DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: We're
in the Brera in Milan, and we're looking at an
important early Raphael. DR. BETH HARRIS:
Raphael's in his early 20s when he paints this,
and the subject is The Marriage of the Virgin. And it's taken from a book
called The Golden Legend. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: Now, this is
a medieval book that basically tries to fill in all the
missing stories in the Bible. I mean, if you think
about this deeply religious Christian culture,
they look to the Bible to understand the sacred story. But there are so many omissions. There are so many things that
are missing that people created the glue to tie the
stories together. DR. BETH HARRIS:
And that's what's collected in the book we know
today as The Golden Legend. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER:
So this story is about the marriage of the
Virgin Mary to Saint Joseph. And the story says
that there were a number of people that
wanted to marry Mary. DR. BETH HARRIS: She
had many suitors. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: And each
of these suitors had a rod, and that she would be married
to the one whose rod flowered. DR. BETH HARRIS:
Miraculously flowered. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER:
Needless to say. DR. BETH HARRIS: And so
they went to the temple, and the man whose rod
flowered was Joseph. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: And we can
see that in this painting. Joseph, who's got that wonderful
yellow drape over his shoulder and around his waist, is
putting a ring tenderly on the Virgin Mary's finger. And he holds in
his left hand a rod that indeed has
leaves at its end. DR. BETH HARRIS: And there
are other suitors behind him you can see have rods
without flowers on the end. And one suitor in
the front is annoyed, has decided to break
the rod on his knee. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: This
wonderful human narrative quality here, this is not
just the sacred event. But it really is
enacting it before us as a kind of performance. DR. BETH HARRIS: And
so right in the center, we have a priest
marrying Mary and Joseph. And the painting is so
symmetrical in so many ways with that temple behind. And we have this rationally
constructed perspective space. And that priest is in the
middle between Mary and Joseph, but he tips his head a little
bit, so he's just off center. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER:
In fact, there's a little bit of the
chaos of the crowd that people are moving this
way and that, that people are focusing here and there. DR. BETH HARRIS: This
painting is often compared to an early
Renaissance painting by Raphael's teacher, Perugino,
The Giving of the Keys to St. Peter. And you can begin to see
here in this early work by Raphael indications of what
we understand now as the High Renaissance style, as opposed
to a kind of stiffness of the 15th century, of
the early Renaissance. Raphael gives us
figures who seem to move very easily
and elegantly. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER:
So make no mistake. This is a painting that is still
clearly indebted to Perugino. But I think you're
absolutely right. Raphael is beginning to step
out of his master's shadow. He signed the painting, and
if you look very closely at the front of the
temple, you can see it says Raphael Urbinus,
Raphael from Urbino. And there is a beautiful
sense of elegance, especially in the Virgin Mary. She is painted so tenderly. DR. BETH HARRIS: And she stands
in a lovely contrapposto, tilts her head down. There's that typical
Raphael sweetness. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: So whereas
the early Renaissance so often was trying to reveal the truths
of what we see of the world that we live in, here there's
an attempt to perfect, to create a kind of balanced,
harmonious representation of an ideal, Heavenly place. DR. BETH HARRIS: Ideal
beauty, perfection, harmony are qualities we
associate with the High Renaissance. And we see that in the
background of this painting. If we follow the linear
perspective system and we track the orthogonals
created by those paving stones behind the frieze
of figures in the front, we see a centrally planned
temple in the background, a form that was considered
ideal by the architects and the artists of
the High Renaissance. We can think of Bramante, for
example, and his Tempietto. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: It's
a spectacular building. And I love the way that
the linear perspective leads our eye back there
past the frieze of figures in the foreground. And then our eyes are
allowed to move around that arcade that's occupied
by those smaller figures. But then my eye goes
back to the doorway and then through the building
to the doorway on its far side and to the sky that's
revealed beyond even that. And there is that diminishment
of the scale of the one doorway and then the farther
doorway giving us a real sense of the
completeness of this space. DR. BETH HARRIS:
There's a real love of creating an illusion
of space and the way that the sizes of
the figure shift as we move further
back into space. We have this real
harmony here that I think is very
typical of the High Renaissance between the
architecture and the figures where one ennoble
another, where one is as ideal and
perfect as the other. It's this High
Renaissance moment, although the very beginnings. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER:
And of course, we're looking with hindsight
as to what will happen. [MUSIC PLAYING]