Was Raphael the Runt of the Renaissance?
It’s rare that history offers up a simple diagnosis of cultural decline, but we happen to know the exact moment when all of European art headed for ruin. According to the critic John Ruskin, the disaster was called Raphael. The Renaissance master, whose name is only ever sighed in the same breath as Leonardo and Michelangelo, supposedly traded truth for beauty, and ended up destroying both. His work was dull and vapid, a “tasteless poison,” Ruskin said. Just think of all those vacant Madonnas, structurally perfect compositions, and obedient daydreams of antiquity. A modern eyeball can handle only so much before it starts to derange itself in search of a single painterly quirk or sliver of personality.
I had some of this antipathy knocking around in my head before seeing “Raphael: Sublime Poetry,” a show in the works for eight years, at the Met. The good thing about exhibitions of scale, featuring hundreds of objects and once-in-a-century levels of rarity—this is the first major Raphael show in the U.S., a herculean undertaking by the curator Carmen C. Bambach—is that it’s almost impossible to be unchanged by them. Either the crust of your resistance thickens, or it crumbles in the face of genius. In this case, my experience was much stranger. I found an artist so spongelike in his adoption of other styles, so dispersed in his influence on other artists, and so mythical in his stature that I could barely form a clear picture of him.
Like all great myths, Raphael’s is full of symmetries. He was born on Good Friday in 1483 and died on Good Friday in 1520. Given that he lived in the center of Christendom, this wasn’t an insignificant coincidence. Even though he died at the age of thirty-seven, reportedly from having too much sex—not from a venereal disease or a fantastic sex injury but literally from an excess of lovemaking—people often preferred to believe that he died at thirty-three, for its Christly associations. His most influential biographer, Giorgio Vasari, said that Raphael was the beneficiary of his mother breast-feeding him instead of handing him off to a wet nurse, and a recent biographer concurs: “This welcoming maternal breast was undoubtedly one of the factors that helped the future artist.” Ah, yes. Undoubtedly.
The more concrete circumstances were no less auspicious. Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi, was a well-regarded painter and poet in Urbino, a court town that revolved around the palace of Duke Federico da Montefeltro. The Duke, a lover of the arts, drew the twin currents of Quattrocento painting into his fiefdom: the geometry and the structural intelligence of the Italian manner, as represented by Piero della Francesca, who brought his talents for linear perspective to town not long before Raphael was born; and the fetish for detail in the Flemish manner, as represented by Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck. Raphael’s father soaked up both traditions and ran a bustling artist’s workshop, or bottega, in a building connected to the family home. As a child, Raphael would have learned not only how to create charcoal from willow twigs or how to handle a brush made with hog bristles; he would have seen the rigid hierarchies of the bottega—who fetched the water and ground the pigment in the porphyry stone, who conceived of the design for paintings, and how competing personalities were orchestrated toward a single aim. Raphael’s father could manage people below him but also, as a courtier who wrote an entire epic about the life and exploits of Duke Federico, flatter the powerful above him. These were two talents he imparted to his son. Even the most complimentary appraisals of Raphael, which celebrate his multimodal genius—painter, draftsman, architect, poet, surveyor of antiquities—also mention his exquisite social tact and career climbing. He wasn’t just a brilliant artist. He was the politest apparatchik of the High Renaissance.
When we meet Raphael in the show, he’s a young lad wearing a cap. A drawing from around 1500, presumed to be a self-portrait, depicts him with a bit of steel in his eyes. Often regarded as a draftsman first and a painter second, Raphael gives us evidence here to see why. Note the control and tightness of the hatched lines on the cheek, and the way the mark loosens with the locks of hair right next to it, like wind rushing around a building. The darkened edge of his face seems almost gouged into the page, lending a drawing that would otherwise be light and sweet a more interesting mortal heft. By the age of twelve, Raphael had lost both of his parents, and by the age of seventeen he was already a magister—a master painter—taking on a private commission for an altarpiece. He wasn’t done learning, though. Even after his apprentice years, he toiled in the workshop of his mentor, Pietro Perugino.
