margaret of Parma,

01:45:01.595 --> 01:45:04.965
the illegitimate daughter of Charles V.

01:45:04.965 --> 01:45:07.534
Perched on the slopes of Monte Mario,

01:45:07.534 --> 01:45:10.337
less than four kilometers north of the Vatican,

01:45:10.337 --> 01:45:15.342
it was commissioned by Leo for his cousin Giulio, the future Pope Clement VII,

01:45:15.342 --> 01:45:22.249
and its primary purpose seems to have been that of a sort of luxurious overnight rest stop for distinguished visitors

01:45:22.249 --> 01:45:26.953
to recuperate from their travels, before making their formal entry into Rome.

01:45:26.953 --> 01:45:30.757
While few clear plans for the villa and grounds remain,

01:45:30.757 --> 01:45:36.029
this is more than compensated for by the existence of a detailed letter from Raphael

01:45:36.029 --> 01:45:39.099
walking us through the building as if it were finished

01:45:39.099 --> 01:45:43.003
to describe its stunning, meticulously thought-out details,

01:45:43.003 --> 01:45:48.442
featuring two courtyards and an elaborate garden framed on its main axis,

01:45:48.442 --> 01:45:51.378
along with a separate private orange grove,

01:45:51.378 --> 01:45:53.180
three logge,

01:45:53.180 --> 01:45:55.182
a hillside theater -

01:45:55.182 --> 01:46:02.656
with dressing rooms for the actors and designed to ensure no during sunlight during the usual late afternoon performance times -

01:46:02.656 --> 01:46:02.689
direct sunlight during the usual late
afternoon performance times -

01:46:02.689 --> 01:46:04.691
a hippodrome,

01:46:04.691 --> 01:46:06.526
extensive stables,

01:46:06.526 --> 01:46:09.563
elaborate basement baths system,

01:46:09.563 --> 01:46:12.232
and several specifically designed areas

01:46:12.232 --> 01:46:15.102
for relaxed, civilizing conversation,

01:46:15.102 --> 01:46:19.373
each one tailored to a particular time of year and temperature,

01:46:19.373 --> 01:46:23.210
in keeping with the building's orientation and surroundings.

01:46:23.210 --> 01:46:27.381
The relatively small part of the structure that was actually built,

01:46:27.381 --> 01:46:32.986
remarkable enough in its own right to have made a strong impression on many over the centuries,

01:46:32.986 --> 01:46:36.256
gives us a palpable sense of what might have been,

01:46:36.256 --> 01:46:39.926
with its beautiful combination of half of the circular courtyard,

01:46:39.926 --> 01:46:44.264
summer loggia, now covered over by glass,

01:46:44.264 --> 01:46:48.869
gardens, fish pond and more.

01:46:48.869 --> 01:46:56.543
The entire project was an emphatic testament to Raphael's passionate belief in the power of ancient Roman architecture.

01:46:56.543 --> 01:47:01.381
That he carefully outlined his ideas and motivations in a detailed letter

01:47:01.381 --> 01:47:06.052
is hardly a coincidence, emphatically mirroring, as it does,

01:47:06.052 --> 01:47:11.224
Pliny the Younger’s famous letters describing his villas 1500 years earlier,

01:47:11.224 --> 01:47:16.196
which explains why Raphael constantly invoked a stream of Latin terminology

01:47:16.196 --> 01:47:19.933
when proudly showcasing what his new palace had to offer.

01:47:19.933 --> 01:47:22.068
Because for Raphael,

01:47:22.068 --> 01:47:26.506
this project clearly represented the culmination of a dream.

01:47:26.506 --> 01:47:31.611
After years of being so strongly influenced by famous classical structures,

01:47:31.611 --> 01:47:38.251
he finally had the chance to create a contemporary one of his very own.

01:47:49.229 --> 01:47:55.035
Raphael’s deep love of classical antiquity and artistic adoption of so many of its features

01:47:55.035 --> 01:47:58.305
clearly predate his 1508 move to Rome,

01:47:58.305 --> 01:48:01.074
so much so that some are convinced

01:48:01.074 --> 01:48:07.614
that a careful inspection of his paintings provides evidence for him having spent time in the city years earlier.n

01:48:07.614 --> 01:48:12.652
Well, that's still an open question, but what can't be debated

01:48:12.652 --> 01:48:16.923
is that the classically-obsessed world of early 16th-century Rome

01:48:16.923 --> 01:48:24.464
was the perfect fit for a young Raphael, determined to integrate antique principles into contemporary art.

01:48:24.464 --> 01:48:27.667
And a figure like Donato Bramante,

01:48:27.667 --> 01:48:32.072
an experienced and powerful force at the head of Julius's comprehensive

01:48:32.072 --> 01:48:36.643
architectural and urban planning program devoted to doing precisely that,

01:48:36.643 --> 01:48:39.513
was an obvious person to associate with,

01:48:39.513 --> 01:48:42.682
learn from, and be influenced by.

01:48:42.682 --> 01:48:45.318
But as we've seen repeatedly,

01:48:45.318 --> 01:48:49.990
from his father to Perugino to Pinturicchio

01:48:49.990 --> 01:48:55.128
to Fra Bartolomeo to Leonardo to Michelangelo

01:48:55.128 --> 01:49:01.735
and many more besides, being influenced by
is hardly the same as copying.

01:49:01.735 --> 01:49:04.871
And so it was with Bramante.

01:49:04.871 --> 01:49:10.877
Raphael surely learned a great deal from Julius's chief architect and fellow Urbino artist,

01:49:10.877 --> 01:49:13.480
whom he clearly deeply respected.

01:49:13.480 --> 01:49:16.783
As it happens, and surely not coincidentally,

01:49:16.783 --> 01:49:21.454
Raphael's luxurious home in the Borgo during his last years in Rome

01:49:21.454 --> 01:49:26.293
was the Palazzo Caprini, designed by none other than Bramante.

01:49:26.293 --> 01:49:31.364
But as usual, Raphael was in no way a mere disciple,

01:49:31.364 --> 01:49:36.069
as can be seen from two of his tapestry cartoons for the Saint Paul's cycle:

01:49:36.069 --> 01:49:40.507
Paul Preaching at Athens and The Sacrifice at Lystra.

01:49:40.507 --> 01:49:46.513
Both have architectural backgrounds that are clearly influenced by Bramante’s celebrated Tempietto:

01:49:46.513 --> 01:49:51.818
a small commemorative structure in the courtyard of the church of San Pietro in Montorio

01:49:51.818 --> 01:49:58.024
commissioned by Ferdinand and Isabello of Spain to mark the believed location of Saint Peter's crucifixion,

01:49:58.024 --> 01:50:02.362
and itself strongly influenced by ancient Roman structures.

