Raphael’s place in the Pantheon of art history

 

Detail from The School of Athens

Is Raphael still top of the painting charts? Back in 1961, when art history was much more judgemental than it is today, Stephen Freedberg wrote a highly-regarded book that described the High Renaissance classical era (note the lower-case “c”). This lasted, according to him, between 1500 and 1520; just 20 years, comprising the great works of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, and ending with the death of Raphael at only 37. It took Freedberg two volumes to describe that short period. Scholars argue over the precise dates of this classical moment, of course, but for many, and certainly for Wikipedia today, there appears to be general agreement that this period was “the absolute zenith of Western painting”. The Wikipedia article for High Renaissance defines it as “a short period of the most exceptional artistic production in the Italian States and in Florence”.

Even more astonishing is that Raphael appears to have burst onto the scene with his mature style almost already formed. “[in 1504] young Raphael, then aged twenty-one, arrived in Florence. He was already the possessor of a formulated High Renaissance classical style, of which the first evidence had been in his very earliest works” [catalogue, p60]. Moreover, we cannot explain just how Raphael acquired this style: “no outward occasion can account for the act by which Raphael infuses a transforming life into the shell of early classical détente.” [Freedberg again].

So any exhibition devoted to Raphael, such as that at the London National Gallery in 2022, would, I would have thought, have tackled that reputation. Is he really still the tops? He started painting the Stanza della Segnatura, including The School of Rome, in 1508, when he was just 25. Even Picasso, widely considered to be one of the most precocious painters of all time, only painted Les Demoiselles when he was 26.

The catalogue seems to take the precocity for granted (a study for the head of St James, dated around 1502, is as good as anything Raphael did), but it does briefly look at Raphael’s amazing mature reputation. Matthias Wivel writes (p46) “By the nineteenth century, Raphael was considered the pre-eminent visual artist of the Western tradition … until the advent of photography he was probably the most reproduced and copied artist in the Western world.” That seems to tally with my experience of visiting heritage sites: no 19th century interior is complete without a Raphael print, usually faded.

Marcantonio Raimondi, after Raphael, Massacre of the Innocents

Wivel then attempts to identify Raphael’s influence on Picasso’s Guernica. I could not imagine a painting more diametrically opposed to the coolness, the sophistication, the assuredness, of The School of Athens. Nonetheless, I can’t deny that the work we only know from engravings, The Massacre of the Innocents, shows a very different kind of Raphael: the most remarkable combination of elegant male forms and a sense of horror. And the late Transfiguration, painted just before Raphael died, does include a boy being healed as he has a seizure. It’s not all milk and honey.

Of course, there will never be full agreement among the critics. Some still believe that Raphael was the summit of Renaissance painting, and of western art. Others, such as the 19th-century pre-Raphaelites and Ruskin, felt his was already an over-ripe development beyond the “purity” of the early Renaissance. If you asked a class of fine art students today, they would probably ask you who Raphael was. He certainly wouldn’t appear in the top ten, or even top 20 artists.

We can discount the usual wacky ideas about Raphael from the critics, for example, Vasari believed these pictures were especially touching because Raphael was breast-fed by his mother, not by a wet-nurse. But even modern-day scholars have their wild moments. Ernest Gombrich believed that Raphael’s fondness for Virgin and Child groupings was a longing to recreate his closeness to his mother and father, who died when he was eight and eleven respectively. And there are modern scholarly articles on Raphael and breast-feeding, claiming that the infant in the Madonna della Sedia is drunk on his mother’s milk (doesn’t look like it to me).

Raphael, St Catherine, detail

Was Raphael the painter of ideal female beauty? The catalogue closes with a full-page close-up of the face of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, which could be seen (especially in close-up like this) as a kind of perfection, the platonic ideal (“una certa idea”) of female beauty. It certainly goes beyond the sentimentality of Raphael’s early master Perugino. But is it where we want to be today? To devote a whole page to a close-up of one face would suggest that the catalogue compilers still believe the perfect female face exists.