Perugino isn’t a household name today, but at the tail end of the Quattrocento he was considered by some to be the best painter in Italy. Before Raphael made it to Florence, around 1504, and had his mind rearranged by the work of Leonardo and Michelangelo, Perugino was his North Star. The exhibition has a number of the teacher’s paintings and drawings, which clue you in to how Raphael picked up his “minute style,” as Vasari called it. In Perugino’s “Saint Augustine with Members of an Augustinian Confraternity” (ca. 1500), notice the crisp little fingers of the faithful, who are shrunken to denote their lesser importance against the big Augustine in the center, with his impressively forked beard. Perugino’s compositions tend to be clumsy in their parallels—two people on the left, two people on the right—and the skin typically looks like candle wax. In the sixteenth century, people started to sour on his work. Paolo Giovio, a physician and a writer, called Perugino’s imagination “sterile.” Michelangelo, never one for niceties, said he was just “inept.”
It’s easy to use Perugino as a foil to Raphael, but I’m not convinced that Raphael ever fully rehabilitated the stiffness out of his master’s bodies. The faces, in particular. It’s as if the candle wax becomes subcutaneous, the skin softened and more graceful but concealing an inner brittleness. Raphael’s admirers often say that he was “the only painter of his generation capable of revealing the souls of the men and women whom he painted,” or that he was a wizard at conveying “psychological presence.” They’re either overstating the case or looking at the work of a different painter. Raphael could certainly extract feeling from the architecture of a body and the distribution of its weight, but the majority of his faces, even the most artificially expressive ones, are unburdened by anything like a psychology. That might sound like a recipe for bad painting. Oddly, it isn’t.
One way to tackle the show at the Met is to go from start to finish, diligently combing through all two hundred and thirty-seven pieces by Raphael and his wider circle. Another is to carve the show closer to the bone, skipping over the contextual padding and focussing on the hundred and seventy-five pieces by Raphael. The third option—and don’t tell the curators I’m suggesting this—is to cut straight to the octagonal chamber in the center of the exhibition, which has five of Raphael’s society portraits, all of them masterpieces. Along the way, you should pause to pay homage to “The Alba Madonna” (ca. 1509-11), a perfect circle of pastoral sweetness, and absorb any drawings that catch your eye, but, if you’re on a tight schedule, an hour concentrated with the portraits is worth more than an hour spread thinly across the rest of the exhibition.
There are two paintings on the left side of the octagon: “La Muta” (ca. 1503-05) and “Portrait of a Young Woman with a Unicorn” (1505-06). Both are very exciting. “La Muta,” or “The Mute,” shows a woman sitting in front of a black void. There’s no historically justifiable reason to call her “the mute,” but Leonardo did write that a painter should capture the mind of a subject via the “gestures and the movements of the limbs, and these should be learned from mute persons, who better actualize them than any other sort of men.” The woman is crossing her hands over her lap, a pose that Raphael may have cribbed from the “Mona Lisa”—he and Leonardo were both in Florence between 1504 and 1508—but the focus of the painting, the point toward which the whole composition plunges, is a single finger. It connects with the bottom of the canvas, as though the sitter is pressing an invisible button.
Odds are that the sitter is Giovanna da Montefeltro della Rovere, who was around forty years old and recently widowed. If that’s true, the entire psychological burden of the piece has been distilled into that one strained digit. Cover the top half of the painting with your hand, and you’ll see that Giovanna’s flat expression bears no relation to the action of her extremities. By removing the face as a theatre of psychology, Raphael puts an unusual pressure on the rest of the painting to communicate and produce feeling. My favorite detail is the red ribbon on Giovanna’s right shoulder, which fastens her sleeve to her dress and floats over the darkness. For some reason, it reminds me of Christ’s loincloth in the paintings of Rogier van der Weyden, rippling against a block of color. There are so many exquisite, Netherlandish, hyperreal details to admire in the piece—the shadow of Giovanna’s necklace, the enamel decorations on her cross, the frizz of her hair—but there’s something about the ribbon that feels like a banner of heartbreak. Even when he emptied out a facial expression, Raphael could produce an ache of sadness with just a few accessories.
