VI. The workshop as a system

No aspect of Raphael's achievement has been more misunderstood, or more recently reassessed, than the way he organised work. The Romantic conception of the artist as a solitary hand made the Roman workshop an embarrassment: the late frescoes were "merely" workshop, the Fornarina was "spoiled" by Giulio, the Stanza dell'Incendio was a falling-off, the Loggia was decoration. It took the scholarship of the last half-century — Shearman, Oberhuber, and above all the Prado's Late Raphael exhibition of 2012, curated by Tom Henry and Paul Joannides — to make the obvious point: that the workshop was not a dilution of Raphael but one of his inventions, and that the "late Raphael" of 1514–20 was a deliberate reorganisation of what a painter could be.

The model was partly Perugino's (reusable patterns, many hands), partly Bramante's (the architect as designer, the building as the work of many), and partly that of the Roman court itself, where a cardinal signed what his secretaries wrote. The master's labour was concentrated where it mattered most: in the invention. Raphael drew — pen sketches of the first idea, composition studies, figure studies from the live model (his garzoni, the shop boys, posing for Madonnas and apostles alike), drapery studies, head studies, and finally the modello, a finished compositional drawing in pen and wash heightened with white, which was the contract between the master and the assistants. From the modello the cartoon was made, sometimes by the master (the School of Athens, the tapestry cartoons), increasingly by Penni or Giulio; from the cartoon the fresco or the panel was executed, with Raphael intervening in the heads and the passages that carried the meaning. The division was not between "real" and "fake" Raphael but between stages of a process whose unity was in the design.

The evidence is in the drawings. The red-chalk studies for the Farnesina Psyche loggia — the Three Graces at Windsor, the Venus and Psyche at the Louvre — are among the most beautiful figure drawings in existence, and they were made precisely so that others could paint from them; the frescoes, which look slack beside the drawings, were never meant to be judged as Raphael's hand. The modello for the Transfiguration at the Albertina, the auxiliary cartoons of the apostles' heads at Oxford and Chatsworth (the term is Oskar Fischel's: full-scale head studies, pounced from the cartoon and then worked up in black chalk from the model, so that the painter could paint the face with the drawing beside him) show how the master kept the expressive centre of a picture in his own hand while delegating the rest.

Then there were the prints. Around 1510 Raphael began to supply drawings to the Bolognese engraver Marcantonio Raimondi, and a new kind of enterprise came into being: compositions designed not for a wall or an altar but for the press. The Massacre of the Innocents (c. 1511–12), the Lucretia, the Judgement of Paris (c. 1515–17), Il Morbetto, the Quos Ego: these exist only as prints, and they made Raphael's inventions available, at a price a German apprentice could afford, from Lisbon to Kraków. A studio factotum, Baviera, managed the plates; Agostino Veneziano and Marco Dente engraved alongside Marcantonio; Dürer, the greatest printmaker of the age, exchanged drawings with Raphael in 1515 and inscribed the red-chalk sheet he received (now in Vienna) with the note that "Raphael of Urbino, who is held in such esteem by the Pope, made these naked figures and sent them to Albrecht Dürer in Nuremberg to show him his hand." Three hundred years later Manet took the reclining river-gods in the corner of the Judgement of Paris and made them the Déjeuner sur l'herbe. The line from Raphael's workshop to modernism runs, in part, through an engraver's shop near the Piazza Navona.

The heirs went their ways. Giulio Romano, the most gifted, took the manner to Mantua in 1524 and turned it, at the Palazzo Te, into something wilful and enormous — the first full statement of what would be called Mannerism. Perino del Vaga took it to Genoa; Polidoro da Caravaggio painted Roman façades and then fled to Naples and Messina; Giovanni da Udine made a career of grotesques and stuccoes; Penni died young in Naples; Tommaso Vincidor went to Brussels to supervise the tapestries and stayed. In each, some part of the system survived — the grotesque, the modello, the clear narrative — while the centre, the thing that had held them together, was gone. Vasari, who knew several of them, put it precisely: Raphael had made a school, and his pupils, "lacking his judgement, went each according to his own nature."

