Serene ecstasy and perfect grace from the quintessential Renaissance man.
I’ m in Rome to cover the majestic new exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale commemorating the 500th anniversary of the death of Raffaelo Sanzio da Urbino (1483–1520), or Raphael, as we Americans call him. I resolved to see the exhibition — 250 paintings, drawings, prints, books, and letters — when I heard about it last year, and nearly made it in March. The show opened on March 2 and had a run of exactly three days before Italy closed its museums, thanks to the virus mill in Wuhan.
Raffaello: 1520–1483 reopened in the beginning of June, coincidentally on the day it was slated to close. During the lockdown, its curators persuaded every lender to allow every loan to stay in Italy for an extended period ending August 30. Not a single curmudgeon insisted on having his Raphael back. That’s Herculean work. Judging from the exhibition, they’re brilliant. They mustn’t lack for grit and charm, either. Basically, they organized an exhibition of precious Raphaels and did it twice.
Once I resolve to do something, I morph chrysalis-like from my dour, buttoned-down WASP shell into both an immovable object and an irresistible force, in this case with wings since I needed to get to Italy. After all, it’s Raphael, and this is the definitive Raphael show of our era. I was going to see it if it killed me and certainly wasn’t about to let the lowdown, germy handicraft of the Chinese Communist Party and an international hysteria stop me.
And here I am, in Rome, aglow after a day of Raphael, suffused by his unique, unforgettable brand of beauty and emboldened to say I have an entirely fresh and deepened understanding of both the man and his work. Americans are allowed in Italy on “affari indispensabli,” which more or less means essential business, and the show closed today.
I’m a journalist writing a story about it for you. I can’t think of any business more essential than that.
The show is called “Raffaello: 1520-1483,” and that’s not curatorial dyslexia. It starts with Raphael’s death on Good Friday, 1520, on his 37th birthday, and goes backwards, through flashbacks, from the Rome of Leo X and Julius II, two powerhouse popes, to Raphael’s vision to disinter the buried ruins of ancient Rome, to The School of Athens, his development of ideal beauty via his many versions of the Madonna and Child, and to his relationships with Michelangelo, Bramante, Leonardo, Mantegna, Fra Bartolomeo, and Perugino. It ends with the savant’s early years in the art-savvy court of the Montefeltro dukes in Urbino.
Presenting a show backwards is a risk, and an emphatic one since it starts with a nearly life-size reproduction of Raphael’s tomb in the Pantheon. His death shocked Rome and every high-end court in Italy. He was famous when he died and beloved by Leo X, who was “sunk in a measureless grief,” Renaissance historian Giorgio Vasari reported. A few days after Raphael’s funeral, Rome was shaken by earth tremors the pope believed were signals from his spirit.
Starting at the end invites the show’s central questions. Why is Raphael so famous, and why does he matter now? Many of us can answer the question on one point, via Vasari. In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, from 1550, Vasari couldn’t praise Raphael as an artist with more fervor, but he also defined him as Rome’s leading sex machine.
Vasari revealed his cause of death. Raphael “pursued his amorous pleasures to an inordinate degree” during a weekend bender, Vasari says. He felt fevered and tired and called a doctor who slapped leeches on him and bled him to death. Vasari was the leading biographer of the artists of the Renaissance. His views, for better or worse, have long legs.
Art historians are usually nerds, so writing about a stud now and then adds spark to the profession. Judging from Raphael’s Self-Portrait with His Fencing Master, from 1518, and his early, 1504 self-portrait, both in the show, he ranged from hunk to cutie. La Fornarina, from 1518, and La Velata, from 1514, also there, are so intensely famous because they might be Raphael’s mistresses, though they might not be. Over 500 years, dissertations dished the dirt about his love life, making him both a matinee idol and a celebrity artist.
On a more cerebral point, Raphael was famous for fashioning the style and milieu we call the High Renaissance and rooting it securely in the papal court. He was the essential man — designer, painter, tastemaker, entrepreneur, team builder, courtier, and visionary — who weaved disparate impulses and personalities into an all-purpose classical revival. The Renaissance might have started in Florence but once in Rome, the center of the world, it took off like a rocket. Thus begins the modern age.