01:50:02.362 --> 01:50:07.834
But both of Raphael's Tempietto-like buildings in his tapestry cartoons

01:50:07.834 --> 01:50:12.639
are significantly, if slightly, different from Bramante’s.

01:50:12.639 --> 01:50:15.575
In Paul preaching at Athens,

01:50:15.575 --> 01:50:20.680
the pillars are spaced differently, the upper level is altered and out of sight,

01:50:20.680 --> 01:50:24.751
and the ornate balustrade has been replaced by a simple wooden one.

01:50:24.751 --> 01:50:27.687
While in The Sacrifice at Lystra,

01:50:27.687 --> 01:50:31.725
the underlying structure is comprehensively transformed.

01:50:31.725 --> 01:50:34.761
Once again, the message is clear:

01:50:34.761 --> 01:50:37.197
it's not about repetition,

01:50:37.197 --> 01:50:39.933
it's about absorbing as much as possible

01:50:39.933 --> 01:50:43.403
from as many worthy directions as you can find

01:50:43.403 --> 01:50:49.009
in order to create something best suited to the particular circumstances at hand.

01:50:49.009 --> 01:50:51.845
Nothing was sacrosanct -

01:50:51.845 --> 01:50:57.283
very much, including, most significantly,
the ancients themselves.

01:50:57.283 --> 01:51:01.187
Even Vitruvius, the classical architectural authority

01:51:01.187 --> 01:51:04.224
whose works Raphael had studied very carefully

01:51:04.224 --> 01:51:07.427
and was diligently preparing a first Italian edition of

01:51:07.427 --> 01:51:10.697
in collaboration with his humanist friend Fabio Calvo,

01:51:10.697 --> 01:51:12.799
was hardly off limits.

01:51:12.799 --> 01:51:15.035
Vitruvius’ curmudgeonly lament,

01:51:15.035 --> 01:51:18.138
“We now have fresco paintings of monstrosities,

01:51:18.138 --> 01:51:21.408
rather than truthful representations of definite things.

01:51:21.408 --> 01:51:24.811
How is it possible that a reed should really support a roof?

01:51:24.811 --> 01:51:29.949
Or that such a slender, flexible thing as a stock should support a figure perched upon it?”

01:51:29.949 --> 01:51:34.287
was met cheekily by Raphael and Giovanni da Udine,

01:51:34.287 --> 01:51:42.796
who regularly created intricate examples of vastly more fantastical imaginings than those that had so irritated Vitruvius.

01:51:42.796 --> 01:51:44.798
And then there's Raphael's

01:51:44.798 --> 01:51:47.634
And then there’s Raphael’s famous sketch of the interior of the Pantheon,

01:51:47.634 --> 01:51:52.572
which contains an intriguing number of deviations from the way it actually looks.

01:51:52.572 --> 01:51:57.177
And while most experts maintain that he was working from a poor copy

01:51:57.177 --> 01:52:01.614
or changes were made by a second author, or some other explanation,

01:52:01.614 --> 01:52:05.685
another much more straightforward possibility also exists:

01:52:05.685 --> 01:52:09.789
that he simply thought it looked better the way that he drew it.

01:52:09.789 --> 01:52:14.761
But before you break the rules, you have to know the rules,

01:52:14.761 --> 01:52:18.565
which not only meant rigorously studying the classical texts,

01:52:18.565 --> 01:52:22.469
but also carefully examining ancient works.

01:52:22.469 --> 01:52:24.437
Unfortunately, however,

01:52:24.437 --> 01:52:29.509
many of the new construction projects in Rome, including the new Saint Peter’s,

01:52:29.509 --> 01:52:32.846
were built by cannibalizing ancient monuments,

01:52:32.846 --> 01:52:36.483
leading to their destruction at an alarming rate.

01:52:36.483 --> 01:52:40.787
But Raphael was now in the perfect position to put a stop to things.

01:52:40.787 --> 01:52:46.226
Not only was he the chief architect responsible for the design and construction of Saint Peter’s,

01:52:46.226 --> 01:52:53.433
in the summer of 1515, Leo also put him in charge of all stone and marble to be used for its construction.

01:52:53.433 --> 01:52:59.038
The stage was set for embarking on one of his most ambitious projects of all:

01:52:59.038 --> 01:53:01.541
a rigorous cataloging and reconstruction

01:53:01.541 --> 01:53:05.178
of all ancient Roman monuments and sculptures.

01:53:05.178 --> 01:53:08.848
Which brings us to another of Raphael's famous letters,

01:53:08.848 --> 01:53:15.355
this one addressed directly to Leo and co-written with his humanist friend Baldassare Castiglione

01:53:15.355 --> 01:53:18.224
to provide the necessary literary polish.

01:53:18.224 --> 01:53:24.898
He begins by urging the Pope to officially stop the pernicious modern practice of dismantling ancient monuments

01:53:24.898 --> 01:53:26.566
to construct modern buildings,

01:53:26.566 --> 01:53:33.506
before moving on to give a sort of preliminary report of his personal observations of the city’s ruins,

01:53:33.506 --> 01:53:36.509
since, as he intriguingly mentions,

01:53:36.509 --> 01:53:38.945
Leo had specifically tasked him with:

01:53:38.945 --> 01:53:44.117
“drawing as much of ancient Rome as can be known from what is still to be seen”.

01:53:44.117 --> 01:53:48.354
His general conclusion is that of all the ancient arts,

01:53:48.354 --> 01:53:52.425
architecture declined the slowest, and was the last to be lost,

01:53:52.425 --> 01:53:55.528
citing, as a revealing example,

01:53:55.528 --> 01:53:58.198
the fourth century Arch of Constantine

01:53:58.198 --> 01:54:03.036
that was built in “a beautiful, well-executed architectural style”,

01:54:03.036 --> 01:54:05.238
but whose contemporary reliefs

01:54:05.238 --> 01:54:10.510
were laughingly amateurish compared to the excellent cannibalized works on its upper levels

01:54:10.510 --> 01:54:13.580
that had been created centuries earlier.

01:54:13.580 --> 01:54:20.153
The rest of the letter is focused on best practices required to carry out this ambitious project,

01:54:20.153 --> 01:54:23.656
from an itemization of specific surveying
techniques -

01:54:23.656 --> 01:54:30.864
which, among other things, particularly recommends the magnet compass that Leonardo had used to create his map of Imola

01:54:30.864 --> 01:54:32.632
that we saw earlier -

01:54:32.632 --> 01:54:37.036
to a detailed description of the ideal preparatory architectural drawings,

01:54:37.036 --> 01:54:41.107
explicitly contrasting the needs and orientation of the architect

01:54:41.107 --> 01:54:43.076
with those of the painter.

