San Miguel

The archangel sets one foot on Satan's back and raises his spear, wings open, face perfectly calm. Raphael's image of heaven over hell became the very first lesson of the French royal academy.

The story behind the painting

Raphael first painted Saint Michael around 1504 or 1505 for Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, a small work on the back of a draughtboard. A little over a decade later he returned to the theme for Pope Leo X, producing this large painting, about 268 by 160 cm, dated 1518 by Wikidata. Wikipedia says it was commissioned by Leo X, while also noting that other sources describe it as originally a gift to Francis I of France. It was tied to the French Order of Saint Michael and used as an image of power in the French state. By 1667 Louis XIV had placed it in the Louvre, where it remains.

What to look for

Michael stands amid rocky scenery, one leg planted on the devil, spear raised to strike his head. His wings are open, while the devil's are closed, a sign of defeat. Follow the line of the body from the tip of the spear down to the serpent's head. The twisted pose recalls Michelangelo's male nudes, and the action suspended in time recalls Leonardo. Notice also the colour, unusual for Raphael: orange, yellow and gold combined into a metallic finish, with black ink to darken the image and suggest smoke. Charles Le Brun later observed that the figure seems to move while the angel's face stays calm.

Meaning and intent

The painting shows God triumphing over evil. The calm face against the violent action expresses, for Le Brun, the authority of heaven over hell. George B. Rose wrote that Raphael's figures are drawn with grace and reserve and that in his compositions man is always dominant over nature; here the archangel is master and Satan the subdued creature. Raphael had a gift, the source says, for evoking the divine in a subtle way, and for capturing movement at a standstill. His figures suggest the perfect bodies believers hoped to receive in heaven, while staying human enough to move viewers on earth.

Legacy

In 1667 the painting was the subject of Charles Le Brun's first lecture at the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture. He compared Michael's muscles with statues of Apollo, and drew lessons that became foundations of French classicism: a unified colour scheme, a simple main idea, and a figure posed to suggest movement. Not everyone admired it. Sebastiano del Piombo complained to Michelangelo that the figure looked smoky or made of iron; Eugene Muntz blamed Giulio Romano's heavy use of black, and some have asked whether Giulio painted it. It was restored by Primaticcio in 1537 to 1540, again in 1685, and moved from wood to canvas in 1753.