The first gallery of the exhibition, with the facsimile of Raphael’s tomb, puts his passion for ancient Rome front and center. Raphael surely saw the Pantheon as prime real estate for his eternal repose, but this wasn’t simply his ego at work. During his years in Rome, starting around 1508 when Pope Julius II (1443–1513) brought him to Rome from Florence to his death, Raphael focused with more and more intensity on the Rome beneath the surface.
In Raphael’s lifetime, Rome was a medieval city with most of the ancient imperial sites we know today either half-buried or poorly understood or both. Raffaelo: 1520–1483 tells the story of Raphael’s discovery of this heritage, his realization of its scope, and his commitment to its recovery.
Raphael’s Portrait of Julius II, from 1512, and The Portrait of Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’Medici and Luigi de’Rossi, from 1518, anchor the show’s close look at Raphael’s two popes and partners. These share a space with Self-Portrait with His Fencing Master and The Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, from around 1514. These four heavy-hitter portraits, seen together, are worth the trip to Rome.
They’re bracing and lush, and each oozes authority. In those days, the popes were indeed the masters of the universe. They were God’s wingmen, unspeakably rich, ruled the capital of Roman Catholicism, and were infallible to boot. Both Julius and Leo (1475–1521) made high culture a priority. They prized quality decoration, which led Julius to hire Raphael to paint the frescoes in his private library in the Vatican Palace, now called the Stanza della Segnatura. The Disputa and The School of Athens are there, done by 1512. They also were absorbed in literature, present and ancient, music, and art and architecture of the highest refinement and intellectual heft. They loved Greek and Roman art, or what they knew of it, for its purity and elegance. They admired Greek and Roman writers for their sophistication, wit, and wisdom, paganism aside. Both assembled courts where erudition and good taste mattered. Both made the beautification of Rome a central concern.
As popes, they were a couple of warmongers and spendthrifts. They sold indulgences by the truckload. Leo didn’t help prevent the Protestant Reformation, but no matter.
Leo expanded Raphael’s portfolio. He continued to paint rooms in the palace but also became the architect of the new St. Peter’s basilica. In both popes — Julius, deep in thought, Leo, watchful and cunning, both in crimson — Raphael could not have found more enthusiastic patrons.
Castiglione (1478–1529) was the leading public intellectual of his day and the pioneer of what we call civic humanism. It’s a package of characteristics such as gentleness, respect, courage, self-improvement, cultivation, and my favorite, “sprezzatura,” which is a sense of style that springs from confidence and innate goodness rather than artifice. “Sprezzatura” is a natural grace that inspires judgment, reason, and good taste. Raphael’s portrait conveys warmth and gravity, sobriety and conviviality. His brushstroke isn’t bombastic. There are no dark, ominous shadows. Castiglione evokes serenity but with sparkling blue eyes appraising the viewer with curiosity.
Raphael was Castiglione’s age, and there’s no question they were “simpatico,” but, of the two, Raphael was the poster boy for the Renaissance Man. His was atom-fueled “sprezzatura,” and let’s not discount his way with the ladies. I think Raphael as a painter has launched scholarship aplenty. Art historians have probed and poked every inch of every work he made. I think the exhibition’s strength is its look at Raphael as a conceptualizer and synergist.
Julius brought Raphael to Rome, but Leo gave him and Castiglione the grandest assignment. The exhibition hooks Raphael’s fame to his paintings and drawings, to be sure, but decisively as well to his work as an archaeologist. In 1518, Raphael proposed to develop a detailed neighborhood-by-neighborhood reconstruction of ancient Rome using existing excavations and the texts of ancient writers. His long proposal, written with Castiglione and submitted to Leo, is in the exhibition.
This wasn’t exactly revolutionary since Brunelleschi, Alberti, Leonardo, Bramante, and many others had dabbled in archaeology. Raphael proposed something comprehensive and organized, something embracing not only buildings but sculpture and inscriptions as well as measures to stop local builders from pilfering materials from the ancient sites visible at the time. Raphael proposed, in effect, to undo what the Barbarians had done.
Leo was as deeply committed to Raphael’s plan as he was to Raphael. Raphael, we learn, was incessantly inquisitive. The exhibition develops his fascination with the design elements of ancient Rome. Unlike Leonardo (1452–1519), Raphael was young. Leonardo and Michelangelo (1475–1564) were disorganized, quixotic, and disputatious while Raphael was focused, affable, and, ego-wise, measured and collegial. Raphael was a diplomat by nature while Michelangelo was a steamroller. Leo felt the rediscovery of Rome’s ancient look and feel was urgent, and he thought Raphael was the one to pull it off.
