Date: 24-10-2004
Owning Institution: The National Gallery
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph Features      
Subject: Middle Ages & Earlier        

When the Renaissance painter and assiduous chronicler of artists’ lives, Giorgio Vasari, sat down to write his biography of Raphael, he could hardly contain his enthusiasm: “How bountiful and benign Heaven sometimes shows itself in showering upon one single person the infiniute riches of its treasures, and all those graces and rarest gifts that it is wont to distribute among many individuals, over a long space of time, could be seen in the no less excellent than gracious Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, who was endowed by nature with all that modesty and goodness which are seen at times in those who, beyond all other men, have added to their natural sweetness and gentleness the beautiful adornment of courtesy and grace, by reason of which they always show themselves agreeable and pleasant to every sort of person and in all their actions.”

Vasari was writing in the middle years of the sixteenth century, several decades after the precocious Raphael’s premature and universally mourned death, at the age of 37, in 1520. Vasari saw Raphael not only as one of the greatest artists ever to have lived – perhaps, in his view, the greatest of all, even including Michelangelo – but as the role model for every aspiring artist of the future. He was not only the perfect painter but the perfect courtier, who in his seemingly effortless ascent to pre-eminence had done more than any other man to correct the age-old prejudice that artists were generally mad, bad and dangerous to know (a prejudice which went back to antiquity, the Greek author Plato having excluded artists from his ideal republic on the grounds of their mental instability). As Vasari breathlessly expressed it: “since the greater part of the craftsmen who had lived up to that time had received from nature a certain element of savagery and madness, which, besides making them strange and eccentric, had brought it about that very often there was revealed in them rather the obscure darkness of vice than the brightness and splendour of those virtues that make men immortal, there was right good reason for her to cause to shine out brilliantly in Raffaello, as a contrast to the others, all the rarest qualities of the mind, accompanied by such grace, industry, beauty, modesty, and excellence of character … Wherefore it may surely be said that those who are the possessors of such rare and numerous gifts as were seen in Raffaello da Urbino, are not merely men, but, if it be not a sin to say it, mortal gods…”

It is surprising fact that until now, despite the presence of numerous works by his hand in British collections, there has never yet in this country been a major exhibition devoted to this demi-god of art. The National Gallery’s principal autumn exhibition, “Raphael: From Urbino to Rome”, the fruit of several years of planning, promises to be a fascinating and ambitious show, gathering together some 70 autograph paintings and drawings by Raphael himself, both from Britain and abroad, together with a number of works by his early teachers and by artists known to have influenced him during his formative years. More than an obligatory blockbuster, it is an exhibition behind which can be discerned a specific aim and something like a missionary purpose – to humanise the dauntingly remote figure of Raphael and, to a certain degree, to rehabilitate his reputation for a modern audience.

Despite his unquestioned status as a founding father of the western art tradition, Raphael is no longer nowadays one of the most widely appreciated Old Masters. This is partly for the very reasons which Vasari once gave for admiring him. The sweetness and decorum of his works, which combine the grace and clarity of early Quattrocento Tuscan and Umbrian art with the spatial sophistication and narrative complexity of the High Renaissance, are not easily compatible with the popular cliché of the driven and tortured genius. Neither are his reputed placidity of temperament, easy sociability and polished, courtly demeanour. Leonardo da Vinci’s restless spirit of enquiry and Michelangelo’s intense, self-questioning spirituality have given both those artists a lasting romantic appeal which Raphael – the third and youngest member of the leading triumvirate of Italian High Renaissance artists – somehow seems to lack. Regarded with awe by generations of academic art theorists, from Vasari to Joshua Reynolds, his star began to wane somewhat during the Romantic period, which coincided with the birth of the modern prototype of the suffering, struggling artist. Johann Wolfgang Goethe sounded one of the first notes of post-Enlightenment dissent, reporting on a visit to the Vatican in his Italian Journey that “From the Sistine Chapel we went to the loggias of Raphael, and, though I hardly dare admit it, I could not look at them any longer. After Michelangelo’s great forms, my eye took little pleasure in the ingenious frivolities of Raphael’s arabesques.”

The National Gallery’s exhibition focusses on Raphael’s formative years and on his arrival in Rome, where he quickly became the favourite of Pope Julius II. In doing so, the show seeks to explore and elucidate one of the most astonishing feats of self-transformation in the history of art – Raphael’s rise, within less than ten years, from the relative obscurity of a workshop in the Umbrian Marches to a position centre stage in Rome, the hothouse of High Renaissance style, where he would enjoy an almost total monopoly of papal patronage, despite stiff competition from the greatest artists of the day. In effect, the exhibition seeks to retrace the steps of Raphael’s journey, documenting his influences and his enthusiasms and his restlessly experimental exploration of new styles and ideas. It does so, to a large extent, by juxtaposing his finished works with his numerous sketches and studies, some of them preparatory works, others breathlessly dashed-off aides-memoires recording the impact which the works of older artists such as Leonardo and Michelangelo had on him when he saw them for the first time. This reliance on drawings, cartoons and other supposedly “secondary” media is more than merely a stratagem forced upon the organisers of the exhibition by the difficulty of securing more than a handful of loans of his finished oil paintings (although the roster of those that have been borrowed from abroad is nonetheless undeniably impressive). It is an attempt to recapture something of the spirit of struggle and excitement that must have animated Raphael, a prodigy if ever there was one, during his early years.

