Detail from The Garvagh Madonna
(Picture: The National Gallery, London)There are relatively few artists whose greatness was recognised in their own day and whose standing has remained unaltered ever since: Raphael is one.
Georgio Vasari, the painter-biographer who tells us most of what we know about him, observed that “When this noble craftsman died, the art of painting might well have died also, seeing that when he closed his eyes, she was left as it were blind… For in truth we have from him art, colouring, and invention harmonised and brought to such a pitch of perfection as could scarcely be hoped for; nor may any intellect ever think to surpass him.”
That reputation has remained into our own time: Kenneth Clark, of Civilisation fame, observed that Raphael was “one of the civilising forces of the western imagination”. Nowadays, mind you, the best known figures by Raphael, about whom a major exhibition is soon to open at the National Gallery, are probably the whimsical cherubs at the base of his Sistine Madonna, which feature in umpteen reproductions in every format, occasionally smoking an enormous spliff.
Raphael was born in 1483 to a father, Giovanni Santi, who was an artist and poet to the small but cultivated court of Urbino, near the top of the calf of Italy’s boot, and insisted that his son should be breast fed at home rather than farmed out to a peasant wet nurse. Raphael’s affectionate mother died when he was eight; his father when he was 11 and he was raised by his father’s brother, a priest.
He grew up then, in a loving family but suffered the early losses that make for an idealised view of family life, to which some critics attribute his tender Madonnas. What Vasari emphasises is his easy and graceful manner: the ideal courtier of the time. Santi apprenticed him to the respected artist Pietro Perugino in Perugia, whose style he assimilated; then in Florence he learned from Fra Bartolomeo and fell under the overwhelming influence of Leonardo da Vinci.
Later he went to Rome where he encountered Michelangelo, which inspired an artistic rivalry with the pugnacious older artist. Raphael was favoured by two patron popes, Julius II and Leo X, and was commissioned by the fabulously wealthy banker, Agostino Chigi. But his career was tragically short, lasting just 20 years (he was aged just 37 when he died). Nonetheless, it left an abiding influence on his own and later generations.
The National Gallery’s forthcoming show would be unmissable if it only included his paintings. But this exhibition is comprehensive; it deals with the entirety of his career (the last Raphael show there featured his early work) and every aspect of it. As the co-curator of the exhibition, Tom Henry, told me (over breakfast at the Vatican, since you ask), “this is the first exhibition outside Italy that includes every aspect of Raphael’s career… painting, tapestry design, architecture and printmaker.” Prints? Apparently so.
“Raphael plainly realised the potential of this new technology for disseminating his work to a wider public, and made the most of it”. So the show will include designs to be engraved by his collaborator, Marcantonio Raimondi. Raphael’s interest in engravings was sparked by the works of Dürer, whom he knew (another recent exhibition at the National, Dürer’s Travels, touched on their relationship).
We meet Raphael as a tapestry designer and surveyor – he surveyed the antiquities of Rome for the pope and we will get to see his famous letter complaining about “the shame of the age”, his contemporaries plundering the Roman remains. Also, Raphael, architect. Eh? Yes, on his tomb in the Pantheon in Rome, he’s billed as architect as well as designer, and he was joint architect of St Peter’s. He was both literally and figuratively what we used to call a Renaissance man or, as Vasari says, ottimo universale, the universal genius.
The show will feature beautiful architectural drawings, including one for the Villa Madama – an out of town residence for the Medicis – as well as paintings, like the Betrothal of the Virgin, where the building is central to the composition. He also designed sculpture and metal work (including grotesque taps for a cardinal’s bathroom); we will see two beautiful circular bronze reliefs he executed for his fabulously wealthy patron Chigi, for his memorial church (though they never made it there) and which have never been shown outside Italy.
