It’s 25 January 1504, and so cold in Florence that the Arno river is about to freeze over. Thirty men meet in an icy room to decide where to position a giant statue of a little hero somewhere outdoors in public view. Among them are Botticelli, Leonardo and Filippino Lippi, who will be dead only weeks later and has already had to concede a substantial commission to the more famous Leonardo, currently working on the Mona Lisa. The statue is Michelangelo’s David, and it will take four days to drag it, upright, to the most prominent square in the city.
Raphael arrives in Florence a few weeks later, possibly from Siena, at the age of 21. He sees the enormous figure, and he draws it. And looking at this nimble image in brown ink, now hanging in the Royal Academy’s small but potent exhibition, you see through Raphael’s eyes for a moment. He stands behind this most familiar of all statues, noticing the extreme musculature so strenuously recorded in Carrara marble; and he corrects it, ever so slightly, scaling down the outsize hands.