Raphael was born in 1483, on the auspicious day of Good Friday, according to Vasari, in the Duchy of Urbino. His father, Giovanni Santi, was a well respected painter and poet who had been attached to the court of the mercenary general Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, one of the most enlightened humanist patrons of art and architecture in the second half of the fifteenth century. Raphael’s father, who painted a number of altarpieces in Urbino and its environs and who also composed an epic poem recounting the life of Federigo da Montefeltro, died before the child reached his teens. But it seems likely that the young Raphael acquired from him not only a grounding in the rudiments of art but an unusually broad education for a painter – suggested by the ease and keenness with which, in later life, he made friends with writers – as well as that considerable degree of social polish which was later to impress his high-born patrons and to infuriate rivals as illustrious as Michelangelo.

There are few extant portraits of Raphael but the National Gallery exhibition contains two of them, both self-portraits in fact, and both dated in the early years of the sixteenth century. The earlier of the two is a drawing owned by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, dated circa 1500-2, although it may be earlier still, to judge by the hauntingly immediate, adolescent face which the artist presents to the world. His hair is long, cascading down to his shoulders from under a compact, barely sketched cap, while the smooth, beautifully modelled line of his cheek and jaw – early testament to the young Raphael’s uncanny, life-conjuring abilities as a draughtsman – carries just the faintest suggestion of a young man’s incipient stubble. He has a faraway look in his eyes. The second picture, lent by the Uffizi, was painted some years later and has been somewhat abraded by time, so that much of its surface modelling has been worn (or over-cleaned) away. The work’s quality is outweighed by its fame – so much so that Edward Gibbon disappointedly proclaimed it “without expression, without drawing and without colour” – but it is a memorable portrait of the artist as a young man, nevertheless. There is a certain toughness in the eyes and in the set of the jaw.

The precise nature of Raphael’s early training is unknown, although it probably involved some years in his father’s workshop as well as a period working either as an assistant or apprentice to Pietro Perugino, the leading painter of Central Italy at the turn of the sixteenth century. But by the time he was in his early twenties, Raphael had established himself as an independent painter of altarpieces and other sacred subjects and his earliest works demonstrate the disconcerting facility with which he was able to absorb and assimilate the styles, the innovations and the mannerisms of the painters whom he admired. One of the surprises of the National Gallery show is a Resurrection of Christ painted in about 1501-2, a devotional panel owned by the Museu de Arte de Sao Paolo in Brazil, which has only recently been attributed firmly to Raphael (on the convincing basis that several drawings undeniably by his hand, also in the exhibition, are clearly studies for it). A Peruginesque Christ, flanked by floating angels, ascends weightlessly from a heavy marble tomb that could have been painted by Piero della Francesca, to the amazement of a bevy of armed guards seemingly drafted in from the work, variously, of Andrea Mantegna and Luca Signorelli. The overall effect is not entirely convincing because the artist has not quite managed to make his magpie borrowing of parts cohere into a believable whole; but considering that Raphael was only eighteen when he painted it is still fairly impressive, not least for its ambition.

A number of intriguing sketches created at around the same time, just as Raphael was making a name for himself in towns such as Perugia and Citta di Castello, show just how assiduously he checked out the competition and developed his own compositions accordingly – sketching a particularly animated figure in this or that altarpiece by Signorelli; organising a life model, or garzone, into an equally energetic pose. Raphael’s own inventiveness quickly became legendary, to the extent that in the early 1500s the much older painter Pinturicchio sought his assistance in designing the compositions for an entire fresco cycle in Siena (for the charming and still perfectly preserved Piccolomini Library). But his contemporaries must have been equally struck by his ventriloquistic powers of imitation. The first part of his early career is punctuated by a Saint Sebastian from Bergamo and the National Gallery’s own so-called Mond Crucifixion, both of which mimic the soft, sweet, contemplative style of Perugino’s religious art so perfectly that even the older artist’s most pronounced personal tics – such as the elongated second toes of his statuesque, upwardly gazing figures, and even their elegantly crooked little fingers and accentuatedly protruberant eyelashes – have been duplicated by Raphael. As Vasari remarked, if Raphael had not taken the trouble to sign the Mond Crucifixion, it would almost certainly have gone down to posterity as a masterpiece by Perugino himself.

