Raphael Goes to Rome, Courtesy of the Met

Two big-ego popes, tapestries, and the hater Michelangelo loom large in the last decade of ‘the prince of artists.’

T his past weekend, I reviewed the first half of the Met’s Raphael: Sublime Poetry, ending with some of his portraits, among them his depiction of the young Florentine banker Bindo Altoviti, a picture the artist and early art historian Vasari called “stupendissimo.” So is the Met exhibition. With more than 40 Raphael paintings and over a hundred of some of his most vibrant drawings, there’s splendor galore. It’s the first New York blockbuster covering the work of the Renaissance’s famous, revered savant, tastemaker, and visionary.

Raphael (1483–1520) shot to fame and fortune fast, moving from cultured, rich, but tiny Urbino to Florence by the time he was a bit older than 20. His signature Madonna and Child paintings and a handful of altarpieces made his reputation as both an innovator and a man bound for Rome. There he landed in 1508, as a papal intimate at the Vatican. Pope Julius II, from the della Rovere family, and his successor, Pope Leo X, from the Medici family, hated each other as only Italian Catholics can, lobbing malocchios — the evil eye — the size of Uranus at each other, but both adored Raphael.

The exhibition is chronological, so we see Raphael’s work develop and also the demands of the two popes. It’s too bad his Portrait of Julius II, from around 1511, isn’t on view, since it sets the standard for papal portraits for at least 150 years. Julius, whose birth name was Giuliano, took the name Julius in emulation of Julius Caesar, known more for his autocratic style than for his theology.

Julius emulated Federico da Montefeltro, too. Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino in Raphael’s youth there, was the perfect Renaissance ruler, a despot but a refined and erudite one. Bramante, the Vatican architect and from Urbino, linked the pope with Raphael. Julius liked the artist’s modernity and his natural ease with collaborations. His big project for Raphael, a Montefeltro acolyte in all things aesthetic, was to decorate three rooms, or stanze, in his new papal apartment. Julius couldn’t bear to live in the apartments of his predecessor, the Borgia family’s Pope Alexander VI. They hated each other so much that they decked themselves out with those little red Italian hex-repellant horns whenever they knew they’d see each other.

The School of Athens, from between 1508 and 1510, was Raphael’s big Julian project. A fresco, it can’t move to the Met. The show has a good digital video of it that fills an entire gallery, so it’s immersive and an effective substitute. It depicts the many branches of philosophy, with Plato and Aristotle center stage. Raphael paints himself as a bystander. Michelangelo plays a brooding Heraclitus, alone, crouching by a marble block. Conceiving the themes was a group project — Julius was the central player — but Raphael was involved intellectually, too. Though not deeply educated, he was up for it and translated the content into the design. The fresco is peak High Renaissance and the supreme flower of human form, balance, and harmony as the richest milieu for human endeavor. There’s nothing static in its scene of big minds swapping big ideas. And no one’s disinvited. Visitors to the Vatican Museum usually rush through the stanze to get to the Sistine Chapel, but for all of Michelangelo’s pizzazz, bulk, and drama, Raphael’s rooms possess the rhetorical oomph and stately look at the heart of the Vatican’s authority.

Raphael did four stanze frescoes, but what does it mean that he “did” them? This is an essential element in Raphael’s career. It’s hard to find a more productive artist than Raphael, organized, efficient, collegial, and can-do as he was, but much of his papal art was a group effort. The exhibit’s wall video is good, but the abundance of Raphael drawings is even better and shows us the real Raphael. His splendid drawings were often painted on the walls by the corps of artists — very good artists — he assembled to work with him. There must have been many hundreds of Raphael drawings guiding them. Many were idea pieces, but most were guides and trashed after being used at the work site.

Two drawings rule the roost: God the Father, from the Louvre and used for the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament fresco at the Vatican, and the Ashmolean’s Head of a Horse, from the Vatican fresco The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple. Who dares imagine God? Raphael does him frontally, bold and rough, with dense cross-hatching, using dark, dense charcoal so the figure’s abstract. The horse is fierce.

Michelangelo, that the brooding master of shock and awe and raw power? When I wrote last week about Leonardo, from whom Raphael learned a lot, I noted that there was no rancor between the two. But Michelangelo had a legion of enemies, real and imagined, and he was one of the few people Raphael didn’t like. Raphael absorbed what he wanted of Michelangelo’s magic with monumental painting, but, once the two were in Rome, they were rivals for Pope Julius II’s favor. They were at different poles. One was anchored in beauty, the other — if anchored in anything — in cinematic spectacle. Michelangelo hated Raphael with a pathological, bazooka-his-Vespa kind of hate.

Michelangelo was mostly a sculptor, not a painter, and his epic painting, the Sistine ceiling, is sculptural, with figures that look like offensive tackles. Raphael goes for the lighter touch, not only in figure types but in color and light, with graceful gestures and sfumato. Michelangelo could be crude, rude, and socially unacceptable. Raphael was a courtier.

Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo, from 1507, and Raphael’s Alba Madonna, from 1511, convey their differences. Michelangelo’s Holy Family and the baby John the Baptist look as if they’re auditioning for the curling team of male nudes in the background. Still, once in Rome, Raphael closely studied the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He adds bulk and action a bit of a “Ben Hur” look to some of his frescoes, but things never get hot and sweaty. When it came to narrative, gesture, and elegance, Raphael leaves Michelangelo in the dust, painting-wise.

