Word: raphaels
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From a poor immigrant to an associate professor at Harvard is the log-cabin to white-house story of Raphael Demos, associate professor of Philosophy, who is rated year after year as "top-notch" by his admiring students...
...rehabilitate" an artist who has been a favorite of plain people for four centuries is not so silly as it may sound. That is what the Oxford University Press has undertaken to do for Raphael. Its means is a new volume of its Phaidon series. The Paintings of Raphael ($4.50), just shipped to the U.S. (the present book of reproductions was published last winter in England). The prejudice which it seeks to correct has existed for many years among critics and criticasters in rebellion against the painter of the famous, widely and often ruinously reproduced Sistine Madonna...
...fame touched particularly his sweet, overblown Madonnas: The Madonna of the Chair, the Alba Madonna, the Sistine Madonna. The world agreed with Lübke, 19th-Century German art historian, that the Sistine Madonna "is, and will continue to be, the apex of all religious art." Queen Victoria thought Raphael "delightful" and refined. His Sistine Madonna became almost as familiar a Victorian figure as that of the reigning monarch...
Revolution of '48. Among the first to prick this Raphael bubble were seven young men who banded together in 1848 as "The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood," to defy academism by returning for inspiration to the freshness of Botticelli, Mantegna and other predecessors of Raphael. In art they left nothing rugged, but they did succeed in rolling up a mighty snowball of Raphael-belittlement. Even Academicians like John Ruskin agreed that Raphael's Madonnas bore no resemblance to the Jewish Mary. Manet said crudely: "Raphael turns my stomach." In the 20th Century Stark Young, standing in the solemn little chapel...
Rehabilitation. Without quarreling with such critics, the editors of The Paintings of Raphael furnish a wealth of illustrations to plead Raphael's versatility. Of mild Madonnas they show plenty. But the editors have pulled from Vatican ceilings and walls details of composition which tourists could never properly see-gritty old men with hair in their ears, powerful brooding figures as lonely as those of Michelangelo, heavy-hoofed chargers, pictures of fire and terror, men bowed under back-breaking loads. They have also dug out of obscurity original pen-and-ink sketches, such as Nude Men Fighting About a Standard...