01:54:43.076 --> 01:54:48.014
Many scholars believe that the letter was written to be a preface for the final document,

01:54:48.014 --> 01:54:51.551
but we’ll likely never know for certain since,

01:54:51.551 --> 01:54:54.053
like far too many of his later projects,

01:54:54.053 --> 01:54:56.723
he never had the chance to complete it.

01:54:56.723 --> 01:55:01.694
And while individual sketches of Roman ruins were naturally produced here and there,

01:55:01.694 --> 01:55:05.598
the first rigorous categorization of ancient Roman monuments

01:55:05.598 --> 01:55:08.034
only appeared several decades later

01:55:08.034 --> 01:55:12.305
with the work of the renowned architect and writer Andrea Palladio.

01:55:12.305 --> 01:55:19.746
It’s often said that of all the countless creative deprivations represented by Raphael's sudden death,

01:55:19.746 --> 01:55:24.751
it was the loss of this uniquely comprehensive visual account of ancient Roman life

01:55:24.751 --> 01:55:30.256
that only he could have produced, that most anguished his humanist friends.

01:55:36.262 --> 01:55:39.599
And humanist friends he most certainly had.

01:55:39.599 --> 01:55:43.636
Ludovico Ariosto, the famous poet and playwright

01:55:43.636 --> 01:55:47.941
who later became the author of the celebrated poem Orlando Furioso,

01:55:47.941 --> 01:55:53.947
reportedly assisted Raphael with making his figures in the Parnassus look suitably poetic;

01:55:53.947 --> 01:55:58.017
and Raphael later returned the favor by designing a stage set

01:55:58.017 --> 01:56:03.189
for a 1519 performance of Ariosto’s play, I Suppositi.

01:56:03.189 --> 01:56:07.293
The literary and scientific polymath Celio Calcagnini

01:56:07.293 --> 01:56:11.097
famously dubbed Raphael “the Prince of painters”,

01:56:11.097 --> 01:56:14.434
while the illustrious scholar Pietro Bembo,

01:56:14.434 --> 01:56:17.136
writing once more to Cardinal Bibbiena,

01:56:17.136 --> 01:56:22.141
described an outing to Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli with four of his close friends:

01:56:22.141 --> 01:56:26.045
Raphael, Baldassare Castiglione,

01:56:26.045 --> 01:56:29.615
the papal diplomat Agostino Beazzano

01:56:29.615 --> 01:56:32.585
and the poet Andrea Navagero,

01:56:32.585 --> 01:56:37.123
to mark the upcoming departure of Navagero
for Venice -

01:56:37.123 --> 01:56:42.996
following which, Raphael painted his wonderful dual portrait of Navagero and Beazzano

01:56:42.996 --> 01:56:48.067
and likely gave it to Bembo as a personal gift to help him remember his friend.

01:56:48.067 --> 01:56:51.137
Cardinal Bibbiena, for his part,

01:56:51.137 --> 01:56:56.609
was so taken with Raphael that he arranged for him to be engaged to his neice

01:56:56.609 --> 01:57:01.447
an otherwise unimaginable alliance to consider for a mere artist.

01:57:01.447 --> 01:57:05.485
But Raphael, of course, was no mere artist.

01:57:05.485 --> 01:57:10.123
He was rich, famous, widely respected,

01:57:10.123 --> 01:57:15.695
and somehow managed to be on intimate terms with people on all sides of the social spectrum,

01:57:15.695 --> 01:57:19.599
from Bindo Altoviti, a pillar of the establishment

01:57:19.599 --> 01:57:22.568
and Agostino Chigi’s banking rival,

01:57:22.568 --> 01:57:26.339
to the scandalously rebellious Pietro Aretino,

01:57:26.339 --> 01:57:30.276
a Chigi protegé who, among many other things,

01:57:30.276 --> 01:57:34.013
penned a satirical pamphlet on the death of Leo's pet elephant

01:57:34.013 --> 01:57:36.916
that skewered many leading members of the Curia.

01:57:37.383 --> 01:57:41.687
Everyone, it seemed, loved Raphael.

01:57:42.388 --> 01:57:45.758
Well, not everyone, as it happens:

01:57:45.758 --> 01:57:49.262
there was this little issue with Michelangelo and his partisans,

01:57:49.262 --> 01:57:51.898
particularly Sebastiano del Piombo,

01:57:51.898 --> 01:57:54.400
but we'll get to that in a minute.

01:57:54.400 --> 01:57:58.971
Meanwhile, Raphael, who somehow managed to find time

01:57:58.971 --> 01:58:03.976
for many love affairs in between, or sometimes during, commissions,

01:58:03.976 --> 01:58:07.146
never did get around to marrying Bibbiena’s niece,

01:58:07.146 --> 01:58:09.849
who ended up dying shortly before he did,

01:58:09.849 --> 01:58:15.988
but instead made additional time to create a series of deeply personal portraits of beautiful women -

01:58:15.988 --> 01:58:18.091
or perhaps one beautiful woman -

01:58:18.091 --> 01:58:22.061
whose identity has long perplexed art historians.

01:58:22.061 --> 01:58:25.264
And through it all: the tapestries,

01:58:25.264 --> 01:58:28.968
the major decorative projects, the architecture,

01:58:28.968 --> 01:58:32.438
the archeology, the personal portraits

01:58:32.438 --> 01:58:37.076
and the ongoing production of prints from Raimondi and his associates,

01:58:37.076 --> 01:58:43.116
a flood of additional commissions increasingly poured into Raphael's hugely overburdened workshop

01:58:43.116 --> 01:58:46.853
that also, somehow, had to be met.

01:58:46.853 --> 01:58:50.256
And yet there was always time for a personal gesture,

01:58:50.256 --> 01:58:52.925
particularly for a fellow artist.

01:58:52.925 --> 01:58:58.664
When Fra Bartolomeo was working in Rome’s San Silvestro al Quirinale church

01:58:58.664 --> 01:59:01.400
but became too ill to finish his planned Saint Peter

01:59:01.400 --> 01:59:05.771
that was to be placed across the altar from his recently completed Saint Paul,

01:59:05.771 --> 01:59:09.675
Raphael stepped in and finished it for him.

01:59:09.675 --> 01:59:11.310
Beautifully.

01:59:11.310 --> 01:59:15.114
And he and Giulio Romano worked together on a conceptual sketch

01:59:15.114 --> 01:59:17.617
on a theme of Alexander and Roxana,

01:59:17.617 --> 01:59:22.922
as part of another decorative scheme to celebrate Chigi’s marriage to Francesca Ordeaschi,

01:59:22.922 --> 01:59:24.857
whose final version was,

01:59:24.857 --> 01:59:27.660
in fact, painted by Sodoma.

