Prologue: Good Friday to Good Friday

Giorgio Vasari, who never met him, gave Raphael the most perfect of all artists' biographies: a life enclosed between two Good Fridays. Born in Urbino in the small hours of a Good Friday in 1483, he died in Rome on Good Friday, 6 April 1520, aged thirty-seven — the age, as the devout were quick to observe, that tradition assigned to Christ. Vasari's symmetry does not quite survive the calendar (Good Friday in 1483 fell on 28 March, while the tomb tradition insists on 6 April), but it has survived everything else, because it says something true about how Raphael has been understood for five hundred years. He is the artist whose life was felt to have the shape of a work of art: a beginning in provincial grace, a middle of prodigious learning, a climax in the papal city, and a death at the very instant of plenitude, with the Transfiguration — his last and largest picture — standing unfinished at the head of his bier.

That shape has been a blessing and a burden. No painter has been more loved and, for long stretches, more reflexively admired; none has been so thoroughly turned into a norm — "the divine Raphael," the "prince of painters," the measure against which academies taught drawing for three centuries — and none, in consequence, has had so much trouble being seen. The nineteenth century, which hung a print of the Sistine Madonna in half the studies of Europe, also produced the first movement in art history to name itself after the wish to get rid of him. The twentieth, which preferred its geniuses tormented, tended to find him merely accomplished. Only in the last fifty years, through an enormous labour of archival, technical and art-historical work, has it become possible again to look at Raphael as what he was: a working painter of astonishing intelligence, operating under pressure, improvising solutions to problems that had never been posed before, running the largest artistic enterprise of his age, and dying with most of it unfinished.

This essay attempts a portrait of that painter. It follows his life from Urbino to Rome; it tries to say with some precision what he learned from whom and what he did with it; it looks closely at how he actually made pictures — on what supports, with what tools, through what sequence of drawing, transfer and paint; and it asks what the long argument about him, from Vasari and Dolce through Bellori, Reynolds and the Nazarenes to Wölfflin, Gombrich and Shearman, tells us about painting as an art and about the curious fate of perfection.

I. Urbino: a court as a school

Raphael was born into a building site of the Renaissance imagination. Urbino in 1483 was a hill-town of perhaps five thousand souls in the Marche, but its ruler for forty years, Federico da Montefeltro (d. 1482), had made it the most refined small court in Italy. The Palazzo Ducale, which Luciano Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio built for him, was less a fortress than an argument about proportion; its studiolo, with its intarsia illusions of half-open cupboards and musical instruments, was the most sophisticated exercise in perspective in Europe. Piero della Francesca had worked here and left the Flagellation, that small panel in which perspective becomes a kind of theology; he also dedicated to Federico's son Guidobaldo the treatise De prospectiva pingendi. Justus of Ghent and Pedro Berruguete had painted the famous men of the studiolo. The library was one of the great humanist collections. Baldassare Castiglione would later set The Book of the Courtier in this palace, in the evenings of 1507, as the place where the ideal of civilised conversation had been realised on earth.

The painter's father, Giovanni Santi (c. 1435–1494), was a modest but not negligible figure at that court — a painter of altarpieces and portraits, a designer of court festivities, and, unusually, a writer. His rhymed chronicle of Federico's life, composed in the late 1480s and running to more than twenty thousand lines, contains a "disputation on painting" that is one of the earliest surviving rankings of living artists by a practitioner. Santi praises Mantegna above all, names Leonardo and Perugino as "two young men, equal in age and in loves," lists Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Signorelli and Melozzo, and — remarkably for an Italian of his time — honours "the great Jan" of Bruges (van Eyck) and Rogier van der Weyden. The boy who grew up in that house was thus exposed, before he could have understood it, to an idea that would shape his whole career: that painting was a field with a history and a hierarchy, a competition among named masters with distinct virtues, and that a painter's task was to know them all.

His mother, Magia di Battista Ciarla, died in October 1491, when he was eight; Giovanni remarried, quarrelled over property, and died on 1 August 1494, leaving the eleven-year-old to the guardianship of a priest uncle, Bartolomeo, and to years of litigation with his stepmother. We know almost nothing secure about the next five years. Vasari says Giovanni took the boy to Perugino's shop in Perugia while still living, which is chronologically awkward; later scholarship has proposed that Raphael's first master after his father was Timoteo Viti, a Bolognese-trained painter who settled in Urbino in 1495, and that the Peruginesque manner of his earliest works came less from a Perugian apprenticeship than from the general Umbrian-Marchigian air. The truth is probably that he passed through several hands — his father's assistants in the Santi workshop (one of them, Evangelista da Pian di Meleto, would still be his partner in 1500), Viti, and at some point Perugino himself, who in the late 1490s was the most admired painter in central Italy, running shops in both Perugia and Florence.

Whatever the sequence, three things came from Urbino and stayed. The first was a visual education in measured space: the perspective of Piero, Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio, and with it the conviction that a picture is an architecture before it is a scene. The second was the court itself as a model of conduct — the idea, later codified by Castiglione, that excellence should look effortless and that grace is a social as much as an aesthetic virtue. When contemporaries describe Raphael, they describe a courtier: affable, beautifully mannered, always attended, the friend of cardinals and humanists. The third was a certain provincial openness. Urbino was a crossroads rather than a centre; it had no dominant local style to protect, and its painters looked outward — to Florence, to Venice, to Flanders. Raphael's lifelong habit of absorbing whatever was best wherever he found it began as the natural behaviour of a boy from a small court that collected the best of everything.

