Volume 51, Number 20 · December 16, 2004
The Magician
By Ingrid D. Rowland
Raphael: From Urbino to Rome
Catalog of the exhibition by Hugh Chapman, Tom Henry, and Carol Plazzota, with contributions from Arnold Nesselrath and Nicholas Penny
an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, October 20, 2004–January 16, 2005.
London: National Gallery, 320 pp., £25.00 (paper)
Curators at London's National Gallery have wondered for several years how Raphael will play to the troubled, hurried world of the early twenty-first century. No artist has ever worked harder to disguise his labors: his elder contemporary Michelangelo sweated and hewed his way to glory, an ugly Titan whose only effortless-seeming work, the Pietà, grapples on the plane of ideas with the fathomless tragedy of a mother mourning her dead child. Leonardo struggles to snare life itself in a fury of drawing; many of his paintings were—and are—magnificent technical failures. Titian revels in his paints with voluptuous pleasure. But Raphael's paintings sometimes look as if no one painted them at all. Like those Greek icons described as acheiropoiêtoi, 'not made by hand,' they seem to have sprung into being of their own volition, or by divine decree. There has never been so fine a fresco painter, a seeming magician who can force chalky plaster to shimmer like velvet pile, quicken like flesh, or tingle on a sea breeze. Raphael was to painting what Mozart was to music, and like Mozart he died before he had turned thirty-eight. Unlike Mozart, however, Raphael died rich and well loved, the manager of a large, diversified workshop that applied precocious ideas of global marketing to what had hitherto been a jealously guarded craft.
Review, 4290 words
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