VIII. The long argument: Raphael in theory and criticism

The sixteenth century: the myth of synthesis

The idea of Raphael was made within a generation of his death, and it was made as a contrast. For Vasari (1550, 1568), the history of art rose through three ages to a terza maniera perfected by three men: Leonardo, who had given painting grace and sfumato; Michelangelo, the divine, who had surpassed nature and the ancients; and Raphael, who had "studied the works of the old masters and the modern ones, and taken from all of them the best" — whose virtue, in other words, was the universality of his learning and the grazia with which he hid it. Vasari's Raphael is the great synthesiser, and also the great gentleman: his biography is a sustained contrast with Michelangelo's solitude, a portrait of the artist as courtier, friend, lover and head of a happy school, dying young and beloved. The structure has never really been dislodged.

Lodovico Dolce, in the Dialogo della pittura (1557), written from the Venetian side, sharpened the contrast into a quarrel. His Aretino argues that Michelangelo's nudes are all one nude — terrible, muscular, indecorous on an altar — while Raphael had varietà: old and young, men and women, the delicate and the robust, each shown with the decoro proper to it; that Raphael's invention was richer, his colour sweeter, his grace "a certain something that pleases without our knowing why." Dolce's treatise is the origin of the enduring opposition of Raphael's "grace" to Michelangelo's "terribilità," and of the enduring claim that Raphael, not Michelangelo, was the truly universal painter.

The Academy and the Idea

The seventeenth century made Raphael into doctrine. The Carracci academy in Bologna taught its pupils, in a sonnet attributed to Agostino, to take "Roman design" and Raphael's "symmetry" and Venetian colour and Correggio's grace and fuse them — Raphael himself reconceived as a component of a new synthesis. Poussin, in Rome from 1624, built his whole art on the Stanze and the tapestry cartoons, and Raphael's authority passed, through Poussin, into the French Académie Royale, founded in 1648, whose conférences on individual pictures — Félibien's on the Saint Michael, Le Brun's on the Holy Family of Francis I — are the first sustained art-critical analyses of single paintings in European literature. Roger de Piles's notorious Balance des peintres (1708), which marked the old masters out of twenty under four heads, gave Raphael 17 for composition, 18 for drawing, 12 for colour and 18 for expression — a total of 65, equal top with Rubens — and the arithmetic, absurd as it is, records exactly the eighteenth century's picture of him: supreme in the intellectual parts of painting, deficient only in the sensuous.

The decisive theoretical text was Giovan Pietro Bellori's lecture L'Idea del pittore, dello scultore e dell'architetto (1664, printed as the preface to his Lives in 1672). Bellori took the Galatea letter's certa idea and built on it a complete neo-Platonic aesthetics: nature is imperfect; the artist forms in his mind, by selection from many particulars, an Idea of perfect beauty; the works of Raphael are the image of that Idea, and the course of art since his death is the history of its betrayal by the "naturalists" (Caravaggio) who copied what they saw and the "mannerists" who copied nothing. Erwin Panofsky, in Idea (1924), showed how Bellori's reading turned a painter's casual remark into the foundation of academic classicism, and how the phrase itself marks the moment when Renaissance art theory, which had been about the imitation of nature, became a theory of the mind's priority over nature. Raphael, who had painted Galatea from the shop boys, became the patron saint of a doctrine that held that nature was not enough.

Reynolds, Mengs, Winckelmann

The Enlightenment academies inherited the doctrine and argued about its application. Anton Raphael Mengs — whose name his father, a court painter in Dresden, had given him as a programme — published in 1762 the Thoughts on Beauty and Taste in Painting, which assigned to Raphael supremacy in expression, to Correggio in chiaroscuro and grace, to Titian in colour, and held up the Sistine Madonna, which had arrived in Dresden in 1754 when Augustus III bought it from the monks of Piacenza, as the model of ideal beauty. Winckelmann, who had seen the picture in Dresden before he saw Rome, described it in his first book (1755) as the supreme example of "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" in modern art. Sir Joshua Reynolds, in the Discourses delivered to the Royal Academy between 1769 and 1790, turned Raphael into the central example of the "grand style" — the art that generalises, that elevates, that chooses the permanent over the accidental — while arguing, with characteristic honesty, that Raphael was not the greatest genius: "Michael Angelo had more of the poetical inspiration… Raphael had more taste and fancy, Michael Angelo more genius and imagination"; Raphael's "materials are generally borrowed, though the noble structure is his own." Reynolds's Raphael is the supreme intelligence of painting, the man who knew how to learn — and the Discourses are, in a sense, a long argument that this is what an artist should be.

The Romantic reversal

Then the image turned over. In 1797 Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder published the Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar, the founding text of German Romantic art theory, and its opening vision is of Raphael: not the learned synthesiser but the pious dreamer, to whom the Madonna appeared in a vision and who painted what he had seen. Wackenroder's Raphael is a saint of art, and his art is prayer. Within a decade the young painters of the Lukasbund — the "Nazarenes," Overbeck and Pforr and their friends — had taken the Dresden Madonna and the Florentine pictures as the model for a purified Christian art and had gone to Rome to live in a convent and paint like Raphael before his "fall" into the paganism of the Stanze. The Sistine Madonna became, for the German nineteenth century, an object of something close to worship: Friedrich Schlegel, Grillparzer, Schopenhauer and Dostoevsky (who kept a print in his study and makes Stepan Trofimovich defend it against the nihilists' boots in Demons) wrote about it as a religious experience, and Nietzsche, who was not religious, found in it the perfect emblem of the Apollonian.