All of Raphael’s portraits in the octagon are quite distinct—the palette ranges from emerald green and cinnabar to earthy browns and bone black—but there is one bizarre consistency. To recast a three-quarter-length body as a pyramid, a favorite Renaissance shape, Raphael repeatedly files down the shoulder blades and turns their supporting muscle into a long sloping line, which dives from neck to arm. In theory, this could be a standard beauty modification, like Ingres tossing a few extra vertebrae into a naked back. But Raphael botches the foreshortening and engorges the left trapezius to make it seem closer. The result looks a bit like the internet sensation the Crooked Man, who exercises his left trapezius and nothing else. (Don’t look it up.) The situation is particularly severe in “Portrait of a Young Woman with a Unicorn.” I was so distracted by her trapezius that I kept forgetting she was holding a baby unicorn.
Shipped over from the Galleria Borghese, in Rome, the portrait is the most bracingly odd thing in the show, and well suited for modern eyes. The title says it all, except that the unicorn is more like a lapdog with a horn and the young woman, if it is indeed Laura Orsini della Rovere, is around thirteen, which likely makes this a betrothal portrait, meant to advertise her beauty and her dowry. For more than two centuries, she was overpainted as St. Catherine, the unicorn hidden under a torture wheel. Now the unicorn is back, cutely neighing, its mouth as open as Laura’s is closed. It could be a double-edged symbol of virtue and vice, of chastity and unheeded pleasure, but it could also be a bit of heraldry, to highlight Laura’s family ties. The underdrawing, seen with the help of infrared reflectography, shows that Raphael did some last-minute idealizing of her face (as he did with “La Muta,” whose double chin disappears in the final version). Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio had already spun the Renaissance fantasy of the bella donna, with her golden tresses, blue eyes, and pale skin. Laura Orsini is true to type.
Raphael clearly had a thing for blond hair. Laura’s coiffure is dealt with lavishly, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a painter show off so much as in Raphael’s portrait of Bindo Altoviti (ca. 1515-16), a dashing young banker whose golden coils roll down his neck with absurd levels of silkiness and precision. Painted a decade after Giovanna and Laura, Bindo isn’t served open-faced and evenly lit; Raphael has him look over his right shoulder, from shadow to light. The painting is about a hundred times more erotic than the other two portraits and at least twice as erotic as “La Fornarina,” Raphael’s nude of a woman he possibly slept with. Just look at Bindo’s neck, exposed by a parted curtain of hair, the feathery wisps of sideburn, the plump lips, the green eyes. On multiple visits, I’ve had a sort of paranormal experience with Bindo’s right eye, in the middle of the canvas. The longer you stare, the more Cyclopean it becomes, so that it starts to levitate, like a jewel, up and out of the painting. The floating eyeball makes this either my favorite piece in the show or one that I need to stay away from.
When Raphael left Florence for Rome, in 1508, he arrived right on time. Pope Julius II was in the process of restoring the Eternal City to its imperial splendor. A lover of rare antiquities, the Pontiff had commissioned work from the architect Donato Bramante, who liked to scurry around town and measure Roman ruins. Bramante was from the Duchy of Urbino, and he recommended his fellow-Urbinate Raphael for a fresco project in the Stanza della Segnatura, a room in the papal apartments. It was specifically in these frescoes, according to John Ruskin, that the gangrene of modernity set in. By putting religious and profane art together—a picture of Christ on one wall and Apollo on another, both equalized in their prettiness—Raphael triggered centuries of decadence. That’s just one opinion, though. Another person might see the Stanza della Segnatura as the height of humanism, a celebration of ancient philosophy over patristic theology, as in “The School of Athens,” Raphael’s most famous work.
