Raphael is one of those artists whom Charles Ricketts attempted to portray in a nuanced manner in his study The Prado and Its Masterpieces (1904), partly because of the difficulty of attributing certain works to him, given that he employed such a large number of assistants.
Other pictures which left Raphael's studio as his work are really his, though the work of the assistant and the restorer may have intervened. [...] I would advocate a more guarded way of specifying the importance of an assistant in a picture than is now prevalent.If the design of a work (the structural element of its visible presence) belongs to the master, behind it we notice his intellectual bent, and are able to estimate the creative force which was his. The modern tendency is to recognise, if possible, evidence of an assistant's hand, find his name, and so to dismiss the work forthwith as by the master 'only in part'. This is misleading.
(p. 104)
Ricketts described some paintings in detail, such as 'The Holy Family with the Lamb':
[...] like most of the smaller pictures belonging to Raphael's Tuscan period, it is more mature than his more important early works, in which the elements influencing him occur in a state of perplexing fusion [...] It is free from repainting, if a little over-cleaned.
(p. 105-106)
He referred to it as
[...] a delightful idyll which curiously reveals the temper of the Renaissance; the Virgin is represented as a bland yet charming woman, the Holy Child is playing with the lamb, the symbol of his sacrifice, whilst St. Joseph leans on his traveller's staff, a charmed spectator.
(p. 106)
Nevertheless, his sympathy lay with another painting, which generally enjoyed a lower reputation, but whose workmanship he admired more: 'Portrait of a Cardinal'.
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| Raphael, 'Portrait of a Cardinal' (c. 1510-1511) [The Prado, Madrid] |
According to Ricketts the 'slight coldness in scale of colour' was attributable 'to the picture-cleaner'. He admired 'the delicate modelling of the mouth', while the cap and cape were painted 'with extraordinary care and breadth' (p. 106-107).
We may sometimes feel out of touch and out of love with Raphael, but with him we are never conscious of vagueness and insufficiency: touch the outer softness of his work, and we feel the pulse of a tremendous vitality.
(p. 116)
Ultimately, Ricketts wrote, the Prado's Raphael collection was too limited to form an opinion about the painter.
In his other art historical monograph, Titian (1910), Ricketts compared Titian to Raphael:
If the unique quality in the art of Raphael might be described as an unfailing sense of rhythm, the rhythmic sense, though great in Titian, is crossed by a greater hold upon realities which he marshals into a rhythmic whole, without Raphael's tendency to transmute them into the terms of his own convention.
(p. 171)
In his art historical writings, Ricketts focused on Raphael's paintings, but for the Vasari Society – and this was perhaps one of the appealing aspects of the undertaking – he was able to examine the painter's drawings.
Raphael was the artist about whom he wrote the most pieces for The Vasari Society; incidentally, this series of articles only began with the Second Series in 1920. However, Ricketts's first contribution was about a drawing he ascribed to Raphael, while a footnote referred to Oskar Fischel who was of the opinion that the drawing was by Perugino. The MET, where the drawing is now kept, is a little less certain and has ascribed the drawing to the 'Workshop of Perugino' (see the MET's website).
In 1922, Ricketts devoted some paragraphs to Raphael's drawing 'Cartoon for Madonna and Child' from the collection of the British Museum.
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| Raphael, Drawing, cartoon (the Virgin and child) [British Museum, London: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license] |
Ricketts's contribution was signed 'C.R.':
In the National Gallery the unfinished Madonna, bequeathed by Miss Makintosh, commonly called the Madonna of the Tower (from the Orléans, Hope, and Rogers Collections), has been generally accepted as a Raphael, and the relation between this and the magnificent cartoon in the British Museum is manifest; in this last the rough indication of the general design is a sketch, but the treatment of the heads is intense and almost Leonardesque and full of a sense of entranced and ardent life. Unlike most of Raphael's Madonnas, the hair is not parted on the forehead, but thrown back and held by a band, as it is in the St. Catherine in the Madonna di San Sisto and in the Galatea in the Farnesina Fresco: despite this detail, and owing to surviving influences of Leonardo and even Fra Bartolomeo, the present writer would date the cartoon about 1512; there are points of similarity between the type of the Virgin and some of the Muses in the background of the Parnassus.
The British Museum now dates the drawing to 1509-1511.
In Part IV of the Second Series Ricketts very briefly discussed Raphael's 'Portrait of Himself as a Boy' (from the collection of The Ashmolean Museum):
Despite the age of the artist this exquisite drawing must be classed with the early studies made for the Coronation of the Virgin. Even under the influence of Perugino Raphael as a draughtsman was himself from the first. Here he is possessed of that tender vision and delicately tempered power which has given him his place in art.
The Ashmolean nowadays describes the drawing as 'Portrait of an unknown youth, possibly a self-portrait'.
Two more drawings from The Ashmolean were given short comments, and of one of these Ricketts wrote:
To men of Raphael's range and gift this exquisite drawing counted but as a step in the creation of yet finer things.
Ricketts not only examined every detail in a drawing, but also studied the object as a historical relic: what had happened to it since the master's hand had left it untouched? An example is his entry in Part V of the Second Series about a drawing in the collection of Windsor Castle: 'Christ Giving the Keys to Peter' (now known as 'Christ's Charge to Peter'):
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| Raphael, 'Christ's Charge to Peter' [Royal Collection Trust] |
The deviations in this design from the tapestry cartoon at Kensington (for which it is a study) are too conspicuous for comment, notably in the action of the Saviour, who has been drawn from some model or apprentice of Raphael's, stripped to the shirt, whilst other figures retain entirely or in part their every-day clothes. The composition is not only in reverse but is shaded from left to right; this last characteristic proves that the Windsor page - fine and vivid as it is - is not the actual original but a singularly sharp off-set from a drawing by the master, of which the study for Christ in the Louvre, identical in every stroke of the chalk, is all that is left. The Louvre fragment has been, in part, cut out and mended in the left foot and in the left sleeve. The Windsor version therefore preserves in its entirety (but in reverse) the original design which at some time has been cut up, in all probability, by some dealer.
The website of the Royal Collection Trust explains the procedure of the off-set:
In Part VII of the Second Series, Ricketts devoted five lines to another study by Raphael, which contains in a great measure a 'perfect balance between his gifts of explicit draughtsmanship and enveloping charm'.
All of Ricketts's writings about Raphael show that he regarded him as one of the truly great masters of the Renaissance.
