RAPHAEL'S TEMPLE in the MARRIAGE OF THE VIRGIN

RAPHAEL's TEMPLE in the  MARRIAGE OF THE VIRGIN

A previous blog entry discussed the building on the left by Bramante. This entry will compare Bramante's Tempietto to Raphael's painted temple in his 1504 painting of the Marriage of the Virgin

(now in the Brera Gallery in Milano) seen on the right. These two art works, begun around the same time, one created of stone and one fictionalized in paint, are by artists from the same region who were related by family, and the two temples have enough similarities to warrant close analysis.

    As we have shown in the previous blog, the Tempietto, begun in 1502, was established to mark the spot where St. Peter was crucified upside down in Rome. Designed by Donato Bramante

(1444-1514), it was paid for by the Spanish royals, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella 10 years after

they had celebrated Columbus' discovery of the New World. (See Jack Freiberg's book, Bramante's Tempietto, the Roman Renaissance, and the Spanish Crown, 2014, Cambridge University Press.)

The Tempietto is a circular temple with steps and a colonnaded walkway around it. The dome resembles a papal cap to remind the viewer of the first Pope, Peter. Raphael's temple is not a replication of Bramante's building, but there are enough features similar to it to make us wonder if Raphael saw Bramante's designs for the building, or if he saw the building itself under construction.

They are both rounded inner structures topped by a dome with a peristyle (outer colonnade) around them.
 

 A series of steps leads up to both colonnades. 

The central structure appears to be two storeys in both and the windows on the second level provide some of the light for the interior. Each has a central doorway set between columns in the colonnade. The space in each is a human space, meant to accomodate humans easily. How is Raphael's temple in the painting different from Bramante's actual Tempietto structure?

To begin, it has many more steps (8 instead of 3) up to the colonnaded arcade, Ionic capitals rather than Doric, no metopes or triglyphs as in the Tempietto, and rounded arches lifting up the walkway around the building.

Its central entrance shows the landscape beyond in the exit door, and Raphael's inner structure is a 16-sided polygon room rather than a cylinder.

He keeps windows on the second storey but has no balustrade; instead he imagines scroll volutes that 
move out like ribbons from the inner cylindrical shape to the outer colonnade, much like those Alberti attached to the facade of Santa Maria Novella in 1470; they are not identical, but one perhaps inspired the other:

Raphael's temple is still a rounded domed structure with outdoor colonnade up a series of steps, very like the actual realization of the Tempietto.
When could Raphael have been in Rome, though? Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520) was born in Urbino, near Bramante's hometown of Fermignano, and he knew Bramante as a fellow artist and family relation. Raphael's own early training was not as an architect, however, but as a painter in Perugia with Perugino, then in Siena with Pinturicchio. After helping Pinturicchio paint the Piccolomini Library in the Siena Cathedral between 1502-3, where Raphael might have also made designs even for the buildings in those frescoes, Raphael travels to Florence and stays awhile for more training, perhaps even with Leonardo da Vinci. He must have kept in contact with Bramante, who was in Milano from 1474 to 1499, because after Bramante moves to Rome in 1499, the older architect writes to Raphael in Florence to come to Rome for work.

In Vasari's Life of Raphael, Vasari tells us:

 E questo avvenne perché Bramante da Urbino, essendo a' servigi di Giulio II per un poco di parentela che avevano insieme e per essere di un paese medesimo, gli scrisse che aveva operato col papa che, volendo far certe stanze, egli potrebbe in quelle mostrare il valor suo. Piacque il partito a Rafaello, e lasciò l'opere di Fiorenza, trasferendosi a Roma;

Translation:  And this happened (Raphael went to Rome from Florence) because Bramante from Urbino, being in the services of Pope Julius II, wrote to Raphael, since he was related to Raphael by family and since he was from the same town, that he (Bramante) had worked with the Pope who wanted to do certain rooms (in the Papal Palace), and that Raphael could prove his worth if he painted those. Raphael liked the idea of leaving, and abandoned the works in Florence, and moved to Rome. (trans. mine)

Raphael starts painting the Stanze (rooms) for Julius II in 1508 in Rome. But he must have been familiar with Bramante's ideas and construction of the Tempietto before that date because he paints the temple in the Marriage of the Virgin painting four years before arriving in Rome for work. Bramante is much older, 56 when he starts the Tempietto, while Raphael is 19 and at the beginning of his career in the same year, 1502. Raphael regards Bramante as another mentor in his early stages of employment. So on the one hand, we could see the painted temple as his way of paying homage to Bramante as the older architect, but, on the other hand, Raphael has ambitions of his own to be an architect and his painting of the temple in the Marriage panel signifies his own interest in the same problem that occupied Bramante, the central-plan church.

       Once Raphael gets to Rome, he immediately demonstrates his own architectural ambition in the design for the church of Sant' Eligio degli Orefici, begun in 1509 in Rome on the Tiber River. It is meant to be Raphael's presentation of his ability to compete with his compatriot as an architect. He stays close to Bramante's simple central plan and spare lines in Sant'Eligio.