The immovable paintings create a problem for any Raphael exhibition that’s not in the Vatican. The way the Met has chosen to deal with this is to toss the Vatican frescoes onto all four walls of a side room via projector. Because the images rotate at a screen-saver pace, my advice would be to focus on the preparatory drawings and cartoons, which are like sparks thrown off some great, beautiful machine. Although I can appreciate “The School of Athens,” with its leisurely construction-site ethos—Socrates and friends lounging around an enfilade of vaults, open to the sky—I’m partial to “The Fire in the Borgo,” one room over at the Vatican. The composition is pure chaos, which is a relief after so many paintings of classical restraint. Raphael arranges more than forty bodies across at least five centers of action, using all kinds of columns, arches, stairs, and loggias to visually slice and dice the space for narrative ease. To encompass the story, about a miracle from 847, when Pope Leo IV stopped a fire with a blessing, Raphael brings you into the fresco through the unshod feet of a woman in agony and leaves you near the very back, with a tiny and serene Leo IV. (Notice how Raphael uses the wind—in hair, in clothes—like invisible twine, wrapping different parts together.) There is no full cartoon of the fresco, but the Met does have a small red chalk drawing of its most poignant moment: a son carrying his father out of the flames.
The final crescendo of the exhibition will seem a tad strange without context—it’s three enormous tapestries (or, rather, second editions of tapestries) that Raphael designed with the assistance of his studio. Woven in wool, silk, and gilt-metal-coated thread, the first set was commissioned to decorate the walls of the Sistine Chapel, and its cost was astronomical. It contributed to the bankruptcy of the Roman Curia and effectively added gasoline to the Protestant Reformation. (Martin Luther, born the same year as Raphael, visited Rome in 1510 and was appalled by the extravagance of the Pope’s tastes.) The artistic value of the tapestries is that, like “The Fire in the Borgo,” they show Raphael as an ingenious organizer of visual narrative. In “The Miraculous Draft of the Fishes,” birds wheel in the sky, a puff of smoke rises from a chimney in the background—and yet, within this single moment, a multipart story is unfolding, with Christ telling the apostles to cast their net, the apostles hauling fish from the water, and Peter throwing himself at Christ’s feet. Like a proto-Christopher Nolan film, Raphael collapses the second into the minute into the day, and then doubles the scene over itself through a reflection in water. All of this is captured in thread.
When Raphael died, a hundred torches were carried by painters at his funeral, and he was buried in the rotunda of the Pantheon. People were so eager to venerate his remains that skulls of his magically multiplied. Goethe saw one in Rome and swooned over its handsome bone structure, saying that it looked exactly like the kind of skull in which a “beautiful soul could comfortably meander.” (It wasn’t Raphael’s.) The hero worship was eventually punctured, though, and in the nineteenth century Leonardo and Michelangelo would become the twin heads of Renaissance art genius. The nail in the coffin was the Pre-Raphaelites. Raphael has the rare distinction of having an entire aesthetic movement named after a desire to go back to a time before him.
What makes Raphael so difficult to appreciate is that his greatest talents are, in a way, invisible. A brilliant composition isn’t as tangible as a single body rippling with muscle or the sfumato of an earlobe; it’s an interrelation of parts. When the art historian Erwin Panofsky waxes about the composition of Raphael’s “Madonna di Foligno” (1511-12), describing the “well-balanced two-dimensional pattern and an equilibrated distribution of plastic bodies in three-dimensional space,” he ends up sounding like a structural engineer. It’s hard to explain the beauty of the space between things. And supposedly Raphael managed the bodies in his workshop just as well as he did those in his paintings. He went around with a posse of some fifty-odd painters, and his very presence could dispel bad moods and bring out the best in people. That kind of popularity and radiant goodness produces a lineage of artists but doesn’t have the crowd appeal of a lone genius who invents a flying machine or pulls a seventeen-foot sculpture out of a block of marble.
Ruskin said that the only thing clear about Raphael’s compositions was that “everybody seemed to be pointing at everybody else, and that nobody, to my notion, was worth pointing at.” It’s a moving insight on his achievement, in a way. Think of all those heavenward looks in Raphael’s drawings and paintings, such as the man at the center of the Oddi Altarpiece (ca. 1503-05), in which a raised chin can be a medium of transport to somewhere else in the painting, or somewhere above it. Or think of those empty faces which have abandoned their emotion only to have it picked up in a single finger or a ribbon. It’s an art of grace notes and subtleties, of in-betweens and elsewheres. Raphael’s legacy isn’t one masterpiece but so many mysterious crumbs of greatness scattered in sketches and designs, in oil paintings and frescoes. How lovely it would be to see them. ♦