01:59:27.660 --> 01:59:32.365
And when Albrecht Dürer reached out to establish contact with Raphael,

01:59:32.365 --> 01:59:34.901
they sent each other samples of their work.

01:59:34.901 --> 01:59:38.938
Dürer offered a self-portrait, now sadly lost,

01:59:38.938 --> 01:59:44.777
while Raphael sent him a preparatory study that was duly inscribed in German with the phrase:

01:59:44.777 --> 01:59:52.885
“Raphael of Urbino, who was so highly esteemed by the Pope, sent this to Albrecht Dürer in Nuremberg.”

01:59:52.885 --> 01:59:59.692
But on the whole, Leo and his court were keeping Raphael and his workshop so intensely engaged,

01:59:59.692 --> 02:00:02.628
that when Alfonso d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara,

02:00:02.628 --> 02:00:06.966
now reconciled with the papacy after his many battles with Julius,

02:00:06.966 --> 02:00:11.637
commissioned a painting from him in 1517 for his burgeoning collection,

02:00:11.637 --> 02:00:18.010
Raphael never got around to converting his designated sketch of the Triumph of Bacchus into a finished work;

02:00:18.010 --> 02:00:22.915
and after his death, the deeply frustrated Duke turned to Titian,

02:00:22.915 --> 02:00:29.689
who obligingly picked up on the Bacchic theme and created his famous Bacchus and Ariadne painting for him instead.

02:00:29.689 --> 02:00:33.326
Not a bad deal in the end, all things considered.

02:00:37.997 --> 02:00:41.067
And as we examine the many portable paintings

02:00:41.067 --> 02:00:44.403
that came from Raphael's workshop during his later years,

02:00:44.403 --> 02:00:46.472
it's worth bearing in mind that,

02:00:46.472 --> 02:00:48.741
while it's naturally the business of scholars

02:00:48.741 --> 02:00:53.379
to rigorously investigate who exactly did what in which parts of each work,

02:00:53.379 --> 02:00:58.217
from Raphael's perspective, the goal was exactly the opposite.

02:00:58.217 --> 02:01:03.022
The whole point was to produce a large volume of high-quality works

02:01:03.022 --> 02:01:07.627
in such a way that clients can't tell which bit of the painting was done by whom,

02:01:07.627 --> 02:01:13.466
instead simply focusing their attention on the overall impact created by the finished work.

02:01:13.466 --> 02:01:18.638
But of course, Raphael's workshop was first and foremost about Rraphael;

02:01:18.638 --> 02:01:26.479
who, as always, continued to develop artistically through his ongoing engagement with his surrounding environment.

02:01:26.479 --> 02:01:29.048
It's hard not to think, for example,

02:01:29.048 --> 02:01:33.552
that Leo's famously musical papal court didn't play a significant role

02:01:33.552 --> 02:01:38.924
in the vivid depiction of musical rapture in his Saint Cecilia Altarpiece.

02:01:38.924 --> 02:01:41.527
And then, once again,

02:01:41.527 --> 02:01:49.568
there was Leonardo da Vinci, who spent much of the period from 1513 to 1516 quitely living in the Vatican -

02:01:49.568 --> 02:01:56.008
largely, but not exclusively, focused on his scientific activities.

02:01:56.008 --> 02:02:00.279
And while there's no documented record of their interaction during this time,

02:02:00.279 --> 02:02:05.685
it's virtually certain that Raphael would have sought out his company on many occasions.

02:02:05.685 --> 02:02:11.390
And it's surely no coincidence that so many of Raphael's devotional paintings from that period

02:02:11.390 --> 02:02:18.631
began to display an unquestionably Leonardesque influence in their penetrating combinations of light and darkness,

02:02:18.631 --> 02:02:24.804
very much including those commissioned by Leo as a gift to the French court of the new kin, Francois I,

02:02:24.804 --> 02:02:28.374
where the 66-year-old Leonardo had by then moved to;

02:02:28.374 --> 02:02:31.444
perhaps a coded message to Leonardo,

02:02:31.444 --> 02:02:33.079
who surely would have seen them;

02:02:33.079 --> 02:02:39.752
a personal testimony to his ongoing artistic legacy in the Italy he left behind.

02:02:44.523 --> 02:02:47.693
Relations with Michelangelo, on the other hand,

02:02:47.693 --> 02:02:50.629
were of a different sort entirely.

02:02:50.629 --> 02:02:55.067
While their early encounters in Florence seem to have been quite amiable,

02:02:55.067 --> 02:02:57.269
by the time they met up again in Rome,

02:02:57.269 --> 02:03:02.842
Raphael had moved from being a promising youngster to a serious rival.

02:03:02.842 --> 02:03:10.049
He was dashing, fantastically popular, and there were increasing rumblings that his compositions,

02:03:10.049 --> 02:03:12.618
with their remarkably coherent beauty,

02:03:12.618 --> 02:03:17.123
were simply better than anything Michelangelo had ever achieved.

02:03:17.123 --> 02:03:21.427
“Oh, Michelangelo was wonderful, of course,”  everyone agreed,

02:03:21.427 --> 02:03:23.696
“Terrifyingly so at times.

02:03:23.696 --> 02:03:27.800
But Raphael, well Raphael was heavenly” -

02:03:27.800 --> 02:03:35.508
the ideal artist who served as proof for many obsessed with the then-raging “Paragone” debate comparing painting with sculpture

02:03:35.508 --> 02:03:39.245
that painting was clearly the superior art form.

02:03:39.245 --> 02:03:43.716
This unsurprisingly rankled the famously touchy Michelangelo,

02:03:43.716 --> 02:03:46.886
and not just because he was the world's best sculptor,

02:03:46.886 --> 02:03:51.724
but because so many of Raphael's allegedly divinely-inspired images

02:03:51.724 --> 02:03:57.496
bore an obvious resemblance to his own twisting figures on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

02:03:57.496 --> 02:04:03.803
And when Leo came to power, Leo in whose household Michelangelo had virtually grown up,

02:04:03.803 --> 02:04:06.338
somehow nothing changed.

02:04:06.338 --> 02:04:10.142
Raphael was chosen for the Sistine Tapestries.

02:04:10.142 --> 02:04:14.480
Raphael was chosen as Chief Architect of the Vatican.

02:04:14.480 --> 02:04:23.322
Meanwhile, he, Michelangelo, was plagued with the millstone of creating Julius’ monumental and inachievably grandiose tomb.

