RAFFAELLE’S TAPESTRIES

The so-called tapestries of Raffaelle are by some considered to be his masterpieces. Not by any means all of the tapestries hung in the Galleria degli Arazzi were designed by him. It is said that the designs which come from his hand were originally intended for the Scriptural panels in his Loggie, but that Leo X. had ten of them converted to this use.

Of the ten cartoons drawn by Raffaelle in 1515 and 1516, and executed in tapestry at Brussels, seven were purchased in Flanders by Charles the First of England, and are now in the South Kensington Museum. Baedeker says that the cost of weaving the whole ten tapestries came to seven hundred pounds,[18] though before they were injured they must have been amongst the most beautiful tapestries ever executed. It is not surprising that they are damaged, for they have had more than their share of vicissitudes. They have been unlucky from the very beginning. They were first hung on the walls of the Sistine Chapel below the paintings of the great fifteenth-century masters in 1519; and had only been there eight years before they were torn off the walls in the sack of Rome by the Imperial Army under the Constable de Bourbon, and carried away. They were not recovered for twenty-six years. In 1798 the French seized them and sold them to a Genoese Jew, and it was another ten years before they were repurchased by Pius VII.

place when it is held in the Vatican.]

They are now hung in a gallery adjoining the Galleria dei Candelabri and are shown on Wednesdays. No order is necessary, but as those who are only in Rome for a short time have not always a Wednesday left free, these glorious tapestries are a good deal neglected.

And glorious they are beyond dispute; even now, when they are injured, their colouring is rich and exquisite, and in them Raffaelle reached his highest point in combining dignity with simplicity--sublimity with obviousness.

Their dignity, their majesty, their beauty, are beyond dispute, and if we except the beards which were, I suppose, ordinary in that fantastic age, the figures are as natural as if they had been taken by instantaneous photography.

The figure of Our Lord in the tapestry of the Calling of St. Peter must be reckoned with His figure in Masaccio’s Render unto Cæsar, in the Carmine at Florence, and His figure in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, at Milan, as the three noblest conceptions in painting of the Son of God. Marvellous are the pathos, the humanity, and the wisdom in the Divine Countenance. It is hard to dispute the dictum of those who pronounce this wonderfully beautiful and majestically meditative figure Raffaelle’s masterpiece. The truthfulness of type in the disciples must also be acknowledged. They would be Salvationists to-day. You can see their goodness, their sympathy, their ardour, and in the background all the gentle picturesqueness, not of Palestine, but of Umbria.

In the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, the absurdities are miraculous. The cranes stand almost touching the boats; the boats are full of sea-fishes: they are not large enough to hold one man, let alone three. Your taste is not offended; it is not a real fishing scene: the accessories are a mere stage for the six figures, five of which are sublime.

Hardly any of the tapestries appeal more widely to the world than that of St. Peter healing the paralytic at the beautiful gate of the Temple. But the exquisite architectural conception of this picture is said to portray no gate and no temple, but the porch of the Old St. Peter’s, founded by Constantine the Great, which Raffaelle, the lover of antiquities, was privileged to predecease. He died before it was torn down by ruthless hands, after he had, in one of the finest and most poetical of his works, caught its immortal grace and imprisoned it in art. This is perhaps the most beautiful of the tapestries, though not the best.

If there be any more beautiful it is the utterly pagan Sacrifice of Lystra, with its vista of the world when it was young. As we look into it, if we have a spark of imagination, we are fellow-citizens of the Romans ere the old religion had begun to pass, giving place to new. If the ruins of Pompeii were suddenly recalled into existence as the dry bones in the Vision of Ezekiel were clothed with flesh, scenes such as these would be before our eyes. And there must be added the Areopagus, unconvincing in its architecture, but with the most devout figure in the whole of art claiming our attention in the centre. In the corner is that wonderful fair woman whose image is so stamped upon his masterpieces that we know, without any superscription of biographers, what she must have been in his life.

