Detail of The Garvagh Madonna
(Picture: The National Gallery, London)Fame, acclaim, notoriety - all are often attached to great artists, but divinity is rarely bestowed on any but the saints. Raphael was one of those rarities, compared with Christ after he died at the age of 37 on April 6, 1520 (Good Friday; a convenient coincidence), he has since been held up as a sort of perfect artist and paragon of virtue (despite the fact that he was reputed to have died from “a surfeit of love” - his reputation as an enthusiastic shagger seems not to have troubled his admirers).
This exhibition at the National Gallery seeks to be the first in the UK to present the full range of Raphael’s work. In his time he was described as a “universal artist”; now we would accurately call him a Renaissance man. A virtuoso draughtsman, a boundary-pushing painter, a clever printmaker, an exquisite designer of vases and tapestries, an innovative architect and, by all accounts, an absolute delight to be around, from his tragically short career he left behind an unsurpassed body of work that changed Western art.
