ART STUDY LECTURES
Steen Art Study III: ORANGE COUNTY
Raphael: Art & Life
An Illustrated lecture exploring the life, art, career, and visual
poetry of the High Renaissance master Raphael.
by
PROF. RONALD E. STEEN,
Art Historian and Art Educator

RELATED EXHIBITIONS:
"RAPHAEL AND HIS CIRCLE: DRAWINGS FROM THE WINDSOR CASTLE"
An exhibition of drawings and watercolors by Raphael and the earliest artists
who influenced him and the artists he subsequently influenced,
on loan from Queen Elizabeth II.
and
"RAPHAEL AND HIS INFLUENCE ACROSS THE CENTURIES"
A collection of thirty-one drawings by Raphael and his followers,
from the Getty collection.
Exhibition dates:
Octorber 31, 2000 to January 7, 2001
The J. Paul Getty Museum
Wednesday, November 29, 2000
10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon

REGISTRATION FEES:
REGISTRATION THRU WEDNESDAY, NOV. 8, 2000.......................................$20.00
REGISTRATION AFTER WEDNESDAY, NOV. 8, 2000.....................................$25.00
Minimum 30, Maximum 40
SOLD OUT as of Nov. 1st
AT:
St. Joseph Center
Library Conference Room, Second Floor
Orange, CA 92868
Parking: Free Lot at S. Batavia & La Veta Ave.
(Thomas Brothers 2000 Guide page 799 F5)
ABOUT PROF. RONALD E. STEEN: Prof. Steen is a multi-dgreed art historian working on the paintings of the Seventeenth Century Dutch master and ancestor, Jan Steen. He is also an art and museum educator, critic, curator, former museum director, and former instructor of art history at California State University at Fullerton, UCLA Extension, and has been an adjunct lecturer for the J. Paul Getty Museum Education department and is currently a guest lecturer. In 1982, Prof. Steen received the "Outstanding Achievement in Museum Education Award", from the Museum Educators of Southern California organization and in 1997 he received the "Founding President 1979-1982 Award" from the same education organization.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATED LECTURE: RAPHAEL SANTI, Italian painter and architect (1483-1520). He was the son of Giovanni Santi, a painter active in Urbino where Raphael was born. After his father, his first teacher was Timoteo Viti. In 1499 he became an assistant to Perugino in Perugia where his gifted drafting and painting skills were nurtured. He worked there until his move to Florence. In Florence he came into contact with the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Fra Bartolommeo, and as a result began to develop a more incisive and monum ental style of his own. His development during his Florentine period can be traced to the sequence of Madonna's and Holy Families he painted there, which are devoted chiefly to compositional problems arising from the positioning of figures in space. In 1507 he completed the "Entombment" , his most dramatic and active figural composition to that time. Toward the end of 1508 or early 1509 he left Florence for Rome.

Pope Julius II at once employed Raphael to decorate the Stanza della Signatura in the Vatican. Its frescoes exhibit a complex program of Renaissance humanist themes in which Philosophy, Theology, Jurisprudence, and Poetry are interrelated in a harmonious figural and architectural scheme. On facing walls, among other works, are paired the monumental frescoes of the "Dispute Over the Sacrament" and the "School of Athens". This room is considered one of the purest embodiments of the ideal style of the High Renaissance. In 1515 he began designs for a series of tapestries destined to decorate the lower zone of the Sistine Chapel. They are his most concentrated and dramatic figural compositions, and they became prototypes that were studied and imitated until the 18th century.

In 1514 he was appointed architect of St. Peter's and in 1515, commissioner of antiquities in Rome. His last fresco cycle was the "Story of Psyche" for one of the ceilings of the Villa Farnesina finally executed by assistants from his plan and drawings. His other paintings executed in Rome are the "Ecstasy of St. Cecilia" and the "Transfiguration".

The classic style of the High Renaissance found its most harmonious embodiment in the works of Raphael. After his own close circle of followers in Rome had dispersed his fame was temporarily eclipsed, but from the 17th to the 19th century he was the fountainhead of all movements in painting that aspired to the classical concept of form.

This lecture is not sponsored by the Getty Center.

RELATED:
Artists Demonstrations:Contemporary draughtsperson and painter Peter Zokosky will demonstrate how Raphael used metalpoint, pen and ink, charcoal, and red chalk in the drawing style of Raphael and techniques used by Reanisance artists.
Getty Center, Thurs. Nov. 2, 16, 30 & Sun. Nov. 5, 19, 1-4 p.m., East Pavilion Art Information Room.
Artist Walk Thorugh: Contemporary draughtsperson and painter, Laura Lasworth will conduct a tour through the Rapahel exhibitions,
Fri. Dec. 8, 6:00 and 7:30 p.m., limited to 25 people.