A walk in Rome, celebrating Raphael’s 500th anniversary
Raphael, Self-portrait, 1506-1508. Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi.
This year marks the 500th anniversary of the death of Raffaello Sanzio (1483-1520), one of the greatest artists who ever lived.
His exceptional career grew rapidly and his artistic influence was immense. Born in Urbino and the pupil of Perugino, he worked in the Marche, Umbria and Tuscany, before moving to Rome in 1509, where he promptly became one of the most highly esteemed and sought-after artists by popes, cardinals, and other pre-eminent members of the Roman ecclesiastical and intellectual milieu. It is enough here to mention the stunning oil portraits of Pope Julius II (before March 1512) and Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi (1518), preserved, respectively, at the National Gallery in London and the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence.
At the pinnacle of his fame and only thirty-seven years old, Raphael died unexpectedly in the papal city, a circumstance which significantly contributed to the ensuing myth of the divine Urbinate, helped of course by the eternal beauty of his paintings and drawings.
Raphael, Portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi, 1518. Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi.
Already celebrated among his contemporaries during his lifetime, “Rafael da Urbino” was definitively apotheosized by Giorgio Vasari in his Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architetti (Florence 1550), as a man and an artist who embodied infinite riches, graces and the rarest of gifts bestowed by Heaven.
One year before the appearance of Vasari’s monumental Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, a smaller, rarer, and unquestionably lesser known work linked to Raphael was published: Della nobilissima pittura (On the Noble Art of Painting) by Michelangelo Biondo, issued in Venice in 1549. We offer here an exceedingly rare copy of this work, printed on blue paper (see the complete description here), one of the entries in our latest catalogue, Italian Books II, devoted entirely to books printed on blue paper (see the full catalogue here).
The Venetian Michelangelo Biondo (1500-1565) also belonged to the crowd of Raphael’s enthusiastic admirers. Born in Venice, Biondo studied arts and medicine in Naples under the celebrated philosopher Agostino Nifo, and during his life he published works on a broad range of topics, from medicine to astrology and from navigation to ethics, earning – like numerous other sixteenth-century writers, such as Ludovico Dolce, or Anton Francesco Doni – the label of a poligrafo.
Between ca. 1535 and 1545, Biondo sojourned in Rome, where he practiced as a physician, and became acquainted with important members of Pope Paul III’s Farnese court. He had access to noble residences, and could admire artworks commissioned by wealthy patrons to the major artists then active in Rome.
Back in Venice in 1545, sources refer to Biondo’s activity – a feature common among the poligrafi – as a publisher, hidden under the mark All’insegna di Appolline, possibly a choice revealing his special love for the arts. In fact, around twenty editions of works by Biondo himself or other authors were produced in Venice between 1545 and 1565, and bear on their title-pages such indications such ‘Alla insegna di Apolline appresso il Biondo’, ‘apud Blondum sub signo Apolline’, ‘dal tugurio del Biondo’, ‘dalla casuppula del Biondo’, or more generally ‘sub signo Apolline’, or ‘all’insegna di Appolline’.
However, it is very unlikely that Biondo had a printing house of his own. Rather, the material operations of printing were managed, on his commission, by various Venetian presses, above all those run by Comin da Trino, Bartolomeo Imperatore, Nicolò Bascarini, and the brothers Nicolini da Sabbio.
Della nobilissima pittura belongs to Biondo’s Venetian activity as a writer and as a publisher. Its first and only edition appeared in 1549, and the title-page bears, as the place of printing, the indication All’insegna di Appolline, but the responsibility of printing was given to the aforementioned Bartolomeo Imperatore. The edition, likely issued in a small run, is very rare, with copies found in only nine institutional Italian libraries, to which the Vatican Library and the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome are also to be added. It is also rarely seen on the market: there exists only one auction record of an ordinary copy in the last sixty years, and only one other copy on blue paper is recorded, this being preserved in the Fondo Cicognara of the Biblioteca Vaticana, i.e., the collection once amassed by Count Leopoldo Cicognara (1767-1834) with an especial focus on works devoted to art history. The blue-paper copy of Biondo’s Della nobilissima pittura presented here could well be that volume in carta Turchina listed in the catalogue of the Bibliotheca Smithiana, the celebrated library assembled by Joseph Smith (ca. 1682-1770), British consul in Venice between 1744 and 1760, and well known for have being the patron of Canaletto.