It’s a challenge to represent every aspect of a career which arguably reached its highest point in the private apartments or Stanze of Pope Julius II in the Vatican and the tapestries that were to hang in the Sistine Chapel, to rival Michelangelo’s ceiling. But the curators have managed to represent these too. From the tapestries depicting the Acts of the Apostles, made in Flanders, we get St Paul preaching at Athens, and the cartoons, the designs on which they were based, are right here in London, at the V&A, and these are digitally reproduced in the exhibition.
There will also be an entire room given over to the papal apartments he decorated for Julius II, notably the papal library where Raphael executed his most famous work, the depiction of theology, philosophy, law and the arts, all harmoniously linked – in short, the entire Renaissance project in one room. We have here a life sketch for the wonderful figure of Diogenes in The School of Athens, the one sprawling on the steps. And the psychologically insightful portrait of Pope Julius in the same room didn’t have far to come; it’s one of the nine paintings here from the gallery’s own collection.
Broadly chronological, the show will depict Raphael’s journey from Urbino to Perugia to Florence to Rome, and in that, one aspect of his genius – assimilating the style of other artists. At the beginning it was Perugino, then at Florence it was Leonardo da Vinci – there’s Raphael’s copy here of his Leda and the swan, as well as a study of a young woman where he channels the Mona Lisa – while in Rome, his work was transformed by Michelangelo (there’s a story in Vasari about him being smuggled into the Sistine Chapel when Michelangelo was out of town and absorbing the revolutionary figures on the ceiling - the master was none too pleased about it).
Perhaps the works most associated with Raphael, though, are his representations of the Madonna and Child and there are some very beautiful examples coming to London from his time in Florence and his early years in Rome. Some, like the Alba Madonna, showing the Virgin with Christ and the little John the Baptist (based on an episode in the apocryphal gospels), are in tondo form, the round format that was popular in Florence; in some, the cradling arms echo the circular form. Not even reproductions on countless Christmas cards can quite take away from the charm of these works.
But does there come a point where the serenity jars? Tom Henry, the curator thinks not: “This serenity is the artist’s eternal gift, and if we are open to it, Raphael can lift up our hearts.” Even in scenes of brutality and horror, such as Christ carrying the cross, Raphael gives us grace, beauty and glorious colour – none of the dirt, the agonised humanity of Flemish masters here. His deposition of Christ, however, showing the weight of Christ’s body and the strain on the man lifting it, was very different from what went before.
It was the serenity and harmony that characterises Raphael that repelled John Ruskin, who wrote of the frescos in the papal apartments: “The perfection of execution and the beauty of feature which were attained in these works and in those of his greatest contemporaries, rendered finish of execution and beauty of form the chief objects of all artists; and henceforward execution was looked for rather than thought, and beauty rather than veracity.”
Well, if finish of execution is a problem, see Raphael’s sketches. They have the spontaneity and vivacity which paintings inevitably lack; the sketch for the Alba Madonna is lively and dynamic. Raphael was a great draughtsman, and his finished drawings are among his loveliest pieces. We see here two astonishingly accomplished drawings, self portraits, which he did when he was only 16 or 17.
The last room of the exhibition will be devoted to his portraits, works of psychological penetration. They include two female portraits: the Donna Vellata or Veiled Woman, with her confident gaze, and La Fornarina, a sexy, barely clothed woman with a fine headdress who may have been his mistress (his name is on a band on her arm). A sketch of a female nude suggests that Raphael, unusually, drew women from life, at least at the end of his career. According to Vasari, he was partial to the ladies – and looking at his pictures, you don’t need Vasari to tell you that.
The tragedy is of course that his career and life were cut so short. As Vasari put it: “pursuing his amours in secret, Raffaello continued to divert himself beyond measure with the pleasures of love; whence it happened that, having on one occasion indulged in more than his usual excess, he returned to his house in a violent fever”. Alas, his physicians bled him too profusely, and he died. Still, the manner of his death – which may or may not be entirely accurate – did not prevent him being considered the most Christ-like of artists; above his deathbed his friends placed his glorious Transfiguration of Christ. The divine Raphael indeed.
