Raphael copies Leonardo and Michelangelo

INTERESTING FACT:

“Raphael’s portrait of the pope  was so alive and true that it made one afraid to see it as though  it were in fact the living man” (Goffen 194). Raphael painted the portrait of Pope Julius II during the pope’s final days of life. It was so life-like and captured the self-awareness of ending life. To the viewers it had become something tragic as they realize the ‘frailty of life and human enterprise’.

Raphael’s Madonna and Child with Saints references much of Leonardo’s geometry  in composition as pyramidal and “unified by glance and gesture.” – Specifically in Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi. Raphael also studied Michelangelo mostly in sketches. In Florence, he made three sketches of Michelangelo’s David as well as the Taddei Tondo, the Cascina Cartoon and the unfinished Saint Matthew. The drawings do not copy the artwork exactly but rather present “a variation on Michelangelo’s invention” (Goffen 196). The Taddei Tondo can specifically be referenced in Raphael’s Madonna paintings such as the Bridgewater Madonna.

An excerpt for Renaissance Rivals by Rona Goffen

“When Raphael took from Leonardo, he took wholesale, adopting Leonardo’s compositional formulas and his conception of the Mother and Child. Raphael so thoroughly integrated Leonardo’s aesthetics that imitation became absorption. When Raphael appropriated ideas from Michelangelo, however, his borrowings became more selective: It was not the whole but particular parts that Raphael incorporated into his compositions. From Leonardo, he had taken whole texts; from Michelangelo, he took phrases” (Goffen 205).