Raphael, a thwarted pioneer of architectural preservation.
“Most Holy Father, there are many who, on bringing their feeble judgment to bear on what is written concerning the great achievements of the Romans—the feats of arms, the city of Rome and the wondrous skill shown in the opulence, ornamentation and grandeur of their buildings— have come to the conclusion that these achievements are more likely to be fables than facts. I, however, have always seen—and still do see—things differently. For, bearing in mind the divine quality of the ancients’ minds as revealed in the remains still to be seen among the ruins of Rome, I do not find it unreasonable to believe that much of what we consider impossible seemed, to them, exceedingly simple.”
Raphael and Baldassarre Castiglione, letter to Leo X 1519.
My phone reminded me last week that two years ago I was writing my first online talk and nervous about using a platform I’d never heard of called Zoom. We were in the depths of Italy’s strict lockdown and a trip to take the rubbish out was a treat to be savoured. I had been asked to present something about the Raphael exhibition at the Scuderie which was to commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of his death. It had been twenty years in the planning and closed three days after opening on 5th March, only to reopen (with extremely restricted numbers) in June 2020.
On that first foray, I chose to focus on Raphael’s enthusiasm for antiquity. Raphael’s extraordinary career (surely one of the very finest painters ever to have lived?) was thwarted by his premature death at the age of thirty-seven. It is perpetually astonishing to think that his near contemporary Michelangelo had a productive working life fifty years longer. What might Raphael have done with another half century?
One aspect of his career which perhaps is less often spoken of was his role as an, ultimately thwarted, pioneer of the preservation of antiquities. In 1515 Pope Leo X appointed Raphael to the grand-sounding praefectus marmorum et lapidum omnium. The prefect of marble and all ancient stones in the city is a title which is perhaps misleading. While inscriptions, where deemed important, were to be preserved, the main objective was to source materials from ancient buildings with which to build the new St Peter’s.
On the one hand those “Renaissance” men were interested in the ancient, on the other they were still pillaging it. It is a contradictory time. Leo X commissioned a vast drawing from Raphael which was to recreate the glories of ancient Rome; not showing ruins but intact monuments. Raphael’s premature death meant it was never completed but, gosh, it would have been wonderful! The Pope’s objective was to use this study of the ancient city to make the New St Peter’s even more glorious. Raphael, however, was interested also in preservation.
A year before his death, in 1519, Raphael enlisted the help of his great friend Baldassare Castiglione to write a letter beseeching the Pope to preserve the Ancient remains of the city. Castiglione was the very embodiment of a Renaissance Man: poet, diplomat, soldier, and author of the handbook for Renaissance discretion and good manners, The Courtier. He also coined the splendid word sprezzatura: the cultivated nonchalance of making the artful seem effortless.
Here is Castiglione, his sharp blue eyes cutting straight through five centuries in a portrait by Raphael usually in the Louvre but which I photographed at the 2020 Rome exhibition.
The longest surviving version of the letter is now in the National Library in Munich (here is a link to the full text translated into English), a shorter contemporary transcription is in the National Archives at Mantua (one can scroll through its pages at the bottom of this web page). In the letter Raphael and Castiglione urged for the preservation of those surviving ancient monuments being denuded for materials. Raphael rails against the idea of Rome’s antiquities as a quarry for spare parts.
In the part of the letter quoted in my opening paragraph, Raphael begins by speaking of those who bringing their “feeble judgement” to the achievements of the Romans - whether military, urban, or architectural – have decided that these were mere “fables” and not fact.
Raphael tells us, however, that he sees things differently, that his studies both of the surviving remains of Roman architecture and of written sources, have convinced him of the extraordinary achievements of the Ancients.
This appreciation also causes Raphael pain. He speaks of seeing the “corpse of this great, noble city, once queen of the world, so cruelly butchered”. He says that he wants to record and recreate the ancient buildings to give an image of the city at the peak of Empire. This is, he says, important for all Christians because it is their history: “all men”, he says, “owe respect to their parents and their native lands”. The Empire as the precursor to the Church is the underpinning theme of the Renaissance: the Pope is in Rome because Peter was martyred in Rome by the Emperor, without the Empire the Church’s roots in the city are lost. The Church is seen as the phoenix rising from the ashes of Empire; as a continuation of the narrative, not separate from the ancient past. The study of the Antique is therefore the study of the roots of Christian culture. This was a long present idea, what is new in the letter written by Raphael and Castiglione is the suggestion that the scale and decorative grandeur of the buildings of Ancient Rome shouldn’t merely be emulated, but also preserved.
Raphael goes on to say that ancient buildings had been destroyed not only by “Goths, Vandals, and other perfidious enemies of the Latin name”, but also by Popes who “allowed ancient temples, statues, arches, and other buildings to fall prey to ruin and spoliation”. He continues “I would go so far to say that this entirely new Rome that can be seen today… is built using mortar from ancient marbles”. A reference to the process of heating marble in lime kilns to release the quick lime used in mortar. Rome is, he says, an animal eating itself, an exercise in the conservation of matter. He mentions the numbers of buildings lost in the twelve years he had been in Rome and says: “men who held the same office as Your Holiness, but had neither your wisdom nor your magnanimity.” He is, surely, appealing to Leo’s vanity. “…by preserving the example of the ancients, he says, may Your Holiness seek to equal and better them…”.
Pope Leo, however, blithely ignored this supplication, and Raphael’s premature and tragic death saw the curtain fall on this intriguing and avant-garde enthusiasm for architectural preservation, and those Stones of Rome would continue to be looted for another four centuries and used to beautify churches.
I went on a spoila hunt this afternoon and thought of Raphael's best efforts.
Such interesting stuff about my main man Raphael - thank you, Agnes! (Also, ten million points for the Ozymandias reference.)