Kids in the Hall

I recall my tour of the Vatican Palace and its museums as a human version of a cattle drive. Swept up in the relentless current rushing to the Sistine Chapel, I craned my neck around trying to take in the wonders flying past. Fortunately, a logjam ahead allowed us to pause in the Stanze di Raffaello, the papal apartments in which Raphael painted his masterpieces as Michelangelo worked on the chapel ceiling. Drinking in The School of Athens, one of my all-time favorite paintings, for five minutes was pure, easeful joy followed by another race to the finish. One of the many wonders of the palace I didn't get to race through was Raphael’s Loggia, which is not open to the public. Fortunately, Nicole Dacos’ The Loggia of Raphael: A Vatican Art Treasure, published by Abbeville Press, allows me to return to visit that hall (shown above) and linger like the popes and kings of old. “Raphael’s Loggia is among the Roman monuments that have been the most appreciated, copied, and visited by artists, connoisseurs, and travelers,” Dacos writes. “It is the ornamental ensemble that has left the deepest impression on Western art.” And, yet, the Loggia of Raphael remains overshadowed by Michelangelo’s more famous achievements in the popular consciousness. The Loggia, however, influenced the style of power for generations and continues to do so even today, lingering in our subconscious without our even knowing it. Thanks to Dacos’ text and a systematic photographic analysis done with Vatican approval, modern viewers can rediscover this lost treasure “hidden” before our very eyes all along.

When Donato Bramante, designer of the triple portico of the Vatican Palace, lay on his deathbed in 1514, he advised Pope Leo X to hire Raphael to finish the job. Raphael jumped at the chance, seizing the opportunity to express the contemporary power of the papacy along the lines of the homes of the ancient rulers of Rome, specifically the Domus Aurea of Nero. “To create this program,” Dacos writes, “Raphael drew on the immense antique repertoire that he had collected, a repertoire of unparalleled extent, which he enriched with modern compositions and scenes taken from life, the whole being combined in an effort to recreate the sumptuousness of the Roman empire.” Raphael descended into the grotto-like ruins of the Domus Aurea and marveled at the amusing and fanciful little paintings all over the walls, which soon gained the name “grotesques” for their “grotto-esque” location. Raphael entrusted the painting and sculpting of these grotesques to his assistant Giovanni da Udine, who created an entire world of trompe-l’oeil animals, flowers, and vegetables (such as the festoons and blackbird above). Strolling the hall, Leo X and his visitors would conduct business and comment on these little visual treats that lightened the heavy duties of diplomacy in a way that a heavily thought out program could not.



Nothing in Raphael Loggia is painted or sculpted by the master himself. Everything that appears came from the hand of an assistant following Raphael’s master plan. The unifying spirit of the Loggia belongs to Raphael himself, who was channeling the desires of Leo X, who hoped “to emphasize his role not as a warrior, which would have evoked Julius II, but as the champion of the faith.” Reaching back into the pagan past of Rome, Raphael yoked it to the modern world of Christianity to create a hybrid that achieved a whole new dimension in humanism. Dacos sees Raphael’s Loggia as perhaps one of the first steps in the Counter-Reformation. While Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation raged across Europe, Raphael almost simultaneously struck an artistic blow for humanism in the Catholic mode. Trompe-l’oeil architecture (above) called the mind to believe in higher things while the stories of the life of David (above) and other Biblical figures, refashioned in Raphael’s design, appealed to the tradition of the church on earth.



Through his assistants, Raphael envisioned a kindler, gentler Bible “carefully expurgated” of the wrathful God that depicts instead a “beneficent and reassuring” God lovingly caring for his people. Skipping over the tragedies, Raphael went straight to the happy endings (or, failing that, the solemn ones). Stand at one end of the Loggia and you can look back and see just these reassuring images lined up one after the other, a final, parting shot of reassurance for the doubting. Taking visual cues from ancient Christian mosaics, illustrated early Bibles, classical sources mined by the best of the Renaissance, and classical sources never used before, Raphael brewed together a wholly new type of Bible and then left it to his two most trusted assistants, Giulio Romano and Perin del Vaga to execute it. (One of Romano’s Loggia frescoes, The Finding of Moses, appears above.) Although the sea of unfamiliar Italian names sometimes becomes hard to navigate, Dacos wonderfully guides the reader through the often uncharted territory of the Renaissance workshop in action, tying specific works to specific assistants and showing how their unique talents were combined in the overall plan as the master stood on the sidelines and allowed his students to put his lessons into action. Additional artists came from great distances to work and learn. “A host of artists were thus eager to participate in Raphael’s Bible,” Dacos writes, “if only to execute a single fresco, sometimes returning farther on in the gallery, sometimes sharing the same story, at a work site whose organization, under the direction first of Giulio [Romano] and then of Perino [del Vaga], seems to have been very flexible.” The consummate teacher, Raphael trusted himself enough to trust that his students would deliver, as they did.



