Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great | Page 4

said to be the work of Raphael; but there is now very good reason to believe it was the work of Raphael's father, and that the figures represent the baby Raphael and his mother. The picture is faded and dim, like the history of this sainted woman who gave to earth one of the gentlest, greatest and best men that ever lived. Mystery enshrouds the early days of Raphael. There is no record of his birth. His father we know was a man of decided power, and might yet rank as a great artist, had he not been so unfortunate as to have had a son that outclassed him. But now Giovanni Sanzio's only claim to fame rests on his being the father of his son. Of the boy's mother we have only obstructed glances and glimpses through half-flung lattices in the gloaming. Raphael was her only child. She was scarce twenty when she bore him. In a sonnet written to her, on the back of a painting, Raphael's father speaks of her wondrous eyes, slender neck, and the form too frail for earth's rough buffets. Mention is also made of "this child born in purest love, and sent by God to comfort and caress."
The mother grew aweary and passed away when her boy was scarce eight years old, but his memories of her were deeply etched. She told him of Cimabue, Giotto, Ghirlandajo, Leonardo and Perugino, and especially of the last two, who were living and working only a few miles away. It was this spiritual and loving mother who infused into his soul the desire to do and to become. That hunger for harmony which marked his life was the heritage of mother to child.
When an artist paints a portrait, he paints two--himself and the sitter. Raphael gave himself; and as his father more than once said the boy was the image of his mother, we have her picture, too. Father and son painted the same woman. Their hearts went out to her with a sort of idolatrous love. The sonnets indited to her by her husband were written after her death, and after his second marriage. Do then men love dead women better than they do the living? Perhaps. And then a certain writer has said: "To have known a great and exalted love, and have had it flee from your grasp--flee as a shadow before it is sullied by selfishness or misunderstanding--is the highest good. The memory of such a love can not die from out the heart. It affords a ballast 'gainst all the sordid impulses of life, and though it gives an unutterable sadness, it imparts an unspeakable peace."
Raphael's father followed the boy's mother when the lad was eleven years old. We know the tender, poetic love this father had for the child, and we realize somewhat of the mystical mingling in the man's heart of the love for the woman dead and her child alive. Reverencing the mother's wish that the boy should be an artist, Giovanni Sanzio, proud of his delicate and spiritual beauty, took the lad to visit all the other artists in the vicinity. They also visited the ducal palace, built by Federigo the Second, and lingered there for hours, viewing the paintings, statuary, carvings, tapestries and panelings.
The palace still stands, and is yet one of the most noble in Italy, vying in picturesqueness with those marble piles that line the Grand Canal at Venice. We know that Giovanni Sanzio contributed by his advice and skill to the wealth of beauty in the palace, and we know that he was always a welcome visitor there. From his boyhood Raphael was familiar with these artistic splendors, and how much this early environment contributed to his correct taste and habit of subdued elegance, no man can say. When Giovanni Sanzio realized that death was at his door, he gave Raphael into the keeping of the priest Bartolomeo and the boy's stepmother. The typical stepmother lives, moves and has her being in neurotic novels written by very young ladies.
Instances can be cited of great men who were loved and nurtured and ministered to by their stepmothers. I think well of womankind. The woman who abuses a waif that Fate has sent into her care would mistreat her own children, and is a living libel on her sex.
Let Lincoln and Raphael stand as types of men who were loved with infinite tenderness by stepmothers. And then we must not forget Leonardo da Vinci, who never knew a mother, and had no business to have a father, but who held averages good with four successive stepmothers, all of whom loved him with a tender, jealous and proud devotion.
Bartolomeo, following the wish of the father, continued to give the boy lessons in drawing and sketching. This