If you wanted a great portrait in early 16th-century Italy, or a few rooms filling with frescoes, or even a bathroom doing, Raphael was your artist – ahead of his contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. He could paint with as much authority as Leonardo, but without the long delays and distractions to which the older genius was prone as he paused commissions to build a flying machine or simply do maths for a few months. As for the other artistic titan of the time, Raphael cruelly satirised Michelangelo in his fresco The School of Athens, which is spectacularly recreated in this show as a wall-filling facsimile. Michelangelo is depicted in this great vision of classical Greece as the philosopher Heraclitus, sitting by himself, a grumpy loner with his face resting in his hand in the attribute of melancholy.
Raphael was well-dressed and charming. Of the big three of the High Renaissance, he was the most straightforward, the most productive, and for 300 years, the most influential. When he was in his early 20s he saw the Mona Lisa and other works by Leonardo and transfigured their style into his own, as you can see here in his 1507-8 painting La Muta of a woman with Mona Lisa-like mystery and reserve. The adaptation he made to Leonardo’s style was a sensational success – honing the classical noses and poses, but removing the bizarre chiaroscuro. This created a noble, balanced, clear figurative art that was taught for centuries as the correct, perfect style, until modernism knocked it off its pedestal.