Artists such as Spain’s Alonso Berruguete worked on the Loggia while studying in Rome. (Berruguete’s Loggia fresco Jacob’s Dream appears above.) Receiving word that Charles V had set up court in Spain, Berruguete returned home and brought the lessons of the Loggia to the Spanish court. Luca Penni, another Loggia part-timer, spread the Loggia style to France and the court of Francis I at Fontainebleau. Even Henry VIII of England found time between wives to mimic the Loggia in his Nonsuch Palace. Russia’s Catherine II fell so in love with Raphael’s Loggia that she had a duplicate made that now rests in the Hermitage Museum. “Even during Raphael’s lifetime,” Dacos writes, “artists who traveled to Rome would admire the Loggia in the same way that they studied the antiquities or visited the Sistine Chapel,” usually with an eye towards bringing Raphael’s ideas home to powerful patrons. J.M.W. Turner visited the Loggia in 1819 and painted how he imagined Raphael at work in his masterpiece. But, within a few decades of Turner’s visit, the Romantics and John Ruskin orchestrated the shift in taste from pomp to the common people that led to the decline in the Loggia’s prominence in popular culture.


Once you’ve opened yourself up to the world of Raphael’s Logia via Dacos’ examination, you’ll find traces of Raphael in all the halls of influence and power. Constantino Brumidi’s decorations of a corridor in the U.S. Capitol Building (above), done from 1857 through 1859, show how later artists translated Raphael’s ideas into different contexts of government. What sets Raphael’s Loggia apart from other displays is the infusion of classical humanism, the reaching across eras and cultures to mix together the best of all possible worlds. Full of humor as much as grandeur, Raphael’s plan speaks to every aspect of the human individual. Nicole Dacos’ The Loggia of Raphael, which speaks to the ears, eyes, and soul of the art history lover, is as much a treasure as the Vatican masterpiece it celebrates.

[Many thanks to Abbeville Press for providing a review copy of Nicole Dacos’ The Loggia of Raphael: A Vatican Art Treasure and the images from the book above.]

Holy Toledo

Doménicos Theotokópoulos, better known simply as El Greco, did more than his share of traveling during his lifetime. Born October 1, 1541 in Crete, El Greco traveled to Rome in 1570 to hone his already formidable skills. Although Michelangelo, Raphael, and other giants of the High Renaissance no longer lived, their influence was inescapable. However, El Greco found himself drawn the school of Mannerism and masters such as Tintoretto and Titian. El Greco soon took the eccentricities of Mannerism beyond acceptable levels for Italy and traveled to Spain in 1577 in search of royal patronage from King Philip II. The good Spanish king longed for a proper Counter-Reformation artist who would place religious substance over personal style. El Greco sadly didn’t fit the bill, but he remained in Toledo for the rest of his days. El Greco’s View of Toledo (above, from 1596-1600) shows the then-vibrant city, the religious capital of Spain in its day, beneath a tormented sky. Arriving during the height of the Spanish Renaissance, after artists such as Alonso Berruguete had already pushed the envelope of what was acceptable stylistically, El Greco should have fit right in, but his unique style, although enjoyed by some contemporaries, remained an enigma for most until the twentieth century, when Expressionism and even Cubism “discovered” El Greco as a long-lost predecessor.

