The Life of Raphael

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 188? edition. Excerpt: ... would seem as if Raphael's final establishment in Rome produced a change in the Madonna paintings. The Virgin with the Diadem, with Roman ruins in the background, is a significant proof of this. To my feeling, the most beautiful thing in it is the child asleep with his little arm under his head,, from which the Virgin, kneeling in front, has raised the veil-like covering. By some critics the awestruck adoring boy John is supposed to be the work of another hand. About this time the Madonna di Loretto (in Vasari's time in Sta. Maria del Popolo) also originated, which has been missing since the wars of the first French Republic and is now known only through copies. Her face, and indeed her whole attitude, Raphael lent later to the allegorical goddess of Justice on the ceiling of the Camera della Segnatura. The last in the series of these first Roman Madonnas is that of Foligno, at first in Ara Coeli in Rome (the primitive church which it is said will soon disappear to make place for ths monument to Victor Emanuel), then in Foligno, afterwards in Paris, and to-day in the Vatican. Herder saw it in Foligno in 1788. He writes to his wife: "We have seen a Raphael much more beautiful than that in Loretto. Mary with her child upon the clouds; the child has risen from her lap and is about to step with one little foot upon the clouds. Below an excellent John the Baptist, a man who has a world in himself. A glorious piece, but alas injured; the nuns are allowing it to be ruined." I can agree with Herder only so far as regards the figure below, for the Madonna strikes me as having a certain conscious elegance which is peculiar also to other Madonnas of this first Roman period. Whoever gave the order for this painting may possibly have...