The late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were an exciting time to be an artist, since it was a period of unparalleled innovation and counter-innovation, a time when the language of painting was being developed in all sorts of different directions by a generation of artists blessed with a loftier sense of their own vocation than any to have preceded them. New types of art were coming into being. Portraiture had only recently been established as a serious independent genre of art and many different kinds of narrative and subject paintings – mythologies, allegories, nudes, landscapes – were still only in their infancy. Geometrically calculated perspective had only been developed a couple of generations before Raphael’s birth and oil paint was still a relatively untried medium.

It seems very clear that Raphael recognised that he was living in extrordinary times, and the restless, peripatetic nature of his early career was almost certainly dictated by his desire to study and improve himself at the centre of this storm of creativity – wherever that centre might be. This explains why, having established himself so soon in the relatively provincial centre of Perugia, he took the step of leaving for Florence – arming himself, with characteristic foresight, with a letter of introduction to the head of the Florentine Republic – in about 1505. He had heard that Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci had been commissioned to create two great battle frescoes for the Palazzo della Signoria and he wanted to see their preparatory cartoons for those works at first hand. The frescoes themselves were never completed, but the large-scale cartoons for them caused a sensation and became, in the words of Benvenuto Cellini, “a school for artists”. They were certainly a school for Raphael, who might have been remembered as little more than a gifted follower of Perugino had he died in his early twenties.

It was Raphael’s encounter with the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo that proved to be the decisive catalyst in his own development, and the National Gallery’s exhibition has been selected to convey as vividly as possible the momentous impact which the work of the two older artists had on him. The raw excitement of his encounter with their art was to shape his entire subsequent development, cracking the still and slightly stiff monumentality of his Peruginesque manner and alerting him to the possibilities of ambitiously composed, multi-figure compositions. But it is expressed most simply in some of his most rapidly dashed-off sketches, such as a wonderfully direct drawing of Michelangelo’s monumental statue of David – the great marble giant and eighth wonder of the world, which had only been installed in the Piazza della Signoria in Florence a few years before Raphael’s arrival – which Raphael has had the temerity to imagine walking off his plinth; or a furious set of Five Studies of Nude Male Torsos, evidently inspired by Michelangelo’s battle cartoon; or a whole series of drawings and paintings in which he wrestles with the sudden shock of seeing Leonardo da Vinci’s ingenious, mystically animated variations on the theme of the Madonna with Child. Raphael had painted the subject frequently in the years before he travelled to Florence, emphasising the madonna’s sweetness and grace and the bond of love between her and the infant Christ; but having seen Leonardo’s revolutionary new approach to this popular devotional theme his own later explorations of it became increasingly complex both in the relationship between figures and setting, and in their bittersweet mood of spiritual foreboding. The exhibition explores this aspect of his work in particular depth, in an impressive array of paintings and drawings borrowed from museums all over the world.

Leonardo’s views on Raphael are unknown but Michelangelo, certainly in later life, appears to have resented the way in which the younger artist absorbed and built on his own achievements. “All that he had in art, he had from me!” was Michelangelo’s reported complaint about Raphael to his own biographer Condivi – an interesting early case of an artist lamenting the fact that there can be no copyright in ideas. But while it is true that Raphael might never have developed as he did had it not been for the inspiring example of Michelangelo’s works, the fact is that he was very much his own man; and the grand synthesis that is Raphael’s mature style was by no means the product of his admiration for any single artist. Michelangelo could never have painted Raphael’s great portrait of Julius II, the doughty warrior pope, bent but unbowed, a picture which both drew upon recent Venetian innovations in oil painting and so inspired Venice’s greatest painter, Titian, that he painted his own copy of it; nor could he have painted the profoundly sensual Donna Velata, perhaps the outstanding loan in the whole show, a picture which represents Raphael’s warm-blooded and worldly riposte to the enigma of the Mona Lisa.

The triumphant, culminating proofs of Raphael’s genius were to be the works that he painted on his arrival in Rome, for the private apartments of Julius II. Those works, which represent the climax of the adventure of his earlier career, which is the subject of the National Gallery’s exhibition, cannot of course form part of it – monumental frescoes falling rather heavily ouside of the category of lendable works of art. The greatest of them remains, perhaps, The School of Athens, in which with stunning originality Raphael took an abstract idea – the progress of human learning – and embodied it in an imagined assembly of the philosophers and natural scientists of antiquity. In that picture, the sages of different centuries are shown, impossibly, talking animatedly among themselves, learning from one another, feeding on one another’s intellectual energy and – in one or two lightly comical touches – eavesdropping on the conversations of others in order to steal their ideas. In the light of the National gallery’s exhibition, that painting comes to seem rather more charged with autobiographical meaning than is commonly supposed – an allegory of that same process of collaboration, corss-fertilisation and occasional theft by which, Raphael realised, he too had evolved his thought and his art. As Vasari so straightforwardly put it, “through studying the efforts of the old and modern masters, he took the best from each of them, and by gathering all this together, enriched the art of painting.”