Finally, is the person of the pontiff in danger? Then the viewer must consider the fourth wall of the Stanza d’Eliodoro, with its fresco of The Liberation of Saint Peter, Raphael’s superb night-piece of the saint incarcerated in the darkness of the Mamertine Prison in Rome, glowing like a firebrand beside the shiny black armor of his guards. The sense of life restored, the contrast between the vitality of the saint and the moribund, beetlelike quality of the guards’ bodies, shows how carefully Raphael must have taken note of similar contrasts between the risen God and his slumbering captors in earlier paintings of the Resurrection of Christ. This must have been the last fresco of Raphael’s that Julius could have seen; he was painting it in 1513, the year the pope died.
The work of frescoing the stanze continued well past Julius’ death and was still absorbing Raphael while he worked as papal architect on Saint Peter’s. The clearest reference to the new pope, Giovanni de’ Medici, who took office as Leo X, is quite indirect: it shows a miracle performed by his namesake, an earlier Pope Leo, the Fourth (reigned 847–55), who miraculously extinguished a fire that threatened to destroy Saint Peter’s along with all the buildings of the Borgo. In the so-called Stanza dell’Incendio, in the fresco Fire in the Borgo, he appears as a small, distant figure making the sign of the cross on a balcony, near the vanishing point of the composition. Unless you look for him, you hardly know he is there, but the clue is given by the distant, agitated women beseeching him from below his balcony. The emphasis of the fresco is on the frantic Romans in the foreground, scurrying to and fro, disoriented by the threat of the blaze. The fire rages on the extreme left. On the right, one sees a crowd of women carrying pots of water to put out the flames. There, in the foreground, is a strong young man carrying an older one piggyback, accompanied by a boy: a direct reference back to images of Aeneas accompanied by his son Ascanius and carrying his old father, Anchises, away from the flames of Troy, on their way to found Rome. A mother hands her swaddled child over a wall, into the receptive arms of a helper; a naked man hangs by his fingertips from the wall, about to drop to safety. (This is a fairly operatic moment, since it would clearly have been just as easy for the naked man to scoot around the end of the wall. But that would have deprived Raphael of the pretext to paint that magnificent body, muscles tensed at full stretch.)
In the years during which he worked on the stanze, Raphael did not limit himself to fresco. He also had a large output of portraits and devotional paintings. His portrait of Baldassare Castiglione is to be ranked with Leonardo’s Mona Lisa as one of the suavely inventive masterpieces of that genre. His most popular religious paintings were of the Madonna and Child, usually with the infant John the Baptist. One typical complaint about Raphael concerns these images, which remained steadfastly popular from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and influenced generations of artists, down to Ingres, who wrote, “We do not admire Rembrandt and the others at random; we cannot compare them and their art to the divine Raphael.” The group of German artists in Rome who called themselves the Nazarenes (Overbeck, Pforr, and others) venerated the early more than the later Raphael. Others thought him sentimental, stereotyped, and oppressively masterly; nineteenth-century English artists like Millais and Holman Hunt called themselves “Pre-Raphaelites” because they wanted to paint as though he had never existed.
But today it is difficult to have more than a glancing acquaintance with Raphael’s devotional easel paintings without succumbing to their charm, and then realizing what unsurpassed mastery lies behind them. No matter how often one sees Baby Jesus and infant Baptist playing together, however strongly one may react against the repeated theme—the prophetic Baptist showing the little Saviour a stick, or wand, with a crosspiece which Jesus eagerly reaches out for, since it is a prefiguration of the cross on which he will die—the sheer beauty and fluency of the painting gets you every time. “Immortal,” “divine,” “perfection”—such words, which Raphael’s work evoked from earlier admirers, may die on our modern (or “postmodern”) lips, but their memory cannot be entirely effaced.
And certainly no need to be rid of it was felt in the early sixteenth century. Raphael was the ideal secular as well as religious painter, faultless in his production, his meanings always clear as springwater, his saints holy, his men noble and thoughtful, his women desirable, his technique impeccable. What other artist could have painted two little angels like Raphael’s into an Assumption of the Virgin, giving them an enchanting air of childish detachment while not distracting at all from the majesty of the event? The answer is: none. Nobody had a word to say against him except the notoriously prickly Michelangelo, who learned that Bramante had let Raphael into the Sistine Chapel for an early, unauthorized look at its first completed ceiling section when its scaffolding was dismantled in 1511. “Everything he knew about art he got from me,” the titan grumbled, though serious enmity did not persist between them.
Raphael never let a client down, and among his clients were some of the most powerful men in Italy. Apart from the pope, his chief patron was the papal banker Agostino Chigi, for whom he painted two chapels in the churches of Santa Maria del Popolo (Chigi’s own burial chapel) and Santa Maria della Pace. For Chigi he also painted his only major mythological subject, a Triumph of Galatea (c. 1511–12), frescoing it on a wall of Chigi’s Villa Farnesina in Rome. Where did this delectable sea nymph come from? Possibly, indeed quite probably, she is a portrait of Chigi’s mistress. In the myth, Galatea was uncouthly loved by the monstrous Cyclops Polyphemus, in the Odyssey. (Polyphemus himself is depicted in a nearby fresco in the villa, by Sebastiano del Piombo.) She escaped from him over the sea, in a boat drawn by two dolphins, and in Raphael’s version of the event one sees that one of these charmingly stylized marine mammals is chewing up an octopus, a “polyp,” in its sharp jaws—a sight which Raphael no doubt remembered from a visit to a fish market, but which equally alludes to the defeat of Polyphemus. Nereids and other sea deities sport around her, putti flutter in the sky above. Galatea herself is enchantingly pretty, surfing along in graceful contrapposto, but she may not have been directly painted from a living modeclass="underline" “To paint a beauty, I should have to see a number of beauties, provided Your Lordship were with me to choose the best. But in the absence of good judges and beautiful forms, I make use of an idea which comes to my mind.”
By then Raphael was famous throughout Europe, and so esteemed in the papal court that the pope’s treasurer—Leo X’s chief minister, Cardinal Bernardo Bibbiena—actually offered his niece to the painter in marriage. Even more remarkably, the painter politely refused. There seem to have been two reasons for this. The first was that Raphael’s life was full of other women, notably La Fornarina, who was his adoring mistress for years. If his portrait of her (c. 1518) in Rome’s Galleria Nazionale is truthful, which presumably it is, and correctly identified, which it may not be, one can well understand why he might not have wished to switch. The second reason is said to have been more practicaclass="underline" there was a possibility that Leo X might make him a cardinal, an office to which married men could not be raised. If that had happened, Raphael would have been the first and only artist in history to receive the red hat for making art. But neither that nor the marriage took place: in 1520, at the excessively young age of thirty-seven, Raphael died—as a result, some said, of a fever caused by a particularly energetic night of love with La Fornarina, “the Baker’s Daughter,” his delicious black-eyed woman of the people from Trastevere. He was buried in a niche in the Pantheon: the epitaph cut on his tomb slab was an elegant distich by his friend the poet Pietro Bembo: ILLE HIC EST RAPHAEL, TIMUIT QUO SOSPITE VINCI/RERUM MAGNA PARENS, ET MORIENTE MORI. “The man here is Raphael; while he was alive, the Great Mother of All Things [Nature] feared to be outdone; and when he died, she, too, feared to die.”