Quotation attributed to Raphael

“Time is a vindictive bandit to steal the beauty of our former selves.”

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Raphael

Attributed

1519

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“A painter whose works are widely held to rival those of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo as the greatest achievements of the Hight Renaissance, Raphael (Rafaello Sanzio) was born in Urbino, Italy, in 1483. His life was intensely productive – 300 images of the Madonna were merely a fraction of his prolific output – but lamentably brief: he died on 6 April 1520, his thirty-seventh birthday, which was young, even for the period.

The above quotation continues thus: ‘We are left with sagging, ripped flesh, and burning gums with empty socks.’ To have such a strong sense of physical decay and, by extension, of transience, may seem remarkable in one so young, but, as an artist, Raphael would have had a heightened awareness of the human body and was perhaps able to see decline much earlier than other people, who tend to notice their deterioration only after the process is well established.

Nevertheless, we should not be too surprised that such a feeling should be strong in one so young.

English Victorian poet Matthew Arnold wrote the powerful and pessimistic ‘Growing Old’ before reaching the age of twenty-seven.”(JP)

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