The church is based on a Greek cross circumscribing a circle

(the extended altar area may have been added later) and topped with a dome much like the dome of the Tempietto, capping a cylinder.  

 

 

He does not finish the church before his death, and it is completed by other architects, but this simple structure persuaded people he could be an architect as well as painter because when Bramante dies in 1514, Raphael is made director of the construction of the new St. Peter's instead of Michelangelo.

        His Marriage of the Virgin is painted five years before the start of Sant'Eligio, and when we compare the two temples by him, they seem to come from different sources:

 
The cylinder is obscured behind walls in Sant'Eligio, whereas the Marriage temple appears light and airy because of its slender arcade so like Bramante's colonnade.

The commission for the Marriage painting came from the church of San Francesco in a small town west of Urbino called Citta di Castello. And we know the date because Raphael signs the work and dates it, right on the temple building in the background of the marriage scene.
RAPHAEL URBINAS, he writes on the architrave over the central doorway, M in the spandrel on the left, DIIII in that of the right, Roman numerals for the date, 1504.

         It is hard to believe that Raphael felt it was important to sign and date this particular painting of a common Christian subject in an out-of-the-way Franciscan church in a backwater town like Citta di Castello. And he signs it on the BUILDING!   No, like all artists, Raphael is speaking through the signature and date, to other artists, and in particular to another architect, his
compatriot and rival, Bramante. He is signing, not just the painting, but the architectural idea he has offered behind the signature.
        Raphael knows the important challenge for architects of his era. He wants to display his own centralized church plan, way before his actual construction of Sant'Eligio, not just to compete with Bramante's Tempietto, but to compete with all the architects who are talking about the big reconstruction project of the age, the expected renovation of St. Peter's itself. Bramante and others conceived of the new St. Peter's as a centrally-planned church, too, a Greek cross around a central circle.

 (If you doubt that architects compete with other architects, all you have to do is witness the two major buildings in London, the Gherkin and Lloyd's of London, on the same corner and 18 years apart by Norman Foster and Richard Rogers respectively; they both went to Yale Architecture School and are marking each other with intensely
innovative buildings a block away from each other.)

 

With his painted, signed, and dated building here, Raphael announces his intention to be an architect as well as painter, and eventually he is papal architect from 1514 (Bramante's death) until his own death in 1520. And, although his painted temple and constructed one prepare us to think he will make St. Peter's a central plan, too, like Bramante's, the reconstruction of his idea for St. Peter's, once he becomes papal architect, seems to be a Latin-cross shape for the Basilica, perhaps to differ with Bramante's ideas:

It must be admitted that Raphael's idea of a temple like Bramante's in his Marriage painting may have been inspired also by his painting teacher's painted temples. In Perugino's Marriage of the Virgin (now in Caen) an octagonal temple is imagined behind the scene, again up a series of steps,
 










 and in
Perugino's more famous Christ Giving the Keys to Peter in the Sistine Chapel (1482-83,) an octagonal temple with arcaded side entrances sits between two triumphal arches and it, too, is raised
up from the piazza by several steps.

Raphael's temple in 1504 has none of the fancy pretension of Perugino's 1483 three-storey gilded stage set. But he has thought beyond his teacher to the mentor who came from closer to home, so his temple has more of the simplicity of Bramante's actual temple.
And Raphael's temple is not meant to be a representation of the basilica of St. Peter's, as it is in Perugino's painting, more appropriate for the subject of Christ Giving the Keys of the Church to Peter. For the subject of the marriage of the Virgin, Raphael's temple is merely symbolic of the church, LA CHIESA, a feminine noun which is associated with the Virgin herself:

Most Renaissance marriages did not take place inside a church, so the church behind the figures is only meant to give the scene a sacred space. Strange, even for the 16th-century, to see the marriage enacted in a piazza while the communal passeggiata goes on behind it!

The women attending the Virgin stand on the left, the male suitors on the right. The priest in the middle watches as Joseph places the ring on the finger of Mary. Joseph holds a rod that is flowering, the sign that he was favored to marry her, and the male suitor in the foreground breaks his unfruitful rod over his own knee in frustration.

The suitor bending the rod behind that bending figure may be a self-portrait, since he is looking out and on the right. (We must say that the graceful way the front suitor breaks his rod prefigures many other graceful gestures in the Stanze painted by Raphael later in Rome.)
The temple is also present because Mary's father, Joachim, had been expelled from the temple for being childless, an expulsion remedied when the miracle of Mary's birth occurs. The scrolls that extend from the central structure in Raphael's temple suggest celebration for that birth and then her marriage, but the severity of the perfectly drawn windows and columns tones down that joy with a rigid regularity which owes much to Bramante's somber Tempietto.

 
 
Both Bramante and Raphael are tackling serious subjects in their buildings, the death of Peter, and the marriage of the Virgin, whose son later dies also on a cross, but the restraint they show is a measure of their true intent, to produce a perfect, rounded, central holy building that satisfies aesthetically. Who succeeds in this Platonic quest? Since Raphael's has never been built, it is a perfect virtual question.