Della nobilissima pittura is presented as a tribute to the noble art of painting as well as a strong defence of its high stature among the liberal arts, and is replete with references to classical authors, including Plato, Aristotle, Plutarchus, and Vitruvius. Biondo dedicates his publishing initiative to the “Eccellentissimi Pittori di tutta l’Europa”, that is, the “Most Excellent Painters from all over Europe”.
Biondo’s work represents – despite its small size, the volume containing only eight four-leaf quires – one of the most valuable works on art produced during the Italian Renaissance. Biondo also quotes various other texts on the topic, thereby offering an interesting survey of Renaissance art theory.
Biondo also deals with technical aspects, such as the preparation of paint colours, but the most interesting chapters are those devoted entirely to individual contemporary artists, “li Pittori famosi di questa etate”, of whom he mentions their ‘glorious’ works and, quite interestingly, their location at that time. Here the work reveals its debt to Biondo’s ten-year sojourn in Rome, during which time he could visit churches and palaces to discover masterworks whose presence in his memory still remained so vivid in 1549. The artists mentioned had in effect been active mainly in the papal city and – thanks to the brief descriptions included in Della nobilissima pittura – one can walk the streets, squares, and riversides, and enter churches, palaces and galleries, to discover their portraits, frescoes, and altarpieces. For example, the paintings executed by the Florentine Perino del Vaga (1501-1547) can be found in the church of San Marcello and in the Pucci Chapel in the Trinità dei Monti (fol. E1r), the frescoes by another artist from Florence, Francesco Salviati (1510-1563), in the church of Santa Maria dell’Anima (fol. E1v), and Polidoro da Caravaggio (1499/1500-1543), responsible, in partnernship with Maturino da Firenze (1490-1528 ), for the frescoes painted on the facades of the “palaggio di Gadi”, i.e., the palace originally owned by the wealthy Florentine Gaddi family, depicting scenes of hunting and antiquity, which are now entirely lost (fol. E3v).
The series of chapters Biondo dedicates to individual contemporary painters opens with the memory of “Raphael d’Urbino, pittor eccellente” – Raphael, the excellent painter from Urbino – and his impreciabel pittura, i.e., his priceless painting (fols. D4r-v).
In this short survey, Biondo invites readers to contemplate Raphael’s ‘divine painting’, and traces an itinerary through Rome, in the search of frescoes painted on the walls of magnificent residences, or on wood panels placed over altars.
The itinerary obviously begins from the “meraviglioso et sacro palagio stanza & albergo de patre santo & pontefice Romano”, i.e., the “marvelous and sacred” Vatican Apostolic Palace. In its halls and galleries, it is possible to see “liete logge amplissime sale realissime camere anchora pinte di lavor superbo et raro”, referring to some timeless masterpieces, “superbly and exceptionally” painted by Raphael for the residence of the Pope: first the marvelous Loggia painted on the second floor of the Palace, and the so-called Stanze of Raphael, executed by the Urbinate and his school between 1509 and 1514, and used as apartments first by Julius II, and then by his successor Leo X. Here, visitors are awed by such celebrated frescoes as the School of Athens and the Disputation over the Most High Sacrament in the Room of the Segnatura
Raphael, Room of the Segnatura, School of Athens, 1510-1511. Città del Vaticano, Musei Vaticani.
or the Mass of Bolsena and the Liberation of St. Peter in the Room of Heliodorus, originally used by popes for private audiences.
Raphael, Room of Heliodorus, Mass of Bolsena, 1512-1514. Città del Vaticano, Musei Vaticani.
