Among the Great Masters of Music | Page 4

Evangelist. Upon
the other side, the foremost figure is that of Mary Magdalen, carrying
the jar of ointment in her hand, and behind her stands St. Augustine
with a bishop's staff, looking toward John. At the feet of St. Cecilia are
scattered various instruments of music, a viol, cymbals, the triangle,
flute, and others. They are broken, and some of the pipes of the regal
held by St. Cecilia are falling from their place,--all seeming to indicate
the inferiority of earthly music to the celestial harmonies. Of the five
saints depicted, only Cecilia looks upward, and it has been suggested
that Raphael meant that she, alone, hears and understands the heavenly
strains.

She is clothed in a garment of cloth of gold, St. Paul in crimson and
green, and the Magdalen in violet.
Some writers claim that the face of the Magdalen is that of Raphael's
love, the "Farnarina," whom he frequently used as a model. The baker's
daughter was a girl of the Trastevere, and it is a coincidence that her
home was near that church dedicated to Cecilia, where the saint's
remains have rested for hundreds of years.
As Mrs. Jameson observed, Sir Joshua Reynolds has given us a
paraphrase of Raphael's painting of music's patron saint in his fine
picture of Mrs. Billington, the famous English singer of his last years,
as St. Cecilia. She holds a music book in her hand, but is listening to
the carolling of some cherubs hovering above her. The composer
Haydn paid the singer a happy compliment suggested by this portrait
when he said to Sir Joshua, "What have you done? you have made her
listening to the angels, you should have represented the angels listening
to her." Mrs. Billington was so delighted with this praise that she gave
Haydn a hearty kiss. This splendid portrait of the charming young
singer is in the Lenox Library in New York.
Raphael's "St. Cecilia" has, of course, a history. In October of the year
1513, a noble lady of Bologna, named Elena Duglioli dall Olio,
imagined that she heard supernatural voices bidding her to dedicate a
chapel to St. Cecilia in the Church of S. Giovanni in Monte. Upon
telling this to a relative, Antonio Pucci of Florence, he offered to fit up
the chapel at his own expense, and induced his uncle, Lorenzo Pucci,
then newly created a cardinal, to commission Raphael to paint a picture
for the altar. It was finished in 1516.
Tradition relates that Pucci had no ear for music, and was laughed at by
his brother cardinals when chanting mass in the Sistine Chapel. He
thereupon invoked the aid of St. Cecilia, who rewarded the donor of her
picture by remedying his harmonic deficiency.
In 1796, Napoleon's conquering army carried the painting to Paris,
where it remained until 1815, when it was returned to Bologna. It was
at a later date transferred to the art gallery of that city, where it now

hangs. About the middle of the eighteenth century, when the agent of
Augustus III., the Elector of Saxony, was negotiating the purchase of
Italian paintings for the royal gallery in Dresden, the "St. Cecilia" was
offered to him for $18,000, but the price was thought too high, and a
copy by Denis Calvaert sufficed. This still hangs in the Zwinger at
Dresden, the home of the Sistine Madonna. According to Vasari, the
organ and other musical instruments in this picture were painted by one
of the master's pupils, Giovanni da Udine. Raphael again designed a St.
Cecilia in the now ruined fresco of her martyrdom, which either the
master or one of his pupils painted in the chapel of the Pope's hunting
castle of La Magliana, near Rome. Fortunately, Marc Antonio's
engraving has preserved for us the composition of this work.
Of the many tributes to this "St. Cecilia," we will select the one by
Shelley.
"We saw besides one picture of Raphael--St. Cecilia; this is in another
and higher style; you forget that it is a picture as you look at it; and yet
it is most unlike any of those things which we call reality. It is of the
inspired and ideal kind, and seems to have been conceived and
executed in a similar state of feeling to that which produced among the
ancients those perfect specimens of poetry and sculpture which are the
baffling models of succeeding generations. There is a unity and a
perfection in it of an incommunicable kind. The central figure, St.
Cecilia, seems rapt in such inspiration as produced her image in the
painter's mind; her deep, dark, eloquent eyes lifted up; her chestnut hair
flung back from her forehead--she holds an organ in her hands--her
countenance, as it were, calmed by the depth of its passion and rapture,
and penetrated