F. Testa – Abstract

At a time when western culture in the early modern age began to elaborate conscious, independent reflection on the arts, it happened that the figure of Raphael rose to the rank of exemplary model, the privileged subject of a many-faceted theoretical exercise on identity, objectives, linguistic and formal instruments and the official role of painting, with special attention to the relationship, percieved as fundamental under the aegis of Horace’s Ut pictura poesis, which was established between painting and the art of words.

In his contribution, the author has tried to sketch out the hermeneutic path by which this process of constructing the Raphael model was worked out and developed, with the prospective awareness that the achievements of the artistic literature of the Cinquecento would be crystallized into a powerful topos that has been able, for more than two centuries, to permeate theoretical reflection on the art of painting, and will continue to acknowledge in Raphael a model of universal value.