A Master Is Born
The great Italian Renaissance painter, draftsman, and architect Raffaello Sanzio, now known as Raphael, was born on this day in 1483 in Urbino.
Sculptor Olin Levi Warner made this plaster model for a colossal medallion portrait of Raphael. Warner studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and specialized in portrait busts and medallions. This work was part of a commission to execute colossal portrait busts of five famous artists (Michelangelo, Raphael, Rembrandt, Titian, Velazquez) for the architectural decoration of the Fine Arts Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Though Warner completed the commission, the final ten foot square relief panels, which were to occupy the building's attic niches, were never installed. Warner modeled the likeness, dressed in period costume, after a famous self-portrait of the artist in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
Source: George Gurney. Olin Levi Warner (1844-1896): A Catalogue Raisonne of His Sculpture and Graphic Works. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware.
Pictured: Olin Levi Warner, 1844–1896, Model for Colossal Head of Raphael, 1892, plaster/cast, 22 3/4 in. diam., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Carlyle Jones.
The great Italian Renaissance painter, draftsman, and architect Raffaello Sanzio, now known as Raphael, was born on this day in 1483 in Urbino.
Sculptor Olin Levi Warner made this plaster model for a colossal medallion portrait of Raphael. Warner studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and specialized in portrait busts and medallions. This work was part of a commission to execute colossal portrait busts of five famous artists (Michelangelo, Raphael, Rembrandt, Titian, Velazquez) for the architectural decoration of the Fine Arts Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.