The Cambridge Companion to Raphael (review)

The recent exhibition held at the National Gallery, London, "Raphael:From Urbino to Rome," demonstrated that the artist continues to be attacked and defended within an essentially nineteenth-century intellectual framework. Remarkably, Raphael is still being framed alternatively as an academic pedant and enemy of modernism or a triumphal genius so singular as to render the investigation of broad, fundamental issues superfluous. The Cambridge Com-panion to Raphael is very much the product of the latter school, and its overall purpose is to refine and update a range of topics on which there already exists a massive scholarly literature: Raphael's early formation and patronage, his dazzling Roman career, his workshop and drawing practices, his role as a stylistic exemplar, and his critical fortunes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. To readers from outside the discipline of art history or new to the study of Raphael, the volume's emphasis on summarizing and restating recent secondary literature may serve as a useful starting point. However, for those seeking a major reassessment of this pivotal but also elusive Renaissance painter, archaeologist, and architect, this collection of essays is a disappointment.

The opening essays by Jeryldene Wood and Sheryl Reiss offer two accounts of the artist's training and early career in Urbino. Both stress the significance of Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi, and his contacts at the Montefeltro court for establishing the young artist once he emerged from Perugino's workshop. Wood advances the counter-intuitive claim that the youthful Raphael's sweet, undemanding style appealed to his first patrons, particularly female religious, precisely because of its stylistic conservatism. Perugino's thriving practice, his harmonious workshop, and his eventual rejection in the urban crucible of Florence all had a formative impact on Raphael. Through detailed stylistic analysis of the early altarpieces, Wood demonstrates just how profoundly Perugino shaped the young Raphael, making the artist's subsequent ability to throw off that influence and rethink his professional practices in response to intensively shifting demands appear all the more remarkable. Reiss provides a comprehensive list in prose form of Raphael's early commissions, including his very first Roman patrons.

While Urbino formed this promising maker of Madonnas, there is no question that Rome made Raphael. Linda Pellecchia provides a wide-ranging introduction to the urban fabric of a city rapidly transforming from the stench and chaos of the late fifteenth century to the wide streets and stately palaces envisioned and in some cases executed under the popes Julius II and Leo X, as well as Raphael's great patron, the banker Agostino Chigi. Here Raphael rose from his salad days to the princely velvet-clad figure promoted by Vasari; surrounded by his own large shop, colleague to intellectuals and humanists, beloved by popes and cardinals, and ardent admirer of female beauty in the abstract and in the concrete. Vasari's is a mythic image to be sure but one that vividly conveys Raphael's supreme contributions to the elevation of the artist's social status from artisan rooted in workshop practice to high-flying intellectual free agent. Ingrid Rowland returns to the commission that launched Raphael onto that elevated plane: the frescoes in the papal apartments known as the Stanze begun under Julius II and continued by Leo X. She reads the frescoes as a succession of straightforward, simplified theological illustrations and positions with Julius II as the driving intellectual force behind the original commission. Joanna Woods-Marsden focuses on Raphael's two celebrated papal portraits and lavishes attention on every detail, synthesizing a great deal of recent multidisciplinary scholarship on subjects ranging from Julius's beard to the treatment of papal corpses. The abysmal quality of the book's reproductions particularly undermines her essay, since Woods-Marsden locates her discussion in specific features of these luminous paintings that are totally illegible on the page. While her methodology is laudable, she shares with Rowland and other students of the artist a conception of Raphael as a...