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Raphael
built 114 days ago
In the Image series that treated the first two volumes of the Mirage Comics as canonical, Raphael was blasted in the face and disfigured. After that he wore one of Casey Jones' hockey masks for much of the time, and eventually just an eye patch. Later, Raphael wore Shredder's armor in an attempt to psychologically dominate a number of the New York Mob, with whom the Foot Clan was engaged in a losing gang war. He had accidentally stumbled into a battle between Foot members and these gun-toting Mobsters and was chased right into Shredder's old forge, where he crafted his armor and weapons by hand in Ninja tradition. He donned a slightly variant version of the armor, (which had far more blades on the arms than just the two held on the hand by a type of brass knuckle band seen in other versions of the Shredder), and pretended to be the Shredder to get the advantage on his pursuers. He succeeded in defeating them and was then accepted into, and given control of, the New York faction of the Foot Clan for a brief time.
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"Raphael's style was by no means uninfluenced by Michelangelo's painting. Following the preliminary unveiling of the Sistine ceiling in 1509, the figures in Raphael's pictures acquire more voluminous bodies and more powerful arms, and there is a reduction in their numbers. The bold twisting position adopted by the young woman in the Expulsion of Heliodorus - a pose which reappears in reverse in Raphael's late work, the Transfiguration - would be inconceivable without the influence of Michelangelo. Any question as to the cause of the widely-acknowledged sudden change in Raphael's style after 1509 is removed for good... when we compare the Sibyls and Prophets executed by Raphael in the Capella Chigi in S. Maria della Pace (1512) with those by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. In addition to the thematic kinship of these frescos with Michelangelo, Raphael's new approach to body volumes and twisting poses makes patently clear the enormous impact which the Sistine ceiling had made upon him.
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At this time Raphael had acquired great renown at Rome. But although his graceful style commanded the admiration of all, and he continually studied the numerous antiquities in the city, he‚had not as yet endowed his figures with the grandeur and majesty which he imparted to them henceforward.
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Raphael ... confronted, for the first time, a serious rival to his skill. When Raphael arrived in 1508 to join the team of painters assigned to the Stanze, Pope Julius had entrusted the greatest painting commission in the city, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, to a sculptor, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475รข€“1564). By 1510, when Bramante procured Raphael entrance into the unfinished chapel, the young painter from Urbino took in all of Michelangelo's epic grandeur and strange, luminous color. Michelangelo would later claim that he himself had taught Raphael all he knew about painting. Still, when Michelangelo finished the chapel in 1512, the older painter hurried back to Florence, leaving Raphael as Rome's undisputed master painter, just as Bramante had become the city's supreme architect.
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"In 1504 Raphael went to Florence, bearing a letter of recommendation from the Duchess of Montefeltro to the gonfalonier Soderini. The intensive debates surrounding the new directions being taken in art at that time must have made a forceful impression on the young 21-year-old. It was a period in which Leonardo, just returned from Milan, was astounding the public with his Mona Lisa; Fra Bartolommeo was exhibiting his Last Judgement; and Michelangelo, who had come back to Florence from his first trip to Rome three years previously, had completed his David and was now working on the cartoon of the Bathing Soldiers, part of a series of historical and battle scenes planned for the Palazzo della Signoria. Leonardo ... produced a design for another fresco in the same series, The Battle of Anghiari. As Benvenuto Cellini later recalled: "One of these cartoons was in the Medici palace, and the other in the Pope's hall: and while they remained intact they served as a school for all the world." Raphael responded to the artistic challenge posed by these cartoons in drawings in which he took up the theme of battle, such as his Battle of the Lapiths and the Centaurs sketch of around 1504.
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In 1508 Raphael was called to Rome by Pope Julius II and commissioned to execute frescoes in four small rooms of the Vatican Palace. The walls of the first room are decorated with scenes elaborating ideas suggested by personifications of Theology, Philosophy, Poetry, and Justice, which appear on the upper walls. The most famous of these compositions is The School of Athens, which represents the concept of Philosophy. The painting displays the greatest thinkers of the Greek world, most notably Plato and Aristotle, who are at the center of the composition. As with Leonardo's Last Supper, all of the architectural lines lead back to a vanishing point right behind the main center of interest, and the arch doorway serves to emphasize their importance. Though the artist portrays famous thinkers from a thousand years before his time, he uses portraits of his contemporaries to serve the composition.
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Raphael