For
this fresco, which Raphael painted in the villa (now called the Farnesina) of
a rich banker, Agostino Chig, he chose as subject a verse from a poem by the Florentine
Angelo Poliziano which had also helped to inspire Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus'.
These lines describe how the clumsy giant Polyphemus sings a love song to the
fair sea-nymph Galatea and how she rides across the waves in a chariot drawn by
two dolphins, laughing at his uncouth song, while the gay company of other sea-gods
and nymphs is milling round her. Raphael's fresco shows Galatea with her gay companions;
the picture of the giant was to appear elsewhere in the hall. However long one
looks at this lovely and cheerful picture, one will always discover new beauties
in its rich and intricate composition. Every figure seems to correspond to some
other figure, every movement to answer a counter-movement. We have observed this
method in Pollaiuolo's showpiece. But how rigid and dull his solution looks in
comparison with Raphael's!
To start with the small boys with Cupid's bows
and arrows who aim at the heart of the nymph: not only do those to right and left
echo each other's movements, but the boy swimming beside the chariot corresponds
to the one flying at the top of the picture. It is the same with the group of
sea-gods which seems to be 'wheeling' round the nymph. There are two on the margins,
who blow on their seashells, and two pairs in front and behind, who are making
love to each other. But what is more admirable is that all these diverse movements
are somehow reflected and taken up in the figure of Galatea herself. Her chariot
had been driving from left to right with her veil blowing backwards, but, hearing
the strange love song, she turns round and smiles, and all the lines in the picture,
from the love-gods' arrows to the reins she holds, converge on her beautiful face
in the very center of the picture.
By these artistic means Raphael has achieved constant
movement throughout the picture, without letting it become restless or unbalanced.
It is for this supreme mastery of arranging his figures, this consummate skill
in composition, that artists have admired Raphael ever since.
Just as Michelangelo was found to have reached
the highest peak in the mastery of the human body, Raphael was seen to have accomplished
what the older generation had striven so hard to achieve: the perfect and harmonious
composition of freely moving figures.
There was another quality in Raphael's work that
was admired by his contemporaries and by subsequent generations the sheer
beauty of his figures. When he had finished the 'Galatea', Raphael was asked by
a courtier where in all the world he had found a model of such beauty. He replied
that he did not copy any specific model but rather followed 'a certain idea' he
had formed in his mind. To some extent, then, Raphael, like his teacher Perugino,
had abandoned the faithful portrayal of nature which had been the ambition of
so many Quattrocento artists. He deliberately used an imagined type of regular
beauty.
If we look back to the time of Praxiteles, we remember
how what we call an 'ideal' beauty grew out of a slow approximation of schematic
forms to nature. Now the process was reversed. Artists tried to modify nature
according to the idea of beauty they had formed when looking at classical statues
they 'idealized' the model. It was a tendency not without its dangers,
for, if the artist deliberately 'improves on' nature, his work may easily look
manered or insipid. But if we look once more at Raphael's work, we see that he,
at any rate, could idealize without any loss of vitality and sincerity in the
result. There is nothing schematic or calculated in Galatea's loveliness. She
is an inmate of a brigher world of love and beauty - the world of the classics
as it appeared to its admirers in sixteenth-century Italy.”