Raphael’s sublime perfection

Raphael is thought to have been 17 years old when he painted this chalk sketch, which is probably a self-portrait. “What was truly extraordinary was the perfection of his drawing technique,” curator Carmen Bambach said.

In this chalk sketch, childWhat happens…In an incredibly short period of time, Raphael is considered one of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance, along with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. “I think posterity will see him in third place sometimes,” Bambach said. “I believe he is on equal footing.”

Bambach spent eight years putting together the first comprehensive exhibition of Raphael’s works in American history (237 works in total). It just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Born in Urbino in 1483, Raphael’s precocity exploded after he moved to Florence at the age of 21. “He meets Leonardo, who was kind of very interested in how artists can be creative on paper,” Bambach said. “Raphael absorbs this and suddenly you see this incredible sense of movement, drama, storytelling. He can choose the climactic point of any story. He has to be one of the greatest storytellers in that.”

The humanity, the tenderness of a mother with a baby… His drawings and paintings of the Virgin and Child are beautiful exercises in wishful thinking.

“The mortality rate for women of childbearing age was extraordinarily high, and so were their children,” Bambach said. “When you see Madonna, who looks like a beautiful picture of health, or Bambini, who is plump and joyful, you want to pinch yourself. It’s like creating a kind of idealized world, completely based on desire.”

His portraits look like the real people he painted.

Bindo Artoviti, one of the Pope’s bankers and a friend of Raphael, captured his gaze, his hair flowing down his back, and the embodiment of sensuality. “Bind Artoviti is kind of my favorite portrait in that I always admired that guy,” Bambach said.

His friendships with patrons closely connected to Raphael led to increasingly large commissions, and eventually, at the age of 25, he was commissioned to paint frescoes from Rome and the Vatican for the Pope’s private office and library. (Reproduced in 3/4 size at the Met show.)

He placed a likeness of himself and Leonardo in his most famous school, the School of Athens. Some scholars say that one of the darkest figures is Michelangelo.

“Michelangelo was fiercely jealous of Raphael. Raphael was a tragedy in many ways that happened to Michelangelo, because it happened to him so easily,” Bambach said.

Raphael was commissioned to create a design for a huge tapestry that would be hung just below the ceiling of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.

Commenting on Raphael’s drawings of young and old men and women, Bambach said, “These are the most beautiful drawings Raphael ever made. The foreshortening of the fingers and the different aspects of the hand are expressed in such a reliable way that this is how one can tell the difference between a great artist and a merely good one.”

This painting was for what would become his last painting, “Transfiguration.”

On April 6, 1520, his 37th birthday, Raphael died of a fever in Rome. The inscription on his tomb in the Pantheon reads: “While he lived, nature feared that she would be overtaken by him. When he died, she feared that she too would die.”

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Story produced by Robert Marston. Editor: Remington Coper.

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