MY ESCAPE FROM “THERE IS NO ESCAPE” – PART THREE

My husband loves to plan long weekend getaways.  Most recently he had us on a plane to London to visit friends and see the Raphael Exhibit at the National Gallery.  It was a great escape!

Raphael had a short but busy and very varied career.  From the National Gallery exhibition booklet:

Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio or Santi, 1483-1520) is one of the towering figures of the Italian Renaissance.  In a brief 20-year career, cut short by his sudden death at the age of 37, he rose to dominate art in Rome and far beyond.  Working across a wide range of media, with a practice underpinned by his exceptional skills as a draughtsman, Raphael produced major paintings in oil and fresco and created designs for prints, tapestries, mosaics, decorative art and sculpture.  He was also a gifted architect as well as an early archaeologist, supervising several excavations and the wider preservation of ancient Rome.

This exhibition, the first outside Italy to encompass all aspects of Raphael’s artistic activity across his career, offers new insight into the multidimensional nature of his creativity.  In charting his phenomenal success and extraordinary energy, it reveals his enthusiasm for collaboration, his drive as an entrepreneur, and his dexterity in negotiating the often treacherous waters of ecclesiastical, princely and papal patronage.  It also highlights the qualities that have ensured continuous admiration for his art over the centuries:  the apparently effortless beauty, purity and harmony of his work, the seeming naturalness of his storytelling through composition and gesture, and his constantly evolving capacity for inventive design. 

Raphael was born in Le Marche in the eastern part of central Italy; he was orphaned at age 11 and was brought up by his uncle, a priest.  He took over his family’s workshop at age 15 and began producing paintings for Citta’ di Castello (not far from our Tuscan house) and Perugia.  He learned from the art of others, notably Perugino, Leonardo, and Donatello and worked from live models.  His wide-ranging body of work expresses an emotionalism and originality very different from the stylized and idealized art of his peers. 

Let’s start with his drawings to get an idea of how skilled he was in rendering the human form.  This first work is thought to be a self-portrait.

 

 

The Virgin and Child was the most common theme in Italian Renaissance art.  Raphael worked this subject matter at both at large and small scales.  As the National Gallery exhibition booklet notes, “Raphael was supremely gifted when it came to painting the subject---able to vary the theme endlessly and to capture the power of a mother’s love for, and delight in, her newborn child.

 

Raphael moved from Umbria to Florence and then on to Rome where he gained the patronage of Agostino Chigi, a Sienese banker and at that time the richest man in Italy.  Raphael designed the frescoes for Chigi’s suburban Villa Farnesina and Chigi family chapels in Santa Maria della Pace and Santa Maria del Popolo.  Through Chigi, Raphael gained the notice of Pope Julius II, whose Stanze, or private Vatican apartments, he designed.  His most famous fresco of that series is The School of Athens, the full-scale work and a detail of which can be seen here. 

The gathering of philosophers were chosen by Raphael to represent the papacy’s claim not just to spiritual but also to temporal power.  From The Guardian review of the exhibition:

Michelangelo is depicted in this great vision of classical Greece as the philosopher Heraclitus, sitting by himself, a grumpy loner with his face resting in his hand in the attribute of melancholy. 

Michelangelo and Raphael were rivals.   While the latter worked alone, the former had the largest and most productive artistic workshop in Rome.  As the National Gallery booklet notes:

His interest in other media blossomed in Rome, and while painting remained the staple of his output—including many variations or depictions of the Holy Family…-Raphael became involved with printmaking, designs for decorative art and tapestries, archaeology and architecture, and much else besides.  His freedom to explore such varied interests was in part due to the efficiency with which he managed his workshop, which became the largest and most productive artistic enterprise in Rome.  He trained a number of highly gifted artists, such as Giulio Romano (1492/9-1546), to work as his assistants and played to each of their various strengths.  Through his immaculately finished drawings, Raphael could delegate responsibility for a whole variety of projects.  Increasingly, he came to act as manager and entrepreneur as much as an artist.

Rafael was also an architect and in 1514 was made the chief architect of the new St. Peter’s Basilica.  Pope Leo X made him the supervisor of Rome’s antiquities and excavations and commissioned him to design a series of tapestries to line the walls of the Sistine Chapel.  From the National Gallery exhibition booklet:

Commissioned by Leo X to line the walls of the Sistine Chapel, they were to depict scenes from the life of Saint Peter—the first pope—and Saint Paul, the first-century convert to Christianity who became one of its most eloquent evangelists.  Raphael’s preparations for the Act of the Apostles series included painting full-scale cartoons for the tapestry weavers in Brussels to work from, showing each composition in reverse.  Reputedly costing as much as 2,000 gold ducats each, Leo lavished five times more on this set of tapestries than his predecessor [Julius II] had spent on Michelangelo’s entire Sistine ceiling.

In his copious spare, Raphael also designed town homes for wealthy clients, like the Villa Farnesina in Rome and this model of the façade for the Palazzo Branconio dell’Aquila.

Perhaps the highlight of the exhibition, though, for me were the portraits.

The double portrait above is of Raphael (left) and his pupil Giulio Romano.

But Rafael was not all work and no play.  His biographer, Vasari, claimed Raphael died of love.  From The Guardian review:

By this time in the 1510s, Raphael was in so much demand to fresco Rome that he worked with a large team of assistants, led by Romano. But he also found time, says his 16th-century biographer Vasari, for fun. He was so engrossed in his love life that an employer had to let his girlfriend move into the villa he was painting, or he would not have got it done.

Here she is.

This dazzling show keeps its biggest treat for the end. Suddenly Raphael the person comes out from behind his art, to share his private life. His painting La Fornarina portrays his lover sitting in a garden, showing her breasts. It really is about intimacy: Raphael focuses more sharply on her face than body. She is half-smiling coyly as her big eyes skim shyly sideways: she seems about to burst out laughing.

At least he died happy. Soon after painting this, his last work, Raphael died on the night of Good Friday, 1520, age 37. Vasari claims he was exhausted from too much sex, then killed by the doctors who bled him when what he needed was food and rest. He celebrated life with every painting he did. He showed us something we all need – a dream of beauty and harmony. Gentle Raphael. For more than a century he has been out of fashion, seen as just too perfect to move us turbulent moderns. This great show is like falling in love again.

Love is the perfect antidote.  It’s the counter-argument, the idea that puts the scales back in balance—even if just for an afternoon.

Keep it real!

Marilyn