Design in Raphael's Roman workshop

Abstract

This dissertation examines the frescoes of the Vatican Stanze and the altarpiece of the Transfiguration and all the drawings associated with them in an effort to understand the design process in Raphael's Roman workshop. During the last six years of his life Raphael developed a new way of deploying the talented artists in his shop. He employed specialists to perform specific tasks called for by certain commissions. He also trained assistants to perform specific tasks related to the design of major paintings. By the end of Raphael's life, Giulio Romano had emerged as a major artistic force. Once the drawings for the Vatican frescoes are examined in the context of all the available documentary evidence, it becomes clear that Giulio designed important parts of the Vatican fresco cycles, sometimes with no apparent intervention by the master and that Giovanni Francesco Penni created modelli of complex compositions that had been worked up by the master or by Giulio. I draw a different conclusion from all previous scholars who always reserved the ideation of the works of art to Raphael's creative genius alone. Unlike earlier scholars I see the mind, not just the hand, of Giulio Romano and Giovanni Francesco Penni engaged in the design process. This new way of working may have been suggested to Raphael by his experience working with Pinturicchio on the designs for the frescoes of the Piccolomini Library in Siena. Raphael created original design drawings for this project despite the fact that he was employed by an artist thirty years his senior who had been commissioned to carry out the work. Just as in this case, when Raphael became too busy to attend to every detail of his production himself he did not reserve the design process to himself. In fact, in most cases he seems to have allowed assistants to design and carry through major paintings. He and his shop managed to create innovative and sophisticated works of art while at the same time inviting new ways of working that challenged traditional notions of artistic genius and creativity.%%%%