The English reaction went the other way. In 1848 three young painters in London founded a Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood whose name announced the conviction that painting had lost its honesty when Raphael taught it grace. Ruskin, who became their champion, wrote in the third volume of Modern Painters (1856) the most eloquent attack on Raphael ever made: that in the Stanza della Segnatura, where the pagan philosophers and the Christian doctors were given equal honour on facing walls, "the doom of the arts of Europe went forth," and that from that room "the intellect and the art of Italy date their degradation." Raphael, for Ruskin, was the painter who had made beauty an end in itself and thereby severed art from truth. It was a Protestant argument, and a Romantic one, and it contained a real insight — that Raphael's synthesis was an act of cultural will, not of innocence — wrapped in a moral judgement that the twentieth century would inherit without the theology.

Three philosophers

Raphael occupies a curious place in the philosophy of art: he is the painter to whom philosophers turn when they need an example of the classical — of the idea fully present in the sensuous form. Hegel, in the Lectures on Aesthetics, uses the Madonnas as the supreme instance of religious painting's capacity to show spiritual love in a human face — maternal love, which needs no explanation, as the sensuous form of divine love — and makes Raphael, with his "beautiful soul," the pivot between the classical and the romantic. Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation, reads the faces of "Raphael's and Correggio's Madonnas" as the expression of "that complete resignation which is the innermost spirit of Christianity" — knowledge that has quieted the will — and places them at the summit of his hierarchy of the arts, just below music. And Nietzsche, in the fourth section of The Birth of Tragedy (1872), takes the Transfiguration as the image of his whole argument: the lower half, with the possessed boy and the helpless apostles, is "the reflection of eternal primal suffering," the Dionysian ground; the upper half, with its "radiant floating" Christ, is the Apollonian "redemption in appearance," the dream-world of beautiful form that the Greeks had built over the abyss. It is one of the few passages in which a philosopher looks at a particular picture and sees in it the structure of his thought; and it is, incidentally, a better description of the Transfiguration's composition than most art historians have managed.

From Wölfflin to Shearman

Heinrich Wölfflin's Classic Art (1899) rescued Raphael from both the worshippers and the moralists by the simple expedient of looking at the pictures. Its chapters on the School of Athens, the Madonna della Sedia, the tapestry cartoons and the late portraits describe, in prose of exemplary clarity, how the compositions actually work — the way the Sedia Madonna "fills the round" with a spiral that turns into the picture; the way the Stanze groups are bound by gesture and glance; the way the late Raphael moves from the "linear" to the "painterly" — and they made Raphael, for a century, the model of the classical in the formal, not the moral, sense: the art of the closed form, the balanced mass, the clear articulation of parts. Wölfflin's Raphael is the painter of pictorial order, and it was against that Raphael that modernism defined itself.

The scholarship since has been a long work of recovery. Oskar Fischel's corpus of the drawings (1913–41) established the graphic oeuvre. Ernst Gombrich's Charlton Lecture of 1955 on the Madonna della Sedia (reprinted in Norm and Form) demolished the legend of the picture painted on a barrel-head and used the drawings to show the classical solution emerging from a long process of trial, proposing that the "norm" of classical art was not a starting point but a hard-won result. John Pope-Hennessy's Raphael (1970) and Konrad Oberhuber's studies restored the late work; Shearman's Raphael's Cartoons in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (1972) made the tapestry cartoons the centre of the oeuvre and his Raphael in Early Modern Sources (2003), two volumes of every document and reference before 1602, gave the field its foundation. Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny's monograph (1983) remains the best single book. The National Gallery's technical studies of the Pinks, the Ansidei and the Julius, the Louvre's of the Castiglione and the Belle Jardinière, the Vatican's of the Stanze, and the 2012 Prado and 2020 Scuderie del Quirinale exhibitions (the latter, for the quincentenary, the largest ever assembled, and closed by the pandemic three days after it opened) have given us a Raphael more various, more experimental and more collaborative than any previous century could see: a painter who changed his technique every five years, ran a design office, survey team and print publishing house, and was still, at thirty-seven, in the middle of finding out what he could do.

IX. Coda: the fate of perfection

Why is Raphael hard to love in the way one loves Rembrandt or Caravaggio or Cézanne? Partly because his perfection was made into a rule, and rules are resented; partly because he hid his labour, so that the pictures look easy and we mistake ease for lack of depth; partly because the thing he did supremely well — the organisation of a great many elements into a whole in which nothing is superfluous and nothing strains — is exactly the thing that reproduction destroys, since it depends on scale, on placement, on the spectator's body in front of the wall. The School of Athens in a textbook is a diagram. In the room, at the right distance, it is a space one could walk into, full of people one could talk to.

But there is another reason, and it is the deepest. Raphael's art is an art of relation — of figures in relation to one another, of the picture in relation to its setting, of the spectator in relation to the picture, of the painter in relation to his predecessors. It is not an art of solitary expression, and it does not flatter the modern wish to find in every work the unmediated cry of a self. What it offers instead is the spectacle of an extraordinary intelligence making sense of the world by arranging it — taking what Perugino and Leonardo and Michelangelo and the ancients and Venice and Flanders had to give, and finding for it all a form in which it could coexist. That is a civic virtue as much as an artistic one, and it is not an accident that Raphael was the painter of the Cortegiano, of the humanist papacy, of the dream of a Rome in which the philosophers and the theologians could face each other across a library. The dream lasted seven years after his death, until the Landsknechts came over the wall in May 1527. The pictures are what remains of it — and they remain, once one has learned to look, among the few places in European art where the idea of harmony is not a consolation or a cliché but a thing actually achieved, by a young man who worked faster and thought harder than anyone around him, and who died, as Bembo said, with nature in fear of dying too.