02:04:23.322 --> 02:04:27.927
True, Leo had appointed him to design the facade of San Lorenzo,

02:04:27.927 --> 02:04:33.232
the Medici family church in Florence,  mercifully rejecting the design of Raphael.

02:04:33.232 --> 02:04:37.636
But perhaps that was merely a ploy to get him out of Rome for a while?

02:04:37.636 --> 02:04:40.706
So when, thanks to Agostino Chigi,

02:04:40.706 --> 02:04:43.008
Sebastiano appeared on the scene -

02:04:43.008 --> 02:04:46.979
a young, highly talented ,Georgione-trained painter,

02:04:46.979 --> 02:04:54.253
Michelangelo sensed an opportunity to put this ambitious young Urbino upstart in his place once and for all.

02:04:54.253 --> 02:04:59.992
He began a close collaboration with Sebastiano by providing him with conceptual drawings

02:04:59.992 --> 02:05:03.295
that Sebastiano would incorporate in finished paintings,

02:05:03.295 --> 02:05:05.731
including an outstanding Pietà

02:05:05.731 --> 02:05:08.300
with a highly innovative night landscape,

02:05:08.300 --> 02:05:15.040
and a compelling series of frescoes in the Borgherini Chapel in the Roman church of San Pietro in Montorio,

02:05:15.040 --> 02:05:18.878
the one whose courtyard contains Bramante’s famous Tempietto,

02:05:18.878 --> 02:05:25.217
tha features a riveting scene of the Flagellation of Christ, topped by a Transfiguration,

02:05:25.217 --> 02:05:29.288
combining Michelangelo's notoriously powerful imagination

02:05:29.288 --> 02:05:36.795
with Sebastiano’s vividly pioneering successful use of oil painting directly on the chapel walls.

02:05:36.795 --> 02:05:40.232
Meanwhile, Leo's cousin Giulio,

02:05:40.232 --> 02:05:45.237
the patron of what later became Villa Madama and future Pope Clement VII,

02:05:45.237 --> 02:05:48.307
had recently added the position of Bishop of Narbonne

02:05:48.307 --> 02:05:50.910
to his rapidly growing list of titles,

02:05:50.910 --> 02:05:57.283
and decided to celebrate the occasion by commissioning two large altarpieces for the Narbonne Cathedral

02:05:57.283 --> 02:06:01.453
on two common iconographical themes that were often paired:

02:06:01.453 --> 02:06:05.558
a Transfiguration of Christ and a Raising of Lazarus;

02:06:05.558 --> 02:06:08.193
setting the stage for a direct

02:06:08.193 --> 02:06:12.665
and demonstrably public, confrontation between Raphael,

02:06:12.665 --> 02:06:14.800
who was awarded the Transfiguration,

02:06:14.800 --> 02:06:17.303
and Michelangelo, and Sebastiano,

02:06:17.303 --> 02:06:20.606
who worked together on The Raising of Lazarus.

02:06:20.606 --> 02:06:25.511
Both paintings were universally declared to be masterpieces,

02:06:25.511 --> 02:06:32.484
but Raphael's Transfiguration, with its dramatically innovative combination of a floating transfigured Christ

02:06:32.484 --> 02:06:36.455
above the Apostles vainly struggling to cure a possessed boy,

02:06:36.455 --> 02:06:39.124
had clearly emerged the victor.

02:06:39.124 --> 02:06:41.927
And once again, inescapably,

02:06:41.927 --> 02:06:44.797
is Raphael's homage to Leonardo:

02:06:44.797 --> 02:06:48.334
Not only his powerful use of light and shading,

02:06:48.334 --> 02:06:56.875
but now through an obvious reference to a figure from Leonardo's hugely influential, if unfinished, Adoration of the Magi,

02:06:56.875 --> 02:07:00.079
painted almost 40 years earlier.

02:07:00.079 --> 02:07:03.816
Victory, it seemed, was complete.

02:07:03.816 --> 02:07:07.186
The Raising of Lazarus was sent to Narbonne,

02:07:07.186 --> 02:07:10.923
together with a quickly commissioned copy of the Transfiguration,

02:07:10.923 --> 02:07:16.295
while the original was kept in Rome, deemed too precious to leave.

02:07:16.295 --> 02:07:19.732
But Raphael had no time to bask in this triumph,

02:07:19.732 --> 02:07:22.101
which was fated to be his last.

02:07:22.101 --> 02:07:26.605
In April 1520, he suddenly died after a short illness,

02:07:26.605 --> 02:07:31.644
and the first public display of his Transfiguration was over his dead body

02:07:31.644 --> 02:07:36.148
before he was buried, most fittingly, in the Pantheon.

02:07:47.359 --> 02:07:53.899
Raphael's sudden death meant that his workshop had to pick up even more of the slack for works already commissioned,

02:07:53.899 --> 02:07:57.903
but now, without the vital ongoing coordination of the master,

02:07:57.903 --> 02:08:00.639
both personally and professionally.

02:08:00.639 --> 02:08:04.410
And by far the most significant of all projects in the pipeline

02:08:04.410 --> 02:08:09.181
was the last of the four Vatican Stanze: the Hall of Constantine.

02:08:09.181 --> 02:08:14.420
Sebastiano, who now found himself as the undisputed leading painter in Rome,

02:08:14.420 --> 02:08:18.424
had tried to wrestle the commission away from Raphael’s workshop,

02:08:18.424 --> 02:08:22.828
even cajoling Michelangelo to write to Leo on his behalf.

02:08:22.828 --> 02:08:25.998
But Giulio Romano and Gianfancesco Penni,

02:08:25.998 --> 02:08:30.502
Raphael's two main assistants, whom he jointly designated as his heirs,

02:08:30.502 --> 02:08:35.607
successfully argued that they were in possession of Raphael's detailed designs for the room,

02:08:35.607 --> 02:08:38.610
and were thus ideally placed to execute them.

02:08:38.610 --> 02:08:43.015
The plan in question was a typically intricate and innovative one,

02:08:43.015 --> 02:08:49.688
consisting of four large paintings of key scenes in the life of Emperor Constantine, portayed as tapestries;

02:08:49.688 --> 02:08:55.094
with each of the four flanked by seated
popes, themselves surrounded by angels,

02:08:55.094 --> 02:09:00.399
caryatids and allegorical figures
on either side representing two virtues.

02:09:00.399 --> 02:09:03.802
The vividly decorated ceiling that now greets visitors,

02:09:03.802 --> 02:09:07.372
was not part of the plan, and was created decades later,

02:09:07.372 --> 02:09:09.908
towards the end of the 16th century.

02:09:09.908 --> 02:09:14.413
In addition to spending considerable effort crafting the overall theme for this room,

02:09:14.413 --> 02:09:20.252
Raphael had also contemplated creating it in oil rather than fresco.