As we move back in time, what attracted Leo and Julius to Raphael becomes clearer and clearer. Raphael was omnivorous. He wasn’t formally educated, and it’s unlikely he ever learned to read and write Latin without help. He refined his designs for his frescoes for the Stanza d’Elidoro, the Stanza dell’Incendio, and the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican Palace through exhaustive drawings. The frescoes can’t be in the exhibition, but, through drawings for these and other paintings, we see his willingness to experiment.
Raphael was a synthesizer, too. As the show moves backward in time, we see him drawing from older artists, not only Leonardo, Bramante, and Fra Bartolomeo but also Piero della Francesca, who would have mattered the most to him in Urbino, aside from his artist father, and Donatello. He looked and he absorbed, but, and here’s a miracle, everyone liked him.
Do we miss something irreplaceable because the frescoes can’t be there? No, we don’t, but I think I needed to see them. I went after I saw the exhibition, and I went to the Villa Farnesina, too. Raphael did work there for the Chigi family in 1512. I think seeing Raphael’s painting at both places is part of the effort everyone needs to commit. I’ve written for NR about the Bernini retrospective at the Borghese in Rome and the Tintoretto retrospective in Venice. Both shows, and the Raphael show, work because the other essential art is within walking distance.
Raphael’s final, wild weekend aside, no one ever called him debauched. Let’s say he was randy, or suitably libidinous for an Italian. In assessing his fame over the centuries, we have to look at him, as the show does, as proponent of a feminine ideal driven by a healthy, unadorned beauty, no Botox, no fake eyelashes allowed, augmented by modesty. It’s a generic look, the exhibition argues, even in portraits such as La Fornarina and La Velata, a look only a little more earthly than his Madonnas. On the one hand, none of Raphael’s women is going to give her man an argument. They’re angelic and sweet. On the other, we can’t argue that he doesn’t approach the subject from a courtly, even chivalrous point of view.
The Madonna Alba, from 1511, one of two Madonna tondos (circular works), is there along with The Madonna Tempi, from around 1508, and The Madonna del Granduca, from 1506, and painted in Florence. They’re beautiful and perfect, as are their little Jesuses, but they’re not strictly ethereal. They have weight, and the tenderness between mother and baby is thoroughly Italian and, for Italian art around 1500, something very new.
In thinking about what made Raphael famous, I have to say that he waxes and wanes along with the value we place on decorum, delicacy of touch, accessibility, and an ecstasy that’s serene and silent. The dark side, and Caravaggio comes to mind, waxes and wanes, too. I raise him since in 2010, at the Scuderie del Quirinale, I saw the show commemorating the 400th anniversary of Caravaggio’s death.
For me, there were two haunting moments in the exhibition, haunting in a good way. St. Cecilia with Sts. Paul, John, Augustine, and Mary Magdalene, from around 1517, was painted for a chapel in Bologna when Raphael was becoming famous throughout Italy. Cecilia was a Roman martyr and the patron saint of musicians. Despite her vow to remain a virgin and devote herself to God, her parents pushed her into a marriage with a pagan. She persuaded him to convert, but both were soon killed.
The figures are like columns and unlike Raphael’s plump, malleable Madonnas. Baroque saints can easily feel like an opera, but here, for this patron saint of music, the sound of ecstasy is evocative, soothing, and rich, even healing, like a Ravel piano concerto or something by Debussy or a Mozart concerto. Raphael is not for a time of bombast, or of rancor, unless the culture wants an antidote. As I looked at this picture and the Madonnas, I put my belief in the imperfectibility of humankind aside. Raphael wasn’t perfect — no one can be — but he sought an ideal of perfection, of harmony, and I find that attractive.
Self-Portrait with His Fencing Master shows Raphael as the hunk I believe very well might have died by Bacchanalian debauch. Putting that aside, I’m sure he painted it using a mirror. That his colleague was his fencing master is something an art historian pulled out of his hat. We don’t know who he is. We do know that he’s looking at Raphael but gesturing toward the space beyond the picture frame, as if to say, “Hey, what you see is a reflection. . . . The real Raphael is standing with you.” It startled me, and that revelation persuaded me that Raffaelo: 1520–1483 was indeed essential, and essentially good. Wouldn’t a big dollop of “sprezzatura” do the world some good right now?
