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Raphael's authorship in the 'Expulsion of Heliodorus.' - interpretation of court painter Raphael's mural
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 1997 by Michael Schwartz
Returning next door to the Eliodoro, we see Pope Julius pointing to the middle of Raphael's head and metaphorically "at" the painter's mind. I wish to contextualize this motif further by turning to the famous letter on the idea ostensibly written by Raphael to Baldesar Castiglione. We now know, thanks to John Shearman's investigations, that the letter is a fiction written by Castiglione about 1522 as a memorial to his recently deceased friend.(87) The letter, however, is not only a literary portrait but also a belated response by Castiglione to Raphael's Roman art around the time of the Galatea (ca. 1512). By feigning Raphael's literary authorship, Castiglione attests to how he, as a courtly viewer of works like the Heliodorus, understood Raphael's sense of his own painting:
As for the Galatea, I should consider myself a great master if it had half the merits you mention in your letter. However, I perceive in your words the love you bear me; and I add that in order to paint a fair one, I should need to see several fair ones, with the proviso that Your Lordship will be with me to select the best. But as there is a shortage of good judges and of beautiful women, I am making use of some sort of idea which comes into my mind [io mi seruo di certa idea che mi uiene nella mente]. Whether this idea has any artistic excellence in itself, I do not know. But I do strive to attain it.(88)
The letter contrasts two potential avenues to artistic excellence. One, modeled after the ancient tale of Zeuxis, is an "empirical" or external approach that, with the help of the painter's connoisseur friend, may build up a beautiful figure from the judicious selection of parts. The other is an "idealist" or internal approach that makes use of a certa idea in the painter's mind. The latter path is Raphael's. But what is this idea? In his well-known reading of the letter, Erwin Panofsky makes a number of claims that will serve here as a counterpoint for our own exegesis.(89) First, Panofsky sees the certa idea as having no normative validity. This claim seems wrong since the idea may lead Raphael to artistic excellence - any qualifications about such achievement are for a literary effect of modesty. Second, Panofsky hypothesizes that, if asked, the author of the letter would have admitted that the idea originally had roots in sensory experience. But again this seems mistaken, since the antithetical rhythm of the letter's argument suggests a contrast between the two approaches. Third, Panofsky denies any "metaphysical origin" of the certa idea. Here we need to pay close attention to the phraseology.
The locution that an "idea comes into one's mind" is distinctive from the present-day expression that "one has an idea." During the later Middle Ages, Renaissance, and into the seventeenth century, a fundamental shift in Western metaphysics was accompanied by a changing sense of the term idea: from "cosmic Ideas," as in Augustine's formulation that the divine Ideas are the thoughts of God, to "mental ideas" as possessions of a thinking subject.(90) What is striking about the phrase in the letter is that it calls on both these senses. That the certa idea comes into one's mind implies that it was not always there, that it was elsewhere, beyond the painter's being, and thus having something of a "metaphysical origin." Yet once in mind, the idea becomes a personal mental possession that can readily be used by the (particular) painter.(91)
