” […] timuit quo sospite vinci, rerum magna parens et morente mori”
[… when he was alive, nature has been afraid of being won by him, now that he is death, it is afraid of dying itself”
His contemporaries described him as handsome, lovely and beloved.
In his masterpieces he never missed of honoring and pay tribute to older and less famous artists, like he did in the famous School of Athen were he portrayed Sodoma just beside himself, but he also had such a respect for his predecessors in art that he also opposed the Pope’s will of removing hence destroy former masterpieces to make place for his own:
” because the vault of this room was painted by Pietro Perugino, his maestro, Raffaello didn’t want to destroyed it because of his memory and of the love he had for his maestro, who he recognized to be the begin of his own artistic virtue”
The room which Vasari speaks about is the “Stanza dell’Incendio” (the room of the blaze) that Raffaello began in 1514 after the death of Pope Giulio II. The “urbinate” (the artist from Urbino) didn’t accepted to cancel his maestro’s masterpiece, Pietro Perugino as named by Vasari, has the new Pope,Leone X, ordered.
The enfant prodige of the Italian Renaissance isn’t afraid of paying tribute also to his contemporary and direct rivals: that Eraclito so lonely, surly, absorbed maybe more in his thought than in his writing wasn’t there at the beginning, he appeared after the world discovered the wonder Michelangelo did in the Sistine Chapel.
“Causarum Cognitio”, “Divinarum Rerum Notitia” : in Raffaello everything is order, calm, and splendor (as Paolucci uses to say) and in the world of Science and Art described by Raffaello and approved by the pope Giulio II, there isn’t place for discrimination of any sort.
Starting from the proto philosophers Platon and Aristotle, who were already before Christ, arriving to Averroè, philosopher and much more of Islamic faith (” Averoìs che ‘l gran comento feo” , Inf. IV – The Divine Comedy), all of those great minds have the same dignity and right of being there among the Greats of knowledge and thought, because this is the duty of human being: to and understand the reasons why, it isn’t an option it’s a must of the human nature.
When we pass to the beauty of poetry and art, which humans need to be restored as much as they need laws in order not to live in a wild jungle, again there is no place for discrimination, hence we find not only Petrarca, but beside him Lesbo, the poetess of love par excellence, worldwide known to be homosexual, well Pope Giulio II didn’t have any problems in mentioning Saffo among the greatest poets in the paintings of his own apartments. It seems that that world was a much openminded one compared to the one, we modern human beings aren’t able to create nowadays.