Raphael Germanised
Raphael. By Oskar Fischel. (Regan Paul. £5 5s.) UNTIL his- death in 1939 the late Dr. Oskar Fischel was regarded as the greatest living authority on Raphael. His volumes on the Raphael drawings had given him a unique insight into the artist's creative procedure, and his record in a field in which false attribu- tions necessarily abound was one of singular discretion and reliability. For all these reasons his posthumous monograph on Raphael, a textual volume of three hundred and fifty pages accompanied by a catalogue raisonne and a volume of three hundred plates, arouses eager antici- pation. Here we must surely have the book on Raphael for which we have so often longed, an account of his development from the profoundly sensitive provincial artist of the Vision of the Knight to the monumental painter of the Stanze, an explanation of the influences that went to form his mind, and a lucid analysis of the formal sensibility that makes him the most rewarding of all painters. After a few pages it is clear that these expectations are doomed to disappointment. The German text must have presented grave problems to the translator, but it should not have been an insuperable task to find a literate equivalent for Dr. Fischers far from clear-cut thought. In places the sense of the text has entirely eluded the translator. "Desire and reality," we read, "on the evidence of this portrait, were at that time one in him ; seeing and looking coincide." 'Whatever Dr. Fischel meant, it can hardly have been this. And someone should have dissuaded the translator from inventing words, "classicalism," " peasantesses " and so on ; should have prevented his indulging in obvious infelicities like "The young mother stoops, with both legs drawn in, like a console figure, listening to the contented sucking of the boy "; and should have pointed out that the plain English for "we possess no clue to prove such a conclusion" is "we have no proof of this." Such sentences, and they occur on almost every page, invest what should have been a worthy memorial to a distinguished scholar with an unfortunate element of parody.
And what of Dr. Fischers portrait ? Here the prevailing sense is one of incongruity that so essentially German a portrayal, with its cloying sentiment and its repeated appeals to Schtingauer, Riemenschneider and the Farbenlehre, should appear for the first time in substitute English rather than in its natural tongue. By the middle of the fifteenth century Raphael's personality was the centre of a cult. "Already in his generation men had an obscure and grateful sense of this his vocation ; and they felt that they them- selves had a vocation through him... . His contemporaries conscious of their own disability, were sensible of the drama of this self- perfecting life as a presentiment of the beyond, as a gift of grace from above." This mystical attitude is most highly developed in the nineteenth-century German literature on the artist, and in turn provoked some measure of reaction. As Dr. Fischel's publishers assure us "His natural grace and the apparent ease and fluency with which his work was accomplished have led to the charge that he was lacking in deeper understanding. The author is at pains to refute these criticisms "; and Dr. Fischel himself declares that "with Raphael we ourselves are always in danger of misunderstanding him, because we do not believe him, with his facility, capable of deep thinking." In England today it is probably true that Raphael is the least widely appreciated of the great artists. But the reason for this is not the suspicion that his paintings lack profundity so much as the tendency to view his work through later academic derivatives. The " ranks of worshippers in the Pinakothek " may find their doubts resolved by an account of Raphael's "progress to the other-worldly." The simple visitor to the National Gallery, on the other .hand, for whom the fascination of Raphael is that of a less limited Poussin or an infinitely gifted Ingres, is likely to feel repelled by the fog of rhetoric and mysticism with which Dr. Fischel blurs the contours of this exquisitely limpid artist.
When all this is said, however, we still have reason to be grateful for Dr. Fischel's book. It is inspired by a compelling seriousness of purpose that cannot but arouse respect. It bears throughout the traces of direct visual experience. And in respect of individual works it makes many points that have not been made before. In a very real sense it is indispensable to those professionally interested in its theme, and generations of students will work their exasperated way backwards and forwards through its pages, cursing the writer's impre- cision, the translator's clumsiness and the perversity of the compiler of the index, in the knowledge that when they have finally overcome all obstacles and discovered what Dr. Fischel thought, the judgement will be as near finality as Raphael scholarship can reach.
JOHN POPE-HENNESSY.
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