The Death of Ananias; St. Paul in Prison at Philippi during an earthquake; the Stoning of Stephen; the Massacre of the Innocents (with its wonderful woman’s head); and the Conversion of St. Paul, are the other tapestries from designs completed by Raffaelle. Tradition has it that the designs of his pupils for the other tapestries were in part due to him, but it is difficult to believe this. That the Christ personating a gardener, whose divinity is shown by the halo behind His hat, should be a conception of Raffaelle is incredible, though the gorgeous background and the charming Etruscan tomb might have been due to his suggestion. The Adoration of the Magi, however--especially in its treatment of the Virgin--is so beautiful that Raffaelle may well have inspired it. In most of the other tapestries there is some feature which jars, such as the grotesqueness in the Ascension, of which the colours are lovely; or the jumpiness and gaudiness of the figure in the Resurrection, which has such a beautiful city background. But I must not criticize in detail; indeed, I am not competent to do so. I only call upon the visitor to Rome not to miss this gallery--so seldom open--where he passes down between walls hung with some of the most majestic and human of the figures of Raffaelle. It is delightful to let one’s eyes rest on walls so mellow with the gentle fading of rich colours, and to picture the Sistine Chapel when these arrases hung down to the marble pavement from the frescoes of Ghirlandajo, Pinturicchio, Perugino, and Sandro Botticelli, while they were as fresh and perfect as the frescoes in the Library of the Cathedral of Siena. It is wonderful how the figures of Raffaelle stand out in these tapestries; they are almost like friends who come up and speak to one as one enters the gallery.

A word must be said for an art whose significance we are only just beginning to grasp: that of the designer of the little pictures which border great pictures, or, tangled in arabesques, are the sole ornament of a wall. We call these Pompeian, denying that Rome was the mother of any art but that of mosaic inlayers like the Cosmati. But when we look at the little tapestry pictures woven from the designs of Giovanni da Udine here, and his little frescoes and his reliefs in stucco in the Loggie of the Vatican and the vaults of the Villa Madama, we must allow them to be among the most beautiful productions of the art of his period, and since his inspiration came from the newly unearthed and yet undimmed arabesques in the Baths of Titus, we must allow the inspiration taken from ancient Rome to be Roman. The miniature art of Giovanni da Udine in painting is suggestive of the miniature art which Mino da Fiesole showed in his borders of sculpture. This Gallery of the Arazzi gives us delightful glimpses of this too little appreciated painter, who died in the same year as Michel Angelo and survived Raffaelle by half a century.

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Adjoining the Galleria degli Arazzi is the Galleria dei Candelabri. This is a beautiful chamber, appropriately named, appropriately decorated, appropriately arranged. Leo XIII. had it newly decorated. There are many beautiful pieces of statuary in it, but I shall not attempt to discriminate between them here. I only pause to say that this is a gallery which no one should miss. The beautiful _candelabri_, with their exquisite bas-reliefs--many of them dating from ancient Roman times--are so charmingly displayed; and the room has wonderful vases of the choicest marbles and forms. The room has evidently been as much considered as the precious objects stored in it. In many ways it reminds one of some of the halls in the Villa Borghese, which do not look like portions of a museum at all, but like chambers in a rich man’s house, in which the pieces have been chosen from the point of view of decorativeness. The ceiling is painted with incidents in the Pontificate of Leo XIII. and his favourite St. Thomas Aquinas, by the hands of the artist Seitz, who restored the famous Borgia Apartments; and the pavement is also due to the late Pope’s munificence.

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Out of this gallery opens the Galleria Geografica, the Gallery of the Maps, a hundred and sixty yards long, covered with maps of Italy and its islands, designed by a Bishop of Alatri in the days when he was a Dominican friar, Ignazio Dante, and painted by his brother, Antonio. The ceiling was painted by Tempesta, but neither it nor the maps are of a character to make you regret very much that you are unlikely to get leave to go into it.