Measured against Michelangelo's muscularity, Raphael can look cosy. Yet, argues Andrew Graham-Dixon, he achieved perfection.

Of the three great Italian painters of the High Renaissance, Raphael now seems the most remote and the most thoroughly alien to modern sensibilities. The grace and sweetness and decorum of his work, which earned him universal adulation in his lifetime and made him, for centuries after his death, a paragon among painters, now works against him.
 
We still sympathise easily with Leonardo, whose constant spirit of dissatisfaction with the limitations of a single sphere of endeavour, whose breadth and impatience, may seem awesome but are also endearing. The Icarus-like futility of so many of his enterprises makes him seem fallibly human despite the superhuman nature of his ambition and his vast intellectual range. We like Leonardo for being, in Henry Fuseli's great early 19th-century (and extremely Romantic) description, ''A libertine of thought who wasted life, insatiate, in experiment.''
 
We are, too, still fascinated by Michelangelo: by the power and the terribilit of his imagination; by his sullen, lonely asceticism; by the deep and personal nature (or so it seems, to us) of his struggle as an artist; and above all by the profound tensions in his work. We are liable to see him, now, as a painter and a sculptor wrestling with his own dangerous sensuality and exorcising the demon of his love for a succession of young men by creating a world peopled by idealised supernatural beings: beings whose perfect, muscular male anatomies swoop and circle above us - a reproof and a reminder of our own, less perfect condition - on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
 
But Raphael? He seems insufficiently driven, insufficiently obsessed, incompletely possessed by his own, very different Muses. He seems, perhaps, too well-balanced to...

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