02:09:20.252 --> 02:09:25.557
Two initial figures - the allegorical virtues of Justice and Comitas -

02:09:25.557 --> 02:09:28.127
were painted in oil as test cases,

02:09:28.127 --> 02:09:30.028
but at the end of the day,

02:09:30.028 --> 02:09:36.568
perhaps recalling Leonardo's disastrous Florentine experiment of the Battle of Anghiari 15 years earlier,

02:09:36.568 --> 02:09:41.640
it was decided to stop and do all the remaining work in fresco.

02:09:41.640 --> 02:09:49.114
Recent restoration efforts have led some to conclude that both of those first oil paintings were painted by Raphael himself,

02:09:49.114 --> 02:09:54.920
and thus represent his very last works,
while others attribute them to Giulio Romano,

02:09:54.920 --> 02:09:58.023
Raphael's precociously talented favorite pupil

02:09:58.023 --> 02:10:02.661
who had already collaborated with him on numerous major commissions.

02:10:02.661 --> 02:10:06.598
Meanwhile, directly below the Hall of Constantine,

02:10:06.598 --> 02:10:11.403
in the entrance hall for the Borgia Apartments known as the Sala dei Pontefici,

02:10:11.403 --> 02:10:14.373
two other stars of Raphael's workshop,

02:10:14.373 --> 02:10:19.044
Giovanni da Udine and Perin del Vaga, were hard at work,

02:10:19.044 --> 02:10:25.617
rapidly crafting their own astrological iconography of the ceiling in vivid color.

02:10:25.851 --> 02:10:28.954
The Hall of Constantine above them, however,

02:10:28.954 --> 02:10:33.992
took considerably longer to complete, both because of its sheer complexity,

02:10:33.992 --> 02:10:38.564
and because Leo's own unexpected death at the end of 1521,

02:10:38.564 --> 02:10:43.769
was followed by a two year hiatus under his short-lived successor, Adrian VI,

02:10:43.769 --> 02:10:50.876
with work in the room only resuming after the 1523 papal election of Leo’s cousin Giulio de Medici,

02:10:50.876 --> 02:10:53.345
who became Clement VII.

02:10:53.345 --> 02:10:57.249
The four main paintings:
The Allocution of Constantine,

02:10:57.249 --> 02:10:59.618
The Battle of the Milvian Bridge,

02:10:59.618 --> 02:11:01.954
The Baptism of Constantine

02:11:01.954 --> 02:11:04.356
and The Donation of Constantine

02:11:04.356 --> 02:11:11.430
are all monumental, carefully constructed works in the style of all of Raphael's major decorative projects,

02:11:11.430 --> 02:11:14.399
with a strong sense of thematic coherence

02:11:14.399 --> 02:11:17.769
and filled with many captivating personal touches -

02:11:17.769 --> 02:11:23.809
like the flagrantly anachronistic,  yet completely geographically accurate, Villa Madama

02:11:23.809 --> 02:11:27.079
in the top left corner of The Battle of the Milvian Bridge,

02:11:27.079 --> 02:11:32.284
with construction having resumed now that its patron had ascended to the papacy.

02:11:36.521 --> 02:11:43.095
But while the real Villa Madama was once more slowly progressing on both the construction and decorative fronts,

02:11:43.095 --> 02:11:48.634
it was also increasingly falling victim to the absence of Raphael's harmonizing influence,

02:11:48.634 --> 02:11:51.904
with Giulio Romano and Giovanni da Udine,

02:11:51.904 --> 02:11:54.339
so frequently quarreling over control

02:11:54.339 --> 02:12:00.212
that Clement depsiaringly referred to them in a private letter as “those two madmen”.

02:12:00.212 --> 02:12:04.483
A particularly revealing example of how far the atmosphere had degraded

02:12:04.483 --> 02:12:09.721
among members of Raphael's once close-knit team is the Monteluce Altarpiece,

02:12:09.721 --> 02:12:14.693
the long-unfinished commission awarded to Raphael back in 1505.

02:12:14.693 --> 02:12:18.830
It was finally completed by Penni and Romano some 20 years later,

02:12:18.830 --> 02:12:22.234
with one taking the bottom half and the other the top half,

02:12:22.234 --> 02:12:25.704
before simply joining the two sections together.

02:12:25.704 --> 02:12:31.310
It's hard to imagine something less coherently Raphael-like than that.

02:12:31.310 --> 02:12:36.214
Clearly, it was time for everyone to go his separate way.

02:12:36.214 --> 02:12:40.052
Giulio Romano left Rome in the mid 1520s,

02:12:40.052 --> 02:12:43.288
quite possibly spurred on by the arrest of Raimondi,

02:12:43.288 --> 02:12:46.725
with whom he had collaborated on a series of pornographic prints,

02:12:46.725 --> 02:12:52.831
and became a highly successful painter and architect based at the Gonzaga court in Mantua.

02:12:52.831 --> 02:12:57.202
A few years after Giulio’s departure came the Sack of Rome;

02:12:57.202 --> 02:13:03.375
and the last remnants of Raphael's once-mighty workshop were scattered to the winds.

02:13:09.381 --> 02:13:14.386
But Raphael’s artistic influence was hardly limited to his workshop.

02:13:14.386 --> 02:13:19.891
Given his astounding breadth, productivity and consequent fame,

02:13:19.891 --> 02:13:24.029
his impact over the ages has been nothing short of enormous,

02:13:24.029 --> 02:13:27.265
with the list of names of those falling under his sway

02:13:27.265 --> 02:13:31.803
reading like a veritable who's who of the history of Western art.

02:13:31.803 --> 02:13:35.173
His great Florentine contemporary, Andrea del Sarto,

02:13:35.173 --> 02:13:39.978
was not only clearly affected by numerous aspects of Raphael’s style,

02:13:39.978 --> 02:13:42.247
he went so far as to famously forge

02:13:42.247 --> 02:13:49.054
his portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de Medici and Luigi de Rossi for the Duke of Mantua,

02:13:49.054 --> 02:13:51.990
which was said to have even fooled Giulio Romano,

02:13:51.990 --> 02:13:54.726
who claimed to have worked on the original.

