By Brad Miner
The current exhibition at the most important museum in the United States, Raphael: Sublime Poetry, will be open until June 28 of this year. As happens with most major shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the curators have gathered works by the artist from museums around the world; and in this case, not only from Raphael. There are 237 pieces in total, including 33 paintings, 142 drawings, some monumental tapestries, and also some sculptural work.
In her statements before the opening, the principal curator Carmen Bambach stated that, although many consider him third on the list of Renaissance masters, she «could argue that Raphael is, in all respects, equal to Leonardo and Michelangelo». After dedicating eight years to organizing the exhibition, I doubt she could say anything else. In any case, Raphael was a superb artist and the show is impressive.
I wonder, however, if most people could name a Raphael painting. If asked about da Vinci, many would mention «The Last Supper» and, certainly, the «Mona Lisa». And about Michelangelo, the Sistine Chapel ceiling or one of his sculptures, perhaps the «David» or the «Pietà». Of course, visitors who have toured the Vatican Museums and seen Raphael’s Rooms would undoubtedly remember those extraordinary frescoes.
But Ms. Bambach is among the best in the field when it comes to Renaissance art. When Robert and Veronica Royal were in Manhattan in 2017, my wife, Sydny, and I accompanied them to another of Bambach’s curations at the MET, Michelangelo: Divine Draughtsman and Designer. And even if I had visited the Raphael exhibition without knowing that Bambach is its curator, I probably would have assumed it must be her work.
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (1483-1520) was something of a shooting star: he arrived in Rome from Umbria, in north-central Italy, at age 23 and died there at 37. In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, the first proper art historian, Giorgio Vasari (who was born in 1511, so he did not know Raphael personally), wrote about him:
How generous and kind Heaven sometimes shows itself when it gathers in a single person the infinite riches of its treasures and all those rare graces and gifts that, over time, are usually distributed among many individuals, can be clearly seen in the no less excellent than gracious Raphael.
Vasari did know the great Michelangelo, and it is probably no exaggeration to say that he idolized him. And he definitely knew that the older man (Michelangelo was eight years older than Raphael) frankly detested the upstart from the east; an enmity that may have begun when Michelangelo saw himself portrayed in Raphael’s Vatican fresco, The School of Athens, as an isolated, melancholic, and tormented Heraclitus.
Michelangelo was neither an intriguer nor a libertine, and Raphael had a reputation for being both. Maybe yes, maybe no; it doesn’t matter, because it’s clearly what Michelangelo believed.
However, Vasari writes that when the sculptor Donato Bramante, the keeper of the keys, let Raphael into the Sistine Chapel for the first time (Michelangelo was away, in Florence), the young man was so astonished by the majesty and musculature of Michelangelo’s prophets and patriarchs that, «after finishing it, Raphael immediately repainted the figure of… Isaiah in the Sant’Agostino in Rome».
Perhaps because of this, Michelangelo said: «Everything he knew about art he learned from me». In some versions of the quote, «learned» is «stole». Whether Raphael was a plagiarist or not is debatable. After all, anyone who has mastered something has had teachers along the way.
The MET exhibition is exhaustive. It even includes a room where all the frescoes from the aforementioned Raphael Rooms in the Vatican are projected via video on the walls in rotation. (The same happened in that Michelangelo exhibition, with the Sistine Chapel lit up high in the gallery).
It is fitting and timely to see paintings by Pietro Perugino included in the show, a superb painter and one of Raphael’s masters, as well as low-relief sculptures by Raphael himself.
For me, however, there were three highlights. The first (and this comes more from Sydny) is the remarkable number of Raphael’s drawings (as mentioned above). There is possibly no better way to gauge an artist’s pure technique than such sketches, and they are rarely seen due to their fragility.
The second, and my personal favorite, is the portrait Raphael made of the writer and statesman Baldassare Castiglione, about whom I wrote in my first column for The Catholic Thing («In Praise of sprezzatura», June 18, 2008). It belongs to the Louvre, and I had planned to see it there in September; now I can focus on elbowing my way to the Mona Lisa. Castiglione and Raphael were friends, and it shows. Moreover, the painter managed to create the effect whereby Castiglione’s eyes follow you from every angle of view, which is casually called the «Mona Lisa Effect».
And third, the tapestries.
As can be guessed from the dates of the image above, Raphael, who died in 1520, did not weave the tapestry himself, nor would he have done so if he had been alive. He created «cartoons» that were delivered to Jan van Tieghem and Frans Gheteels in Belgium, who made copies of Raphael’s paintings and cut them into strips, which were placed under the loom to guide the weavers in their work.
Finally, as a kind of coda both to this wonderful exhibition and to this modest review, there is a sublime black chalk self-portrait from around 1500, when Raphael was a teenager. It was drawn on laid paper (made through a laborious process of filtering pulp through a sieve and then pressing, cutting, and drying). Raphael used white chalk to create highlights, but these have faded and flaked off, and are lost. And here is the artist:
About the author
Brad Miner, husband and father, is senior editor of The Catholic Thing and a senior fellow of the Faith & Reason Institute. He was literary editor of National Review and had a long career in the book publishing industry. His latest book is Sons of St. Patrick, written with George J. Marlin. His bestseller The Compleat Gentleman is now available in a third revised edition and also as an audiobook on Audible (read by Bob Souer). Mr. Miner has been a member of the board of Aid to the Church In Need USA and also of the Selective Service System draft board in Westchester County, New York.