Biondo then guides us along the Via Transtiberina – the present-day via della Lungara, in Trastevere – where “voi troverete un superbißimo edificio qual fu gia di uno mercante per nome dimandato Augustino Ghisi, non molto di lunga dalla porta Setignana”, i.e., “we will find a superb edifice once belonging to a merchant named Augustino Ghisi, not far from the Porta Setignana”. The reference is to the celebrated suburban villa built by the Sienese architect Baldassare Peruzzi (1481-1536) at the beginning of the sixteenth century on behalf of the wealthy merchant and patron of arts Agostino Chigi (1466-1520), who likewise originated from Siena.
The splendid building is now referred to as the Villa Farnesina, after the powerful Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who purchased it in 1579, and is universally known for housing – as Biondo states – “una loggia ornate di bellissime pitture”, a room decorated with magnificent frescoes, including the celebrated Loggia of Cupid and Psyche, whose vault was painted by Raphael and his school in 1518. The fresco narrates the myth of Psyche, as testified by Apulieus in his Golden Ass. Earlier, in 1514, the munificent Agostino Chigi had commissioned his favourite artist to create another fresco for his villa, the Triumph of Galathea, which was painted by Raphael on the ground floor.
Raphael, The Triumph of Galathea, 1514. Rome, Villa Farnesina.
The last stop-over proposed by Biondo is the church of S. Pietro in Montorio, which, at the time, still held Raphael’s final work, executed shortly before his death in 1520, and patronized by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (1478-1534), the future Pope Clement VII: “la stupendissima pittura della Transfiguratione del nostro Signor Iesu Christo, che fece nel monte Thabor”, “the wonderful Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ, on the Thabor Mount”, painted in tempera on wood panel, which was then placed “nella pala del altar maggiore”, i.e., as an altarpiece over the high altar. Raphael’s stupendissima work – defined by Vasari in his Lives as the “most divine” of Raphael’s paintings – is now preserved in the Pinacoteca Vaticana.
Raphael, Transfiguration, 1520. Città del Vaticano, Musei Vaticani, Pinacoteca.
To the itinerary proposed by Biondo in 1549, we might add other works realized by Raphael for Roman churches and palaces, for example the Sybils painted in the church of Santa Maria della Pace in 1514, embellishing the private chapel of his patron Agostino Chigi.
Given the city’s wealth of Raphael treasures, it is not surprising that Rome was selected as the ‘natural choice’ for hosting the exhibition “Raffaello 1520-1483”, which opened on 6 March at the Scuderie Papali. The exhibition presents an extraordinary journey through Raphael’s entire life and career, a unique, unrepeatable occasion for admiring, in reverse – from his last year of life to his birth in Urbino in 1483, over 200 masterworks lent by numerous museums worldwide, above all the Gallerie degli Uffizi, in Florence (find more information here).
Sadly, the exhibition at the Scuderie Papali – along with all Italian museums, archaeological sites, libraries, archives, and other cultural places – was forced to temporarily close its doors on 8 March, owing to the outbreak of Coronavirus, and the severe albeit necessary measures undertaken by the Italian Government.
We thus offer here a selection of amateur pictures taken at the Scuderie Papali, including one of our favourites, the impressive oil portrait of the Mantuan poet and diplomat Baldassarre Castiglione (1478-1529), the celebrated author of Il Libro del Cortigiano (Florence 1528) – the earliest and doubtless most famous work on etiquette (see the complete description here). In this wonderful portrait, Raphael captured a special, intimate essence, while giving pictorial form to the perfect Renaissance gentleman.
Raphael, Portrait of Baldassarre Castiglione, 1513. Paris, Musée du Louvre.
We are of course well aware that the quality of these images does not do justice to Raphael’s art: they are offered here only as a sort of placeholder, in the hopes that the Scuderie Papali, the city of Rome, and all of Italy may very soon be able to once again welcome the crowd of passionate visitors, art lovers, scholars, bibliophiles, and collectors from all over the world to which we are accustomed.
How to cite this information
Margherita Palumbo, “A walk in Rome, celebrating Raphael’s 500th anniversary," 11 March 2020, https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/raphael. Accessed [date].This post is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.