Despite the overarching influence of Michelangelo, or perhaps because of it, El Greco couldn’t stand Michelangelo. El Greco believed Michelangelo to be a good man who just didn’t know how to paint. In 1610, El Greco painted his version of the Laokoön, the classical sculpture unearthed during Michelangelo’s time that some suspect Michelangelo sculpted himself and planted to cause a stir. In El Greco’s version, that classical, Michelangelo-esque story gets the full El Greco treatment. The tight arrangement of the original sculpture comes unravelled in El Greco’s hands. Even the snakes seem stretched across the landscape. So many El Greco works stretch vertically that this horizontal work stands out even more. In the background , El Greco models the doomed city of Troy with the Trojan Horse at its gates on his adopted home of Toledo. Compositionally, El Greco’s version is brilliant—years, if not centuries ahead of its time. Painting at a time when religious works always were the most profitable, El Greco’s choice of a classical subject done in such an un-classical way seems odd, unless he intentionally wanted to cast off the burden of Michelangelo and all he stood for once and for all.

When El Greco died in 1614, The Opening of the Fifth Seal (above, from 1609-1614) remained in his studio, finished or unfinished depending on who you ask. El Greco remained one of those strange offshoots of the tree of art history—a fruitless branch until the twentieth century adopted him almost three centuries later. Paul Cézanne saw traces of what would flower into Cubism in El Greco’s stylized figures and landscapes. Pablo Picasso saw such bizarre figures as the risen souls of The Opening of the Fifth Seal and incorporated El Greco’s vision along with countless other influences into his landmark Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Much modern appreciation for El Greco comes from the fact that our eyes are now accustomed to his style after more than a century of similar stylistic experimentation. Taken out of context, El Greco doesn’t seem that different from us today. Returned to his context of time and place, El Greco becomes once again as foreign and difficult to understand as his name once was to his Spanish contemporaries.

Fathers and Sons

After the death of his father Pedro Berruguete, Alonso Berruguete questioned whether to follow in his father’s footsteps as a painter or pursue a career as a lawyer. Years later, when Berruguete died on September 25, 1561, many considered him the “Spanish Michelangelo,” the one artist more than any other who translated the Italian Renaissance into the Spanish Renaissance. Born around 1488, Berruguete’s rebirth and moment of epiphany came when he traveled to Florence and Rome in 1504 and saw the works of Michelangelo firsthand. Berruguete soon earned a place in Michelangelo’s workshop and learned at the feet of the master and befriended other young artists such as Andrea del Sarto and Bartolommeo Bandinelli. Berruguete trained as a painter with his father, but under his spiritual “father” Michelangelo, Alonso became a sculptor, creating years later works such as The Sacrifice of Isaac (above, from 1526-1532). Part of the San Benito altarpiece, The Sacrifice of Isaac shows the dramatic expressiveness of Michelangelo’s sculpture and painting that captivated the young Spaniard. Berruguete adds to the drama of the piece by painting the sculpture, adding to the liveliness and expression of the figures more than unadorned carved wood possibly could.

Berruguete brought Michelangelo-esque touches to his painting as well. In Salome (above, from 1512-1516), we see the young seductress looking down upon the severed head of John the Baptist. The bizarre calm with which she looks upon the head shows the influence of Mannerism upon Berruguete, who tried to amplify reality to the point of hyper-reality in pursuit of Michelangelo’s forcefulness of effect. Unable to match Michelangelo in technique, Berruguete resorted to other means to attract the same kind of religious fervor from viewers. Most of Berruguete’s works show episodes of great ecstasy or great agony, but Salome arrives on the scene after the fact—the calm after the storm of John’s martyrdom. Berruguete painted Salome at the end of his time in Italy, just before returning to Spain in 1517. In 1518, Charles V of Spain appointed Berruguete court painter and sculptor, positioning him to set the standards of taste for all of Spanish art.

It’s easy to see parallels between Michelangelo’s Dying Slave and figures such as Berruguete’s Saint Sebastian (above, from 1526-1532) from the same San Benito altarpiece that The Sacrifice of Isaac belongs to. Yet, Berruguete doesn’t just imitate Michelangelo’s art but extends certain elements of it, adjusting the settings on the drama just enough to create a difference but not set the entire work out of balance. With the official seal of approval of the Spanish court, Berruguete influenced an entire generation of Spanish artists who followed the example of Michelangelo and the other Italian Renaissance giants yet added their own subtle flavor. I look at this Saint Sebastian and imagine a young El Greco arriving years later from Greece, standing before this or some other work by Berruguete, and thinking, stretch the torso a bit here, extend the arms, lengthen the face… Alonso Berruguete’s wise career choice helped shape the direction of Spanish art for generations.