Getty Drawings by Raphael and his Followers Complement Windsor Exhibition
October 6, 2000
Los Angeles--Raphael and His Influence Across the Centuries, on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from October 31, 2000 through January 7, 2001, appears concurrently with the major traveling exhibition Raphael and His Circle: Drawings from Windsor Castle. Complementing the Windsor exhibition, Raphael and His Influence features 31 drawings from the Getty Museum's own collection that illustrate Raphael's impact on his contemporaries and later artists. Works by Raphael and his followers will be shown with 17th- through 19th-century drawings that demonstrate artists' enduring fascination with the master. On view will be drawings by artists such as Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577-1640), Nicolas Poussin (French, 1594-1655), and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French, 1780-1867).
Raphael influenced many artists with his remarkable technique, efficient draftsmanship, and harmonious compositions. His frescoes were studied and admired in situ throughout Rome and distributed across Europe as paintings, drawings, cartoons, prints, and copies. Raphael and His Influence Across the Centuries shows how elements of his art can be found in styles as diverse as Mannerism, Classical Baroque, and Neoclassicism.
A highlight of the exhibition, Raphael's Saint Paul Rending his Garments (about 1514-1515), is a preparatory drawing for one of the cartoons commissioned by Pope Leo X for a series of 10 tapestries about the Acts of the Apostles. The tapestries were created to hang in the Sistine Chapel and complete its grandiose decoration. Raphael was responsible for the design of the cartoons, while his assistants helped paint the immense works on paper. For this drawing, a study for Saint Paul in the Sacrifice at Lystra, Raphael chose the traditional technique of metalpoint on prepared paper. He used the clarity of the medium to its greatest effect, creating one of his most instinctive yet highly accomplished compositions. The dramatic impact of the moment when St. Paul disrobes in protest is captured in the drawing with unprecedented confidence and vitality.
Also included in the exhibition is Poussin's lively drawing, Apollo and the Muses on Mount Parnassus (about 1630Ð1632). Raphael's well-known fresco of this theme in the Vatican's Stanza della Segnatura, painted around 1511, so strongly influenced Poussin's Apollo that the work is seen as an homage to Raphael the master. Executed with a fine quill pen that gives it a buoyantly animated quality, Poussin's treatment of the sun god surrounded by muses and poets at the side of the Castilian Spring is remarkable for its economy of line and abstract simplification of form. Like his predecessor, Poussin's primary concern was to achieve an ideal sense of harmony and provide balance to this crowded gathering of poets.
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