Raphael: From Urbino To Rome
National Gallery, London WC2, until 16 January
Art equals Raphael. So generations of awed Europeans and Americans were led to believe, the generations who first went in thousands to public galleries. Art is up there in the sky, halfway to heaven or at least to the roof, and you look up to it, much as Raphael's faces are turned upwards like blank, calm saucers hoping to catch celestial dew.
I first saw Raphael in the half-ruined Zwinger Gallery in Dresden. There was the Sistine Madonna , immense and sweet above us, and the upturned faces belonged to young Russian soldiers brought in their hundreds to see true art. A lady officer in uniform quacked away to them. I wondered what these submissive boys thought they were looking at. 'Mother', probably. The Sistine Madonna looks patient and nervous, as if she were standing in a queue to get her baby an injection or a ration card. The soldiers knew little or nothing about Assumptions or Trinities. But they knew about mothers in queues, and missed them badly.
Raphael became a gold standard, something to measure other things by but hard to be intimate with. Stendhal used Raphael like this. His journals and notebooks constantly compare the eyes and skin of his girlfriends, or the gestures of his favourite actors, to Raphaels he had seen in Italy. But this painter did not turn him on as, for instance, Veronese did. Later, as 19th century ideas of 'European civilisation' imagined art as an evolutionary process which would culminate in perfection, Raphael seemed to embody perfection. But today, in an age without gold standards, people have grown bored with him. He seems immaculate, awesome and rather dull.
This National Gallery show is out to persuade us how wrong we are. It wants to swing the pendulum back, and reveal Raphael as a detective-story of influences and developments. It tries to do this honourably and cleverly, by taking Raphael from his beginnings and experiments in Urbino and Perugia up to his move to Rome in 1508, the move which was to make his fame as an established Vatican painter. 'Honourably', because the National Gallery has refused to do a 'Raphael: the sexy man behind the canvas' number. All the same, those who share my ignorance will be intrigued to find out that he died at the height of his success at the age of only 38, from a sudden fever caused by what Vasari cryptically called 'amatory excesses'.
In the catalogue, the main essay by Tom Henry and Carol Plazzotta remarks that he transformed 'the revolutionary innovations of Perugino, Leonardo and Michelangelo into a less idiosyncratic and more intelligible classical style', which explains why 'it was he and not they to whom academic tradition subsequently bowed as the epitome of stylistic perfection ...' As they acknowledge, this is why critics and visitors today have gone off Raphael so heavily. He made art which seemed safe and offered easy delight - for popes and cardinals, for aristocratic collectors and eventually for Russian soldiers on a wet Saturday afternoon. There is nothing craggy about Raphael, and never - or almost never - a sense of having brought off something against the odds. His technical talent, his hard work, and his admittedly heavenly instinct for colour produced one straight-down-the-middle triumph after another. The odds were always on him, a favourite to win, especially after he had got to know his market in Rome.
After a time, you begin to search for signs that Raphael felt anything, that he was playing with his own imagination rather than other people's expectations. In the first rooms of the exhibition (which is quite small - a very careful selection of early Raphael - but crowded), there are some fragments of altarpiece which have cartoonish vigour, not exquisitely painted but at least jolly and gory: miracles by St Jerome and St Eusebius, brandished swords and headless corpses with enormous feet. But again and again there come these quiet, soulful faces, eyes rolled upwards, ovals of devotion as similar as boiled eggs. The Bridgewater Madonna is as dead as a cold omelette. And these curious Raphael movements, arrested paces which seem never to have meant to go anywhere. He seems to have problems with physical dynamism, with human bodies which in their swelling energy show what they are about to do next. His older contemporary Leonardo knew all about that.
Then there are Raphael's crowd scenes, which can look like board meetings of the Elect. These are committees of superior persons, meant to be seen taking amendments and remitting motions in frescos some 60 feet overhead. Their colours are wondrous. Their detail is amazing. But other painters of that time - Michelangelo, most obviously - have known how to make these gatherings actually moving, and even mysterious. If Raphael ever stopped to consider why God created heaven and earth, it doesn't show in his painting. Looking at my notes, I see that most of what I have scribbled is about Raphael painting out of character. There are astonishing pieces here. One is the famous little Madonna of the Pinks , with the Virgin wondering if the child can balance with her hands not quite touching him. This painting is alive, and you can see why the National Gallery went mad and paid £22 million for it. Close by is the weird Lady with Unicorn clutching a tiny, woolly unicorn foal in her lap. This sinister picture became a source for the Fantastic Realism painting of Vienna in the 1960s. But a lubricious picture of Leda and the Swan turns out to be by Cesare da Sesto, after Leonardo. Next to it hangs Raphael's version, which (as the guide says) is 'more interested in Leda's graceful attitude than in the eroticism of the subject'. In the last room of the show hang two famous paintings from Raphael's later Roman career. One is the portrait of his patron, Pope Julius II. It's very carefully calculated for effect, even for subliminal effect. Although essentially it shows an old man in a chair, there is a sense of place and space about it, and it takes a moment before you realise that the polished, acorn-shaped finials on the Pope's throne are sending you the reflections of the papal apartments around them. There is no resisting skill of this order, and no way to forget the emblem of an old man in power who is also in pain, and in fear of death. The other star of the room is the portrait of La Donna Velata , an unknown, dark-eyed woman in a low-cut dress. About her, there is nothing soulful. Something uncontrollable is happening under her rich clothes, as the silk of her sleeve goes into convulsions, but she looks back at you boldly. Vasari thought this was the woman for whom Raphael lusted to death. Others say it was a baker's daughter. All that's certain is that this is a different Raphael, painting like an open-hearted Venetian and not a Roman careerist. Pity he didn't do it more often.