I’m delighted that three of Raphael’s Sistine Chapel tapestries are in the show, if for no other reason than that the medium — basically carpets hanging on the wall — often gets no respect. Lofty patrons, though, loved their tapestry art, with intricate design, vast scale, plush look, and, hey, the hangings made a room less cold and damp. His ten Sistine tapestries, made of wool, silk, and silver and gold thread, and treating the lives of Saints Peter and Paul in the book of Acts, are 16 to 18 feet wide and 10 feet tall. They have the look of extreme, glittering bling. Pope Leo commissioned them, probably as a counterpoint to Michelangelo’s Sistine frescoes, a project dear to Pope Julius. The three tapestries on view in Sublime Poetry were second editions based on the originals and commissioned in the 1550s by Spain’s King Philip II.

Starting in 1515, Raphael drew small studies and then painted — with help from staff — watercolor versions in sheets glued together to scale, called cartoons, to guide the weavers in Brussels. The cartoons are in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but the tapestries are the finished work of art. They’re big and, like Saint Paul and Saint Barnabas at Lystra, boisterous. That one is about the two saints-to-be curing a lame man and creating a riot among locals who think they’re Jupiter and Mercury. In the Miraculous Draught of Fishes tapestry, we see Raphael’s newest trick. In one picture, he conflates multiple storylines unfolding over time.

The tapestries save the second half of Sublime Poetry. They’re dynamic, grand Vatican-era Raphaels, and there’s little such fare in the exhibition. The Transfiguration isn’t there. The Farnesina villa, Agostino Chigi’s love nest on the Tiber, is fresco-rich and can’t move. I tell friends that if the lines into St. Peter’s Basilica are too long, go to the Farnesina, a short walk away, for a more sumptuous feast. Papal tombas give me the yawns after a bit. Chigi’s tomb, Raphael’s architectural gem, can’t travel. Two superb late Virgin and Child paintings are on view at the Met, but they can do only so much.

For a retrospective, I like knowing the personal side of the artist. Sublime Poetry didn’t nab a Raphael self-portrait aside from what’s thought to be a Raphael drawing of himself when he was 13 or so. We do get a portrait likeness in La Fornarina (The Baker’s Daughter), baring her breasts, earthy, and thought to be Raphael’s mistress.

She’s no Sophia Loren but she’s very Italian and not a blonde. Her turban is very beautiful. Yes, she’s not fully clothed, and, yes, she’s got a frank come-hither look, but the picture is tasteful, even decorous, inasmuch as it’s based on an ancient sculpture called the Venus Pudica, in part because her lady parts are clothed. This Venus was considered modest, but if she’s modest, I’m a hippopotamus. Raphael wraps his signature — “Raphael Urbanis” — in a blue band with gold borders high on her left arm. Vasari, arguably the first art historian and biographer of artists, said that Raphael was a male tart, and others said that after a week of sex in the spring of 1520, he effectively shagged himself to death.

Sublime Poetry does end with a section called The Eternal City, so we’re flirting with the eternity Raphael entered on Good Friday 1520, dying from a fever, which could mean anything, and on his birthday, too. Pope Leo and his court were in collective shock at the loss of the much-loved artist prince. He’s buried in the Pantheon, once the Roman temple dedicated to the multitude of pagan gods.

Where was Raphael heading? Leo appointed Raphael as the official architect of the new St. Peter’s after the artist’s old Urbino buddy, Bramante, died. When Raphael died, he was in the middle of a survey of all of Rome’s ancient buildings. He wanted to create a map reconstructing imperial Rome, bolstered by block-by-block drawings. This makes him a pioneer in historic preservation. At the time, chaos and change were on the horizon. Leo died in 1521. Rome was sacked in 1527. Martin Luther visited Rome in 1510. He left appalled at the profligacy and hubris of Vatican honchos. He was especially appalled at Leo’s expensive tastes. It wasn’t long before Luther’s “95 Theses” hit the headlines. One reason Leo was selling indulgences was to pay for his art program.

In August 2020, I went to Rome to see the Raphael retrospective at the Scuderie del Quirinale on the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death. There was a lull in Italy in the Covid mass hysteria and hypnosis, but I was going to go if it killed me, though I knew by then that Fauci was not just a quack but a liar and an opportunist, and that the entire Covid drama was a fraud. May he be banished to rot on a rock off the prison island of Ponza with the ghosts of Nero’s mother and Caligula’s sister. That aside, the 2020 Raphael show couldn’t display The School of Athens and so much else, either, but it was really a citywide affair. Viewers were expected to scout and see the things that couldn’t travel. That can’t happen in New York, of course, and Sublime Poetry does suffer for it. Hail to the Met for giving it a Herculean try.

Not to quibble over subtitles, but Sublime Poetry confuses. “Sublime” and “beautiful” are weighty art history opposites. “Sublime” — as in art by Michelangelo, Turner, and Romantics like John Martin and Henry Fuseli — means awesome, fantastic, astonishing, tumultuous, cryptic, moody, and at least a little scary. Raphael’s art is less sublime and more beautiful, meaning idyllic, enchanting, exquisite, pleasing, even beddable. I think we can see why Raphael ruled the Parnassus of aesthetics over Michelangelo, Leonardo, and all others until, say, the age of Modernism, which gave us Picasso and Warhol and, in our time, Basquiat and Jeff Koons. Tastes sure do change.

“Poetry” is another problem word. The introduction to the show concludes with “painting is mute poetry, and poetry is mute painting,” said to be an “ancient dictum.” It sounds good and the stuff of marketing people, but there’s next to nothing in the exhibition about Dante, Petrarch, or Boccaccio. All mere quibbles, and what’s a critic without quibbles? It’s an extraordinary exhibition, a tour de force, and what a story.