02:13:54.726 --> 02:14:00.465
Michiel Coxie, the Flemish court painter to both  Charles V and Philip II of Spain,

02:14:00.465 --> 02:14:05.370
nicknamed “the Flemish Raphael”, spent his formative years in Rome,

02:14:05.370 --> 02:14:11.243
carefully studying, and indeed sometimes copying, Raphael’s works;

02:14:11.243 --> 02:14:17.849
Peter Paul Rubens repeatedly engaged with Raphael’s techniques and ideas throughout his life;

02:14:17.849 --> 02:14:23.522
and went on to pattern many aspects of his highly successful workshop methods after him;

02:14:23.522 --> 02:14:28.460
Nicolas Poussin was often referred to as “the French Raphael”,

02:14:28.460 --> 02:14:34.599
given that so many of his figures could well have jumped right out of a Raphael painting or tapestry;

02:14:34.599 --> 02:14:37.803
Claude Lorraine’s Adoration of the Golden Calf

02:14:37.803 --> 02:14:43.075
is clearly related to the same scene from Raphael's Bible in the Vatican Loggia;

02:14:43.075 --> 02:14:49.181
Rembrandt, whose later bankruptcy inventory contains several Raphael related paintings,

02:14:49.181 --> 02:14:52.317
famously sketched the portrait of Baldassare Castiglione

02:14:52.317 --> 02:14:56.988
that he had glimpsed momentarily at a 1639 Amsterdam auction;

02:14:56.988 --> 02:15:00.692
Turner occupied himself during a formative visit to Rome,

02:15:00.692 --> 02:15:05.430
drawing the statue of Jonah in the Chigi chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo,

02:15:05.430 --> 02:15:08.800
as well as the house that was then widely - and wrongly -

02:15:08.800 --> 02:15:11.970
believed to have been Raphael’s private residence,

02:15:11.970 --> 02:15:16.708
before producing a vivid, imaginary painting depicting Raphael,

02:15:16.708 --> 02:15:22.047
accompanied by La Fornarina, preparing his decorative scheme for the Vatican Loggia;

02:15:22.047 --> 02:15:24.216
which, among other things,

02:15:24.216 --> 02:15:29.454
gives us a remarkable sense of what it must have felt like to be there in 1820.

02:15:29.454 --> 02:15:33.125
Eugène Delacroix was obviously hugely influenced

02:15:33.125 --> 02:15:36.895
by Raphael's drawings, paintings and related prints,

02:15:36.895 --> 02:15:41.032
many aspects of which were directly reflected in much of his work,

02:15:41.032 --> 02:15:45.137
while Renoir was particularly struck by the power of Raphael

02:15:45.137 --> 02:15:48.907
during his formative trip to Italy in the early 1880s,

02:15:48.907 --> 02:15:53.845
which played such a strong role in his own subsequent artistic development.

02:15:53.845 --> 02:15:59.184
Which is all to say that rigorously assessing Raphael's impact on the history of art

02:15:59.184 --> 02:16:02.487
turns out to be an impossibly difficult task.

02:16:02.487 --> 02:16:06.258
Aside from the countless places where you'd expect to find it,

02:16:06.258 --> 02:16:10.028
there are many times that it surprisingly leaps out at you.

02:16:10.028 --> 02:16:14.866
Like the indisputable link between Raymond's print of Raphael's Judgment of Paris

02:16:14.866 --> 02:16:19.671
and Édouard Manet's groundbreaking Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe;

02:16:19.671 --> 02:16:24.876
or Salvador Dalí’s clearly unquenchable thirst for all things Raphael

02:16:24.876 --> 02:16:29.648
that repeatedly manifested itself throughout both his life and art.

02:16:31.550 --> 02:16:34.719
So, influence - certainly.

02:16:34.719 --> 02:16:37.155
But 500 years later,

02:16:37.155 --> 02:16:41.259
what is it about Raphael that makes him so special?

02:16:41.259 --> 02:16:45.697
What, in other words, is his legacy, exactly?

02:16:47.032 --> 02:16:51.269
This turns out to be a surprisingly difficult question to answer,

02:16:51.269 --> 02:16:55.574
not only because of the sheer extent and variety of his works,

02:16:55.574 --> 02:16:59.077
but also because, over the past five centuries

02:16:59.077 --> 02:17:04.616
he's come to represent so many very different and often contradictory notions:

02:17:04.616 --> 02:17:07.719
a divinely inspired creative force

02:17:07.719 --> 02:17:09.921
or a brilliant imitator;

02:17:09.921 --> 02:17:12.891
a boldly pioneering archeologist,

02:17:12.891 --> 02:17:16.595
or a perniciously constraining establishment trope.

02:17:16.595 --> 02:17:21.166
The cascade of juxtapositions began immediately after his death,

02:17:21.166 --> 02:17:25.937
starting with the moving epitaph, attributed by some to Pietro Bembo

02:17:25.937 --> 02:17:28.473
and others to Antonio Tebaldeo:

02:17:28.473 --> 02:17:31.843
“Here lies Raphael. When he was living,

02:17:31.843 --> 02:17:36.114
Nature feared she would be conquered; and as he was dying,

02:17:36.114 --> 02:17:39.251
Nature feared she, too, would die.

02:17:39.251 --> 02:17:43.688
It was a vivid encapsulation of Raphael as the ideal artist

02:17:43.688 --> 02:17:46.825
whose powers can even transcend reality,

02:17:46.825 --> 02:17:51.363
and was explicitly reiterated in Castiglione’s highly influential Book of the Courtier

02:17:51.363 --> 02:17:54.766
published a few years later, in 1528.

02:17:55.533 --> 02:17:57.869
Michelangelo, meanwhile,

02:17:57.869 --> 02:18:01.706
was no more willing to lose to a dead Raphael than a live one;

02:18:01.706 --> 02:18:08.947
and countered by publishing his official biography in 1553 through his disciple Ascanio Condivi,

02:18:08.947 --> 02:18:11.850
where the defining aspect of the ideal artist

02:18:11.850 --> 02:18:15.120
is his mysteriously inexplicable genius,

02:18:15.120 --> 02:18:20.625
in striking contrast to Raphael's workman-like determination to learn from those around him.

02:18:20.625 --> 02:18:23.828
Which explains why the biography emphatically rejects

02:18:23.828 --> 02:18:28.099
Michelangelo’s well-documented apprenticeship to Domenico Ghirlandaio,

02:18:28.099 --> 02:18:34.673
determined as it was to portray Michelangelo as a miraculously self-taught creative force.

02:18:34.673 --> 02:18:39.077
A few years later, the Venetian humanist Ludovico Dolce

02:18:39.077 --> 02:18:44.449
published a celebrated dialog on painting that featured the character of Pietro Aretino,

02:18:44.449 --> 02:18:49.921
the former Chigi protegé, and now an infamous satirist and blackmailer living in Venice,

02:18:49.921 --> 02:18:55.560
who specifically expressed his preference for Raphael’s paintings over those of Michelangelo.

