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| Anonymous Italian artist Standing nude men (after a drawing by Raphael) before 1520 drawing British Museum |
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| Anonymous Italian printmaker St Michael the Archangel defeating the Devil (after a painting by Raphael, now in the Louvre) ca. 1520-60 engraving British Museum |
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| Antoine Lafréry (publisher) Psyche holding the flask of beauty, carried to Olympus by putti (after a fresco by Raphael at the Farnesina in Rome) ca. 1530-50 engraving British Museum |
"We are not aware of confronting a tour de force in composition; what we admire is an image of serene and relaxed simplicity. I know no better description of this miraculous emergence of classic form than two stanzas from a poem by Friedrich Schiller, who, perhaps, gave more thought to these mysteries than any other creative artist. They come in his philosophic poem on Ideal and Life, and though their beauty is naturally much tarnished in translation I should like to quote them for the thought they express:
When, to wake a soul in inert matter,
When, to be a living form's begetter
Genius burns, on glorious deeds intent,
Then with every nerve and muscle straining
Without respite and without complaing
Let his thought subdue the element.
Only zeal that shrinks from no endeavour
Finds the well of truth beneath the rock;
Only heavy hammerblows will ever
Shape the hard and brittle marble block.
But as soon as Beauty's realm is gained
Heaviness which over matter reigned
Sinks to dust and disappears from sight.
Not the fruit of toiling and devising,
Light and lithe, as though from nothing rising
Stands the image to the eye's delight.
In triumphant victory have vanished
All the storms with which the work began.
The perfection of its form has banished
All the insufficiencies of man.
One almost envies Schiller the metaphysical religion of beauty on which he could build his description of the artistic process. His poem is based on a Platonic scheme of things, with the realm of ideas or perfect forms in heaven and embodied in the work of art. It is not always realized that nearly everything we say or try to say about these mysteries is couched in a vocabulary which stems from classical aesthetics and carries with it all the metaphysical implications of Greek thought.
For what can we say to describe this feeling of a perfect solution that we have in front of such a masterpiece? I have called it self-sufficient, self-contained, classical, and if you read more about these things you will find books new and old ringing the changes on various synonyms of organic unity and integration. I remember how, when I read the proofs of my Story of Art, I discovered to my mortification that I had said of nearly every work of art I particularly admired that it formed a 'harmonious whole'. I tried to ration the phrase in my text, but it has never ceased to haunt me."
– E.H. Gombrich, from Raphael's Madonna della Sedia, the Charlton Lecture delivered at King's College in the University of Durham in 1955, reprinted in the author's essay collection Norm and Form (London: Phaidon Press, 1966)
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| Anonymous Italian printmaker Caryatid (after a fresco by Raphael in the Stanza di Eliodoro at the Vatican) ca. 1550-1650 engraving British Museum |
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| Anonymous Italian printmaker Caryatid (after a fresco by Raphael in the Stanza di Eliodoro at the Vatican) ca. 1550-1650 engraving British Museum |
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| Julius Goltzius Sacrifice of Abraham (after a ceiling-fresco by Raphael in the Stanza di Eliodoro at the Vatican) before 1595 engraving British Museum |
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| Cherubino Alberti Entombment (after a drawing formerly in the Arundel collection, attributed to Raphael, now lost) before 1615 drawing British Museum |
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| Lucas Vorsterman Entombment (after a drawing formerly in the Arundel collection, attributed to Raphael, now lost) 1628 engraving British Museum |
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| Anonymous Italian artist Decorative panel with grotesques (after a fresco by Raphael on a window-embrasure in the Stanza della Segnatura at the Vatican) ca. 1600-1700 drawing British Museum |
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| Anonymous Italian printmaker Two Figures from The Ecstasy of St Cecilia (after altarpiece by Raphael, now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna) ca. 1600-1700 engraving British Museum |
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| Anonymous Italian printmaker Adam and Eve with Cain and Abel (after a fresco-design by Raphael for the Vatican Loggia, executed by assistants) ca. 1600-1700 engraving, etching British Museum |
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| Anonymous Italian printmaker God creating the animals (after a fresco-design by Raphael for the Vatican Loggia, executed by assistants) ca. 1600-1700 engraving British Museum |
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| Anthony van Dyck At top: copy of Raphael's portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals, now in Palazzo Pitti At bottom: copy of Titian 's portrait of Capitano da Mar, now in a private collection before 1641 drawing British Museum |
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| Luca Giordano Jacob's Dream (after a fresco by Raphael in the Stanza di Eliodoro at the Vatican) ca. 1650-55 drawing British Museum |