Raphael: Sublime Poetry - A Review

The Renaissance painter, whose Italian name is Raffaello Sanzio, has his first ever comprehensive exhibition in the United States at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, 522 years after his death. The above picture shows the Met on Tuesday of this past week when my wife Caryn and I visited the show. This is only a small view of the enormous museum, whose front steps are more than 150 feet wide, providing leisurely seating for hundreds of New Yorkers who were just hanging out and enjoying the beautiful afternoon.

We almost didn't make it to the show when our car's alternator died at 10 PM in the middle of nowhere on Interstate 80 in New Jersey. By the grace of God, the car was able to creep along the berm at low speed, lunging and lurching the whole time, with no working lights except for the hazard, for two miles until we reached a miraculous highway rest stop. Getting weaker all the time, the car literally died right at the entrance to the parking lot. I immediately jumped out and found three illegal aliens who had coincidentally driven their own disabled car into the rest stop for safety only minutes earlier. They generously helped me push our car into the lot since it was blocking the entrance. To make an originally distressful but ultimately successful story short, the tow-truck driver knew exactly what was wrong with the car and who to take it to for a fast repair. He dropped us off at a hotel, the car was fixed by 10:15 the next morning and we were on our way!

I have had a personal interest in Raphael for about the last three years. I've been collaborating with a British researcher who is training artificial intelligence to tell the difference between the old-master's paintings, because so many attributions are in doubt. If you read this scientific paper, you will see a familiar name as one of the authors, and if you scroll down a ways, you will see my "forgery" of a Raphael self-portrait which was painted to try and fool the computer. I have also been consulted on the authenticity of supposed Raphael paintings whose owners hoped to make millions in the art market. The agents for one of these owners pugnaciously refused my advice that what they had was just a credible copy of a Raphael original. Oh well!

This show has 33 Raphael paintings, some done in collaboration with other artists, another 142 drawings by him, and a whole bunch of paintings and drawings by Raphael's contemporaries, including his teacher, Pietro Perugino. A big surprise was this drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci I had known from books since I was a kid.

The number of paintings may not sound like a lot for one artist, but the 33 shown represent about one-quarter of Raphael's entire known works. He died young at the age of 37. And as meticulous as some of these are, it is amazing that he did this many.

The works come from 60 different institutions in 11 countries. It took the Metropolitan staff seven years to convince all these museums to temporarily part with their works, because they are so rare and valuable. I saw an estimate that the total value of works in the show would be in the billions of dollars, not millions. If one of his Madonna and Child paintings came on the art market today, it would easily fetch well over 100 million dollars. The largest contributor of paintings was our own National Gallery of Art, which has a hefty amount of his work (perhaps the most in the world?).

What sets Raphael apart from most of his contemporaries is the sublime mood in his paintings combined with a technical virtuosity reached by few other artists, in a period of art that featured mostly "heavier" moods with darker shadows and more serious-looking subject matter (though a few of his have very heavy dark shadows). It doesn't hurt that he specialized in Madonna and Child paintings. Even if you are not a Christian, you can appreciate the universal appeal of mother and child paintings. When looking at them, it is easy to forget that these are religiously themed pictures.

I'm going to discuss one of the paintings that impressed me the most—Saint Sebastian. I've known this painting through pictures, even very high-resolution images, but it blew me away to see it in person.

It personifies the qualities of Raphael's work that I mentioned earlier. The mood is very tranquil. This is achieved by keeping the tonal values in the middle range, without any heavy shadows and deep blacks or bright whites. His hair and his shirt are dark, but they don't seem to interfere with the mood of the mid-range tones in the rest of the picture.

His face is kind of effeminate, a trait found in most all of his figures, both women and men. Michelangelo, by contrast, made all his people look masculine, even the women!

Raphael also made use of the cool colors, blues and greens, especially blue-green as opposed to yellow-green. This is in contrast to most Italian Renaissance painters who dwelt in the earth colors like browns and yellow-oranges. Strangely, Raphael painted his first layers in a yellow-ocher color and then covered it all up with the final cooler colors of the painting. I know this from the few unfinished paintings he left behind, one of which is in the show.

Getting back to Saint Sebastian, the details just made my jaw drop. The hand is so naturalistic that it looks photographic. The edges around the hand are very slightly softened in contrast with the edges of his coat and the designs on his shirt that are razor-sharp. A lot of the Italians did not soften the edges of body parts, and it sometimes makes the person look like they are made of plastic.

The hair may not look like much from a distance, but it is incredibly meticulously rendered. I am still trying to figure out how he painted such fine lines, let alone fine lines in one stroke without correction, and still coordinated all the lines in concentric curls with perfect precision. Those Italians loved curly hair and often exaggerated the curls into a design-like pattern.

I employ the best modern sable-hair and synthetic brushes in my paintings, and I'm not sure I can paint a line as fine as I see here, and with such accuracy. I've included a close-up of that hair. Keep in mind that this painting is only about half life-sized. The distance from the top of his head to his chin is only about six inches. Some of his finest lines seem to approach the actual width of a human hair. Along with this is a close-up of the geometric pattern on his coat. I did not even detect some of those lines until I got up right next to the painting. Even then it was hard to see them.

Some of the other highlights in the show included a very famous drawing that is presumed to be a self-portrait done at the young age of 12 that has survived in remarkably good condition. I've included another drawing that particularly shows his delicate and sensitive technique.

And I can't leave without showing a couple of Madonnas and Children:

And a portrait that some of you might be familiar with, a friend of Raphael's, Baldesare Castiglione, the author of "The Courtier."

One of the only drawbacks of the show is that it is all displayed in dark rooms lit with spotlights from above, unlike the rest of the museum which has plenty of bright natural lighting. I presume this is to protect the numerous drawings from ultraviolet light degradation. But the spotlights are not even balanced to daylight temperatures; rather are in the yellow-orange range like old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs. It makes shooting super high-resolution pictures difficult because you have to use unnaturally high ISO ratings on the camera in order to comply with the quick shutter speeds necessary, since they don't let you use a tripod to keep the camera still. The poor lighting may be sensed with the following picture of your humble author striking a pose in front of Bindo Altoviti:

The show is still up till June 28th if you'd like to see it. Make sure you have a working alternator.