Tradition and Originality in Raphael: The Stanza della Segnatura, the Middle Ages and Local Traditions

Abstract

However much has changed in Renaissance studies, the iconicity of Raphael’s School of Athens in the Vatican Stanze tenaciously continues to hold sway, even when scholars seemingly undermine it by innovative research. Thus a recent attempt to explore undeniably new ways of looking at functions and versions of the past in Renaissance culture eventually cedes to ‘the compulsion to end the account with Raphael’.1 Concluding their study of the interaction between the “substitutional” (that is, art independent of time, author and style but as an instance in a chain of replicas) and the “performative” (art as authorial enunciation) in Quattrocento artistic production, Nagel and Wood in Anachronic Renaissance present a Raphael rightly seen à cheval. Stunningly innovative and stylistically individualized as Raphael’s frescoes were, they were in fact positioned within a traditional context of a (pseudo-) mosaic ceiling and a (neo-) cosmatesque pavement, a defining frame the modern viewer all too easily blocks out of view, concentrating instead on the frescoes as easelpieces.2 Yet if Raphael’s art indeed advanced a highly individual artistic claim for excellence, it did so quite consciously within a monumental context that played the old game of reproducing form including its “atmosphere” that was as highly traditional [Fig. 4.1]. The authenticating function of “substitution” as construed by recent scholarship is surely relevant for the search for an appropriate past studied in this volume.3 The recreation of ambience and concomitant content was the essential tool with which to manipulate visitors and viewers of representative space