II. Perugino's heir: Città di Castello and Perugia (1500–1504)

The first document in which Raphael appears as an artist is a contract of 10 December 1500, in which he and Evangelista da Pian di Meleto agree to paint an altarpiece of the Coronation of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino for the Baronci chapel in Sant'Agostino at Città di Castello, a small Umbrian town in the upper Tiber valley. Raphael, seventeen years old, is named first and styled magister — a master, not an apprentice. The altarpiece, finished the following September, was dismembered after earthquake damage in 1789; the fragments in Brescia, Naples and the Louvre, and a copy of the whole, show a symmetrical, gold-lit composition wholly in the idiom of Perugino, with a characteristic Umbrian sweetness of type, but already with a firmness of modelling and an intelligence in the placement of the figures that Perugino's own assistants did not have.

Over the next four years Raphael worked between Città di Castello and Perugia, with excursions to Siena (where Vasari says he helped Pinturicchio design the frescoes of the Piccolomini Library) and to Urbino. The Mond Crucifixion (c. 1502–03, London), for San Domenico in Città di Castello, is signed on the foot of the cross RAPHAEL URBINAS P[INXIT]: a young man announcing his name and his city. It is a Perugino to the letter — the same limpid sky, the same ribbony angels catching blood in chalices, the same gentle heads inclined at the same gentle angle — and Vasari remarked that if it were not signed nobody would think it anything but Perugino's. That is true and not the whole truth. Look at the pavement and the landscape and one sees a painter already more interested than his master in the logic of the space; look at the Magdalen's drapery and one sees a crispness of fold that belongs to a different temperament. The Oddi Coronation (c. 1502–04, Vatican) for San Francesco al Prato in Perugia pushes the formula to its limit and begins to break it: the lower group of apostles around the flower-filled sarcophagus has a variety of pose and a spatial coherence that Perugino's processional rows never attempted.

Then, in 1504, comes the picture that ends the apprenticeship: the Marriage of the Virgin (Milan, Brera), signed and dated RAPHAEL URBINAS MDIIII above the doorway of the temple, painted for the Albizzini chapel in San Francesco at Città di Castello. Perugino had just finished a Marriage of the Virgin (now in Caen) for Perugia Cathedral, and the young painter's picture is a deliberate, almost insolent, confrontation with it. The elements are the same: a foreground ceremony, a piazza, a centralised temple. But where Perugino's temple sits heavily on the horizon and his figures stand in a frieze, Raphael's temple rises in a sixteen-sided drum with a delicately foreshortened stair that draws the eye up and in; the foreground group bends in a shallow arc that answers the curve of the building; the figures are taller, more various, more alive in their weight; the suitor snapping his rod over his knee has an energy nobody in Perugia had painted. It is a demonstration of everything the Urbino education had given him — architecture as the governing idea of a picture — and of something nobody could have taught him: the ability to take a formula and make it breathe.

From the same years come the small panels that show the range of the workshop he had already, at twenty-one, begun to run: the two tiny Saint George and Saint Michael panels (Louvre), the diptych-like Dream of a Knight and Three Graces (London and Chantilly), the São Paulo Resurrection, the Berlin Solly and Diotalevi Madonnas, the Hermitage Conestabile Madonna, the Borghese Portrait of a Man. They show a painter who could do anything in the Umbrian manner and was beginning to find it narrow. The Three Graces — almost certainly derived from an antique group then in the Piccolomini Library at Siena — is his first nude and his first antiquarian quotation; the Dream of a Knight, with its sleeping youth between Virtue and Pleasure, his first allegory in the humanist taste. Neither is Peruginesque in subject. Both are, in execution, still of a miniaturist's delicacy, with the enamelled smoothness that would remain part of his equipment and which, in certain moods, the nineteenth century loved best in him.

What exactly did Raphael take from Perugino? More than the nineteenth century, which thought of Perugino as a sentimental mannerist, liked to admit. He took, first, a sense of pictorial space as a clear shallow stage — a piazza or a landscape with a high horizon in which figures stand with room around them; the Delivery of the Keys in the Sistine Chapel is the model for the Brera Marriage, and its memory hovers behind the School of Athens. He took a vocabulary of pose — the weight on one leg, the head inclined, the hands joined or raised — which he would never entirely abandon and which gives even his most dramatic later figures their underlying composure. He took a method of workshop production based on reusable cartoons and pattern drawings, which he would transform into the most efficient artistic machine of the century. And he took a colour: the Umbrian palette of clear blues, rose-reds, soft greens and gold, laid in thin, smooth layers. What he did not take was his master's complacency. Perugino, by 1504, was repeating himself into contempt; Michelangelo would soon call him, in public, "goffo nell'arte" — clumsy in art — and Vasari would count his recycled cartoons. Raphael, who had learned everything Perugino had to teach, went to Florence.