The year 1825
was declared a Holy Year by Pope Leo XII, and it attracted multitude of
pilgrims to Rome, especially to St. Peter's Basilica. The Slovene painter
Matevž Langus (1792–1855) was there too; he had travelled to Rome on September
18, 1824, and subsequently filled his sketchbooks with scenes of the hustle and
bustle of the Jubilee Year and the general impressions of the Eternal City. The
painter had become acquainted with current academic as well as oppositional
movements in painting in the early twenties in Vienna, and he adopted
Renaissance painting ideals there and gained respect for Italian masters. While
in Rome, Langus's study formation and subsequent stylistic orientation were
strongly influenced primarily by the French Academy. The guiding principle of
his studies was imitation of classical antiquity and the inspiration gained
from the masters of Rome’s High Renaissance, Raphael in the first place. The academy
study programme encouraged training in drawing skills.
The French
Academy tended to inform its students above all about the greatness of the
works of Renaissance masters. Students had the chance to broaden their
knowledge of classicist issues through the study of original High Renaissance
masterpieces. The process of learning about Renaissance artists was based on
copying important works. The copies also functioned as studies, through which
the students were supposed to discover Renaissance art principles, and as replicas
of Renaissance masterpieces which were regularly taken to Paris to furnish
Versailles and other representative spaces. A painter was expected to master a
copy of an important Roman work of art by the end of the fourth year of study,
and only in the last (fifth) year was he supposed to paint an image of his own
invention, which of course was bound to reflect the knowledge he had acquired.
Copying Renaissance works was thus pedagogically justified: it was understood
as a creative process, as a necessary training for the later creation of
historical and biblical compositions.
In addition
to regular students, whose school programme and residence regime in the
institution were under stricter control, the French Academy also admitted
part-time students. Anyone in Rome was allowed to attend drawing classes where
students were trained to draw from live models and casts, without any formal
conditions, which Langus also took advantage of.
The
”divine” Raphael was Langus's role model in Rome and later. Evidence of this
are his numerous surviving drawings of that time, and in his later work we also
find altarpieces and frescoes that Langus copied or adapted from Raphael. The
National Gallery of Slovenia owns an oil copy Langus painted in Rome. It
represents a half-length figure of the Muse, taken from the Parnassus scene found in Raphael's
fresco in the Vatican's Stanza della
Segnatura. The painter copied the upper part of the full-length figure
standing to the left of Apollo, behind the reclining Calliope, the Muse of epic
poetry. The copied figure originally holds a mask in her hands, which is why
the Muse is traditionally named Thalia, the patroness of comedy.
In the
sketchbooks, too, there are drawings based on Raphael's works in the Stanzas. Langus
copied the scene of the Original Sin from the Stanza della Segnatura, drawing the figure of Eve with particular
precision; from the composition of Power,
Truth and Temperance he chose the seated angel on the far right. From the
scene of the Disputation he copied
the angel with a book, from the same fresco he also copied the young man
leaning over the balustrade in the right corner and the figural group gathered
in the lower left corner. The latter is a precise study of light and
expressions. The careful drawing emphasizes the shading, and accentuates the
contrast between the expressiveness of the old man's bearded face and the grace
of the young face. In the Stanza
d'Eliodoro he copied the kneeling female figure in the foreground on the
left in the fresco of the Expulsion of
Heliodorus from the Temple. In the Vatican Loggie he also drew figures from
the compositions of Raphael's students, such as the figures of Eve and God from
the Creation scene and God the Father
from the Creation of the Animals. The
latter drawing is coloured, and so is the copied angelic trinity from the
fresco in the Chigi Chapel in the church of S. Maria della Pace.
In one of
his last works three decades later, Langus once again relied on Raphael. In the
second chapel of the Franciscan Church in Ljubljana, he painted a fresco
depicting the Transfiguration on the
Mount – a scene that he copied from Raphael’s last painting. According to
the Renaissance writer Vasari, this was “the most famous, most beautiful and
most sacred painting”. The issue is about the famous painting in which Raphael,
for the first time in history, united two iconographic motifs – the
Transfiguration itself and the motif of a possessed boy – in a composition that
already foreshadowed the Baroque and was admired for centuries by many,
including Goethe, who wrote: “Everything is connected: suffering, needy people
below, active and saving power above.” Langus was able to see the original of the
Raphael painting in Rome, and it was also widely distributed, especially
through graphic images. Langus probably painted the fresco in the year of the
disastrous outbreak of cholera in Carniola in 1855. The epidemic was also fatal
for the painter himself – he died on the night of October 20–21 that year, just
before the ceremonial consecration of the frescoes in the Franciscan church in
Ljubljana took place.