VII. How the pictures were made

Drawing

Everything began on paper, and no painter before him left so complete a record of the passage from first thought to finished work. About four hundred sheets survive — a fraction of what there was — and they fall into kinds that correspond to stages.

In Umbria he drew as Perugino's shop drew, in metalpoint on prepared paper: a stylus of silver or lead dragged over a ground of bone-ash and glue, which yields a fine grey line that cannot be erased and rewards a sure hand. The early Madonna studies and the Oxford head studies for the Oddi altarpiece are in this medium, and it explains something about the early paintings — their linearity, their cleanness of contour, their lack of second thoughts. Pen and brown ink he used throughout his life for the first stage of invention: the sheets in the British Museum and the Albertina on which a Madonna is tried five or six times in quick loops and ovals, the child turned this way and that, the whole group rotated, are the purest record we have of a Renaissance painter thinking. Black chalk he used for larger figure studies and for cartoons; he adopted red chalk — Leonardo's medium, soft and warm, able to render flesh as well as contour — around 1507–10, and from the Alba Madonna studies at Lille (c. 1509–10) through the Massacre of the Innocents and the Psyche loggia to the late apostle studies for the Transfiguration, it is the medium of his finest drawings from the model. He used wash and white heightening for modelli; he squared drawings for enlargement; he pricked them for transfer; and, in a practice Michelangelo despised, he drew women from boys — the shop garzoni, stripped and posed, whose adolescent bodies underlie the Madonnas' draperies.

Two habits distinguish him. The first is the habit of variation: he rarely settled a composition in one sketch, and the drawings for the Baglioni Deposition, the Disputa and the Madonnas show him proceeding by systematic alternatives, keeping what worked and discarding the rest — a method of design that is the graphic equivalent of his habit of learning from everybody. The second is the habit of the live model. Where Perugino drew from pattern-books and Michelangelo from a repertoire of invented bodies, Raphael set a boy on a stool in the shop and drew what was in front of him, and then idealised it; the "certa idea" of the Galatea letter was not a substitute for looking but its culmination.

Panel and canvas

He painted almost always on poplar panel, prepared in the Italian way with layers of gesso (gypsum and animal glue) sanded smooth, sized, and sometimes — in the Florentine years — given a thin priming of lead white in oil. On this the design was transferred. Infrared reflectography, which makes the carbon underdrawing visible through the paint, has shown two methods in use: in the Mond Crucifixion, the Ansidei Madonna and the Madonna of the Pinks, the dotted lines of spolvero — charcoal dust pounced through the pricked holes of a cartoon — lie under the contours, exactly as in Perugino's shop; in the London Saint Catherine and others, a freehand underdrawing, sometimes much altered, shows him composing on the panel itself. The Madonna of the Pinks — a small, exquisite, long-doubted picture at Alnwick that Nicholas Penny recognised as the original in 1991 and the National Gallery bought for £22 million in 2004 — has an underdrawing full of changes of mind that no copyist would have made, and that fact, as much as any connoisseurial judgement, settled the attribution.

The medium throughout was oil — walnut or linseed — though in the early works it is handled in a manner close to tempera: thin, smooth, built up in small hatched strokes, with the flesh modelled from a pale pinkish mid-tone towards highlights of lead white and shadows of brown earth and black, and the draperies laid in local colour and then glazed. This is the source of the enamelled perfection of the Florentine Madonnas, in which no brushstroke can be seen. In Rome the handling broadens. The Julius II, the Castiglione (which is on canvas, unusually, perhaps because it was to travel), La Velata with its sleeve, the Leo X with its velvet, the lower half of the Transfiguration: here one sees the brush, the paint has body, the shadows are built in transparent glazes over dark underlayers, the highlights are loaded. Vasari's word for the Roman Raphael's tonal blending was unione — the union of colours, so that no edge is hard and every tone passes into its neighbour — and he contrasted it with the earlier "dry" manner. It is the Venetian lesson, learned through Sebastiano and through whatever Giorgionesque pictures had reached Rome, applied by a painter whose instinct remained for form.

