III. Florence: the school of giants (1504–1508)

He arrived in the autumn of 1504, at twenty-one. A letter of introduction from Giovanna Feltria della Rovere, sister of the Duke of Urbino, to Piero Soderini, head of the Florentine republic, long served to date the move; the letter is now generally regarded as a later fabrication, but the date is right, and the circumstances it imagines are plausible. Florence in 1504 was the most dangerous place in Europe for a young painter to go, because it was the place where he would discover how much he did not know.

What he found there has been described so often that it has become a tableau: Leonardo, returned in 1500, exhibiting the cartoon of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne to crowds at the Annunziata and working on the Mona Lisa and the Battle of Anghiari; Michelangelo, whose David was set up outside the Palazzo della Signoria that very September, drawing the cartoon of the Battle of Cascina in the hospital of the Dyers, and painting, soon after, the Doni Tondo; Fra Bartolomeo, returning to painting after his Savonarolan silence, building altarpieces of a new monumental breadth. But the tableau is misleading if it suggests that Raphael came to Florence as a tourist of genius. He came to work — and there is no evidence that he ever received a major public commission there. The Florentines, on the whole, gave him Madonnas for their houses and portraits of themselves. He accepted, and in four years of private commissions he reconstructed himself as a painter.

The documents of that reconstruction are the drawings. A sheet in the Louvre copies Leonardo's Leda; a drawing at Oxford (the Young Woman with a Unicorn study) and the Louvre copy of the Mona Lisa's pose show him taking the measure of the three-quarter portrait with hands; the studies for the Madonnas show him working through, on sheet after sheet, the problem that Leonardo's Saint Anne had posed — how to bind two or three figures into a single sculptural mass with a continuous contour, so that the group turns in space and the relationships between the bodies carry the emotional content of the picture. In Perugia a Madonna was a frontal icon with a child; in Florence it became a composition.

The results are the famous Florentine Madonnas, painted for Florentine families: the Madonna del Granduca (c. 1505, Pitti), still almost Umbrian in its stillness but with a new softness of shadow that is the first trace of Leonardo's sfumato; the Madonna of the Meadow (1505 or 1506, Vienna) for Taddeo Taddei; the Madonna of the Goldfinch (c. 1505–06, Uffizi) for the wedding of Lorenzo Nasi; La Belle Jardinière (1507, Louvre). In each, a seated Virgin in a landscape forms the apex of a pyramid whose base is made by the infant Christ and the infant Baptist; in each the children are turned against the Virgin's axis so that the group has torsion; in each the landscape is a Flemish-Umbrian distance of lakes and blue hills that makes the group read as a monument placed in the world. The pyramid is Leonardo's; the landscape and the sweetness are his own; the combination is the first fully "classical" solution in Italian painting of the problem of the devotional group — tender without sentimentality, structural without rigidity — and it was copied for three hundred years.

The portraits are a different lesson. The pendants of Agnolo Doni and his wife Maddalena Strozzi (c. 1506, Pitti), painted for the same young merchant who commissioned Michelangelo's Tondo, are the Mona Lisa translated into the language of Florentine bourgeois self-regard: the same three-quarter turn, the same folded hands and balustrade, the same landscape, but with every trace of Leonardo's mystery replaced by a fierce attention to the specific — the pearl and the jewelled pendant, the ring-laden fingers, the slightly bovine composure of a woman who knows what she is worth. La Gravida (c. 1505–06, Pitti) and the Portrait of a Young Woman ("La Muta," Urbino) extend the same exactness. Raphael in Florence learned that a portrait could be a psychological transaction; what he added, and would develop to the end, was the sense of the sitter as a social being — a person in a role, looking out at a world of other people.

The hardest lesson was Michelangelo's, and the struggle is visible in one picture. In 1507 Raphael delivered to Atalanta Baglioni, for the family chapel in San Francesco al Prato in Perugia, the altarpiece now in the Borghese Gallery and known as the Deposition or Entombment. Atalanta had lost her son Grifonetto in the bloody Baglioni feud of 1500; the picture was a mother's memorial. The surviving drawings — more than a dozen sheets, in Oxford, London, Paris, Florence — let us watch Raphael move, over months, from a Peruginesque Lamentation (the dead Christ laid across the Virgin's lap, the mourners standing round) to something entirely different: a transport of the body, a muscular procession of bearers straining under a dead weight, derived from a Roman sarcophagus of the death of Meleager and charged with the anatomical energy of Michelangelo's Cascina bathers. The finished panel, signed RAPHAEL URBINAS MDVII, is the first picture in which Raphael attempts what he had seen the Florentines attempt — the narrative of bodies in action — and the attempt is not quite a success: the figures are assembled rather than fused, the sentiment is distributed among too many faces, and the learned quotations (the Michelangelesque swooning Virgin is a Doni Tondo in reverse) announce themselves. But it is a magnificent failure, and it matters more than most successes, because it is the moment the painter of Madonnas decided he would also be the painter of istorie, of dramatic histories — which is to say, it is the moment he decided to be Raphael.

He took other things from Florence that were less visible and more durable. From Fra Bartolomeo he took the idea of the grand altarpiece as an architecture of figures, which would flower in the Roman Madonna di Foligno and the Sistine Madonna; Vasari says the two painters were close, and that Raphael taught the friar perspective and learned from him colour. From the Battle of Anghiari and the Battle of Cascina he took the cartoon as a public event and the nude in action as a subject; the small London Saint Catherine (c. 1507) is a first essay in the spiralling contrapposto that Leonardo had invented and Michelangelo had made heroic. From Leonardo's drawings he took a new instrument: red chalk, which he adopted around 1507–10 and made the medium of his most beautiful figure studies. From the Florentine workshops in general he took a sense of professional scale — the notion that a painter's shop might be a kind of factory of ideas, with the master designing and the assistants executing, which in Perugia had been a matter of economy and in Rome would become a matter of policy.

Two Florentine commissions he left unfinished when the summons came. The Madonna del Baldacchino (Pitti), for the Dei family chapel in Santo Spirito, was his first large altarpiece in the new grand manner, with a Bartolomeo-like architecture, a pair of chatting saints and two flying angels holding back curtains before an apse; he abandoned it in 1508 and it was completed by other hands. And he never painted, so far as we know, anything for the Florentine state. The republic had Leonardo and Michelangelo; it did not need a young man from Urbino. Rome did.