02:18:55.560 --> 02:18:59.264
And then came the hugely influential second edition

02:18:59.264 --> 02:19:02.000
of the Michelangelo-worshiping Giorgio Vasari’s

02:19:02.000 --> 02:19:05.804
Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects,

02:19:05.804 --> 02:19:08.673
which famously describes how Raphael,

02:19:08.673 --> 02:19:13.545
recognizing that he couldn't compete with Michelangelo's genius on its own grounds,

02:19:13.545 --> 02:19:18.316
astutely decided to combine effort and study with his gentle disposition

02:19:18.316 --> 02:19:22.587
and love of the classical world to become the perfect court artist

02:19:22.587 --> 02:19:26.624
whose innate talent, combined with his constantly developing technique,

02:19:26.624 --> 02:19:32.430
had enabled him
to, as we've seen, rival nature herself.

02:19:33.164 --> 02:19:42.073
As it happened, Vasari's account of Raphael increasingly led him to become adopted by the artistic authorities as the ideal model,

02:19:42.073 --> 02:19:45.910
since genius, after all, couldn't be taught.

02:19:45.910 --> 02:19:49.280
And so, irony of ironies,

02:19:49.280 --> 02:19:53.184
one of the most dynamic and protean artists of all time

02:19:53.184 --> 02:20:01.192
became gradually fossilized as the canonical painter who must be strictly emulated at all costs.

02:20:02.360 --> 02:20:10.602
Louis XIV’s court painter Charles Le Brun was a devoted follower, producing both exact copies of Raphael's works

02:20:10.602 --> 02:20:16.574
and his own large-scale scenes, clearly inspired by Raphael-related compositions.

02:20:16.574 --> 02:20:21.346
The influential Dutch painter and art theorist Gérard de Lairesse

02:20:21.346 --> 02:20:27.919
was clearly another Raphael devotee, enthusiastically declaring that he was the greatest of painters,

02:20:27.919 --> 02:20:31.356
despite having only seen his work through prints.

02:20:31.356 --> 02:20:36.961
While Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts,

02:20:36.961 --> 02:20:41.099
who spent a formative two years in Rome
studying Raphael intensely,

02:20:41.099 --> 02:20:44.135
became convinced that the secret to artistic excellence

02:20:44.135 --> 02:20:50.375
lay in combining a Raphael-like studiousness with individual inventiveness.

02:20:50.375 --> 02:20:54.345
Reynolds’s younger French contemporary, Jacques-Louis David,

02:20:54.345 --> 02:20:57.749
was also a passionate admirer of Raphael,

02:20:57.749 --> 02:21:02.487
whose influence can be clearly seen in both David's devotional works

02:21:02.487 --> 02:21:09.327
and large scale compositions that played such a strong role in the merging of art and politics of the day.

02:21:09.327 --> 02:21:14.599
While perhaps the most fanatical Raphael-lover of all was David’s student,

02:21:14.599 --> 02:21:18.036
the neoclassicist Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres,

02:21:18.036 --> 02:21:22.740
who, when not conjuring up imagined scenes from Raphael's life,

02:21:22.740 --> 02:21:30.281
was adamantly pointing to him as the artistic bulwark in his lifelong battle against the dreaded Romantics.

02:21:30.281 --> 02:21:32.417
By the 1830s,

02:21:32.417 --> 02:21:39.858
Raphael-mania reached such heights that Pope Gregory XVI elected to publicly reopen his Pantheon tomb

02:21:39.858 --> 02:21:43.561
in a desperate effort to counter the growing, Elvis-like rumors

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that either part or all of his body had managed to escape.

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Raphael had become nothing less than a holy relic of the Church of Art.

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But by then the backlash was well on its way,

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beginning with the Nazarene Movement,

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a group of German Romantic painters living in an abandoned monastery in Rome

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and rebelling against the neoclassical authorities, with their focus on arid, technical virtuosity

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calling instead for a return to the directly pious artistic traditions of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.

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The Nazarenes, who had nothing negative to say about Raphael, had largely disbanded by the early 1830s,

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but their rallying cry was picked up less than two decades later

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by an English group of artists, who called themselves “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood”,

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so named, because for them,

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Raphael was inextricably associated with the stultifying classicism of academic orthodoxy

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at the expense of honest spiritual sentiment.

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The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was strongly endorsed

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by the writer, artist and art critic John Ruskin,

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who notoriously characterized the Stanza della Segnatura as

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“the degradation of the intellect and art of Italy,

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where execution was looked for rather than thought, and beauty rather than veracity”.

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And then, more than a century later,

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Raphael's public reputation changed yet again,

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with his passionate respect for ancient monuments, as detailed in his celebrated letter to Leo X,

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making him the pioneering visionary of cultural preservation,

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the prescient antecedent of Article 9 of the Italian Constitution

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that highlighted the need to protect the historical and artistic heritage of the nation.

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But however hot and cold the winds have blown from the authorities of the day,

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declaiming what Raphael officially represented,

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there has always been a steady stream of people

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simply strongly resonating with what he'd actually created.

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From Russia's Catherine the Great,

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who was so transfixed by the Vatican Loggia that she had her own exact copy made in Saint Petersburg,

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where it still remains today as part of the Hermitage Museum;

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to Goethe, whose “Italian Journey”

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vividly describes his exhilaration at studying the School of Athens

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and feeling awestruck by Raphael's “pure thought and clarity”;

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to George Sand’s detailed assessment of how the Madonna della Seggiola

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so movingly portrays a divine ideal through a captivating depiction of genuine human tenderness;

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to Prince Albert's avid determination to use the new technology of photography

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to gather together anything associated with Raphael that he could get his hands on -

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which explains the impressive state of today's Raphael collection of the Royal Collection Trust;

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to Franz Liszt’s hauntingly beautiful piano work Sposalizio,

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directly inspired, we're told,

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by standing in front of Raphael's painting of the same name.

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The impact of Raphael, in other words,

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is at once universal and profoundly personal.

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For me, at least,

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if there's one thing about Raphael that stands out above all others,

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one thing that marks him out

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as indisputably one of the greatest artists of all time,

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it's not his productivity

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or his phenomenal drawing skills,

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or even the overpowering beauty of his art -

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remarkable as all those surely are -

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it's his unrelenting determination to harmoniously synthesize,

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ensuring that each of his compositions,

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from the smallest paintings to the largest buildings,

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is so strikingly balanced and coherent

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that every viewer in any particular time, place or cultural milieu,

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is naturally led to engage in his or her own uniquely moving intellectual and emotional experience.

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So when you hear that Picasso created his famous anti-war testament Guernica

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after being inspired by Raphael’s Fire in the Borgo,

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believe it,

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despite all of the many obvious differences  between the two masterpieces.

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Because that, I'm convinced, is the true legacy of Raphael.

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[rhythmic concluding  music]