Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
IT IS RARE for writers of articles in this Magazine to eulogise the achievements of the artists whom they are discussing. Documentation, attribution, contextualisation, iconography – this is our usual fare. We take quality or significance on trust. The more celebrated the artists, the more likely the articles will deal with the minutiae of their life and work, whereas comparatively little-known figures are often more broadly brushed. That Raphael, the subject of this special issue, is still in the Pantheon of artists is beyond dispute and, true to form, the articles published here concentrate on very specific aspects of his career. What is gratifying, however, is the implicit enthusiasm for the artist shown by contributors and the cumulative impact of much fundamental new information, warmed by the pleasures of detection.
THE DECORATION OF the state apartments of Pope Julius II in the Vatican was initially entrusted to several independent workshops: the Stanza dell'Incendio to Perugino's, the Stanza della Segnatura to that of Sodoma, Johannes Ruysch and Raphael, while Luca Signorelli was in charge of the Stanza di Eliodoro, where a fresco by Piero della Francesca dating from the mid-fifteenth century prominently adorned the south wall. There is no indication that either the patron or the artists intended to further subcontract the work on the project. The vaults of these rooms may have been newly decorated in 1508: circumstantial evidence makes this the most likely date of execution for the Stanza dell'Incendio, while the start of work on the vault in the Stanza della Segnatura is dated precisely to that year by documents.
IT IS A PARADOX of scholarship that works of art long in public collections may sometimes be neglected precisely because they are so familiar. Raphael's Ansidei altarpiece, 'saved for the nation' for an unprecedented sum in 1885, is a case in point. It had been bought directly from the Servite friars of S. Fiorenzo in Perugia in 1764 by Gavin Hamilton, acting for Lord Robert Spencer, who subsequently presented it to his brother, the 4th Duke of Marlborough. As an altarpiece by the 'divine' Raphael, the Ansidei Madonna was quite exceptional in a British collection, and became 'the object of a constant pilgrimage to the palace of Blenheim' in Oxfordshire. When in 1883 the picture was offered for sale together with Van Dyck's Equestrian portrait of Charles I to cover the 8th Duke's mounting debts on the death of his father, an appeal by Royal Academicians led by their president, Frederic Leighton, moved Gladstone's government to offer a special grant of £87,500 to secure the acquisition of both pictures, of which £70,000 went towards the Raphael.