The palette was the standard one of the time and place, and technical studies have confirmed it: lead white; lead-tin yellow and yellow ochre; vermilion and red lake (from kermes or madder) for reds; natural ultramarine from lapis lazuli for the best blues — the Virgin's mantle — with azurite for lesser ones and for underlayers; malachite, verdigris and copper resinate greens, the last a glaze that has often browned with age, so that the greens of Raphael's landscapes are now warmer than he painted them; earths and carbon black. What distinguished him was not the materials but the control of value: the habit, visible in every picture from the Marriage of the Virgin onward, of organising the whole surface in a few clear tonal masses before any local colour was allowed to speak.

Fresco

In the Stanze he worked in buon fresco: pigment ground in water applied to wet lime plaster, the intonaco, laid each morning over the area that could be painted that day — the giornata — and bonding with it chemically as the lime carbonated. The joins between giornate are visible in raking light and have been mapped; the School of Athens was painted in some fifty of them, working in horizontal bands from the top of the vault down, so that drips would not fall on finished work. The design came from the cartoon, transferred in two ways: by pouncing, which leaves a dotted line, and by incision, in which the outlines of the cartoon are pressed into the soft plaster with a stylus, leaving a groove — a faster method, which Raphael came to prefer for the large frescoes, and which can be felt on the surface of the Stanze walls. The Ambrosiana cartoon shows both methods in use on different parts of the same composition. Details were added a secco — in tempera or lime-water on the dry wall — especially blues (azurite does not survive in lime) and gold; some of these have flaked, which is why certain skies in the Stanze look thin. In the Stanza d'Eliodoro he began experimenting with oil-bound colour on the wall, following Sebastiano's Venetian example, to get the saturated darks of the Liberation of Peter; the results were not durable, and his successors in the Sala di Costantino went back to fresco.

The tapestry cartoons are a special case: painted in glue-size distemper on sheets of paper pasted together, in bold, opaque, rapid strokes that could be read by weavers, with the compositions reversed because the tapestry would reverse them again. They are the closest we come to seeing Raphael paint fast, and they are a revelation.

Composition and the body

What is specific to Raphael as a composer can be said in a few propositions, each of which he seems to have discovered in a particular picture and then never forgot. That the picture is an architecture first: the Marriage of the Virgin. That a group of figures should have a single contour and a single mass, and that its meaning lies in the relations of the bodies within it: the Florentine Madonnas. That a great assembly can be organised around a void or a point — the monstrance of the Disputa, the gap between Plato and Aristotle, the empty centre of the Heliodorus. That a narrative is made of a few large gestures, clearly legible, with nothing that does not serve: the tapestry cartoons. That the spectator is part of the picture — that the Sistine Madonna walks towards the person standing in front of her, that Castiglione looks at us, that the kneeling woman of the Transfiguration is turned away from us so that we, too, become supplicants. This last, which John Shearman called the "transitive mode" and made the subject of his Mellon lectures (Only Connect…, 1992), is the quality in which Raphael most anticipated the Baroque, and the one hardest to see in reproduction.

And there is the body. Raphael's figures are built on the contrapposto of antique sculpture and of Leonardo — the weight on one leg, the hips and shoulders turned against each other, the head turned again — but what he added was proportion as character. His figures are of a slightly elongated, long-limbed canon, with small heads, long hands and a kind of spring in the stance, which became the visual definition of "grace" (grazia) for the whole European tradition; and they are never, even in the late works, anatomically assertive in Michelangelo's way. Muscle is implied, not displayed. The drapery, which he learned from the Florentines to use as a second anatomy, falls in long, sweeping, tubular folds that describe the body's movement rather than obscure it. Reynolds, who thought about this more than anyone, said that Raphael's figures have "the bearing of people who have always been in good company."