Raphael: From Urbino to Rome (review)

The 2004 exhibition of Raphael's early works at the National Gallery, London, presented the opportunity to evaluate an artist who is largely known through such canonical paintings as the School of Athens and the Sistine Madonna. For those who could not attend, Raphael: From Urbino to Rome offers an armchair version with abundant color reproductions and comprehensive discussions of the eighty-plus paintings and drawings assembled by the curators Hugo Chapman, Tom Henry, and Carol Plazzotta. Additional essays — Arnold Nesselrath's careful analysis of Raphael's relationship with Pope Julius II and Nicholas Penny's fascinating account of the artist's popularity in Victorian England — round out the volume.

In the principal essay the curators trace the evolution of Raphael's style from its genesis in his father Giovanni Santi's workshop at Urbino during the early 1490s to its maturity in Julian Rome (1508-13). This is not to say that style is the only concern, for the essay incorporates all of the known documents on young Raphael, newly discovered ones, and historical information about the artists who influenced him. A recurring theme is whether Raphael's success was due to "natural talent" or "diligent study" (15). Though Vasari tended towards diligence in his sixteenth-century biography, the authors steer a middle course, seeing Raphael's "innate ability as a designer" and his "meticulous process of serial refinement through preparatory drawings" as complementary aspects of his creative personality (15).

Organized chronologically, the essay covers familiar ground: the painter's training; the effect of established artists on his emerging style; and his first patrons in Umbria, Tuscany, and the Marches. For merchants in Città di Castello (ca. 1501-04) and prominent citizens in Perugia (ca. 1502-late 1505), Raphael painted altarpieces for funerary chapels that drew on the paintings of Signorelli (who worked at Città di Castello in the 1490s) and Pintoricchio (for whom he supplied designs for frescoes in the Piccolomini Library), and, most of all, on the art of Perugino, the leading artist of the region at the turn of the century. Raphael's Florentine years (1504/05-08) coincided with the return to the city of Leonardo and Michelangelo, whose elaborate, monumental figures, inventive narratives, and complex tonalities prompted new directions in his art. A relative novice in this competitive artistic environment, Raphael did not receive a major altarpiece commission until shortly before his departure for Rome. Rather, he painted domestic "luxury items" — variations of the Madonna and Child and portraits — for rich young merchants and their wives (42).

The attributions and dates for Raphael's works and the course of his stylistic development mostly accord with prevailing scholarly opinion. Yet at times the clarification of Raphael's progress implies a linear development at variance with the dynamic interplay of competing elements and the overlapping of artistic influences, patrons' requirements, and local preferences that characterize his formation. The contention that Raphael studied with a local master in Urbino after his father's death in 1494, instead of with Perugino, is unlikely to find wide acceptance. Though the extant fragments of the San Niccolò da Tolentino Altarpiece evince Santi's technique and style, as the authors assert, the Peruginesque figures in Raphael's compositional drawing for the work indicate his firsthand knowledge of Perugino and suggest that in this instance Raphael may have accommodated his pictorial approach to that of Evangelista di Pian di Melato, his father's former assistant, who cosigned the contract in 1500.

By 1508 Raphael was poised for the success he would attain in Julius II's Rome. The last part of the essay explores Raphael's realization of his artistic potential in the Stanza della Segnatura, where he quickly distinguished himself among the painters hired to decorate the chamber. As the authors state, "the challenges and resources offered by this supremely important project commissioned by the wealthiest and most powerful of...