Raphael: From Urbino To Rome
Until January 16; National Gallery, London

The notion of the “emerging artist” is unsettling for those who prefer their artists fully developed and their artworks fully formed. It is, however, the perfect phrase with which to describe the young Raffaello di Giovanni Santi, when at the age of 17 he drew a gentle self-portrait in black chalk. Leaving home two years later, the young painter began to make a name for himself, and at 21 he arrived in Florence, ready to learn from the greatest contemporary artists of the time.

The emerging artist had plenty of private work, but he had to wait until he was 25 before his first big public commission. His patron, Pope Julius II, was taking a risk on the young painter, but it paid off. Raphael enjoyed a series of prestigious commissions in Rome until the pope’s death five years later, when the painter was still only 30. He himself would only live another seven years.

Throughout this time, Raphael never stopped learning. As a boy he picked up the latest Flemish innovations in the new medium of oil paint. Leaving his Umbrian home, he absorbed the sweet delicacy of Perugino’s paintings, and in Florence he devoured the soft-toned works of Leonardo and of Michelangelo. Raphael’s fully developed style was destined to be so pivotal that the Pre-Raphaelites would cut art history in two with his name.

The National Gallery’s ambitious exhibition, Raphael: from Urbino to Rome, bridges the 500 year gap since then with aplomb. You watch the artist over his shoulder, following his progress from his father’s workshop to fame and fortune. You see what he draws and paints, you see what he learns from, and you see his ideas as they are worked out. When Raphael moves from place to place, you can see how the changing artistic scenery and the new opportunities feed into his work.

It’s all there in front of you, if you can elbow your way close enough to see it. Without compromising on scholarship (and the weighty catalogue certainly doesn’t), there is a strong sense of the personal. The intimacy is enhanced by the self-portraits which frame the exhibition: the first, as a boy, greets you at the entrance, and the last, as a young man, waves you off at the end.

The National Gallery must have twisted a lot of arms to mount this show. Including over 80 Raphael paintings and drawings, it’s the first major Raphael exhibition ever to take place in Britain, and indeed the biggest outside Italy. Some of the works have never been on this island before, and others return for the first time since they were sold in the Victorian era.

Among these is the gracefully contained Alba Madonna, which was turned down by London’s National Gallery in 1836 and is now owned by the National Gallery in Washington DC. There is also a unique chance to see the double-sided processional banner which Raphael painted as a teenager. It has never, until now, left Città di Castello, the Italian city where it was originally commissioned. Its bad condition is a result of its regular use in civic processions, but the recumbent figure of Adam still glows from beneath the flaking surface.

A number of paintings by Raphael’s father, Santi, give us a good way into Raphael’s world. The older painter’s Netherlandish characters, with their lean bodies and dark contrasts, are arranged around architectural settings. While Raphael’s figures were to be plumper, sweeter and more subtly modelled, he learned much from his father’s love of Netherlandish painting.

Raphael’s next great source of inspiration was Perugino, whose tiny Apollo and Daphnis, on loan from the Louvre, might have been painted by angels. The brushwork is utterly impossible to detect, and the nude figures are an enticing combination of sharp contours with softly modelled skin. The flowers and foliage are detailed with pin-prick precision, while the colour range is still far from the pastel-sweet palette which Raphael would later make his own.

In Florence, Raphael learned from Leonardo and Michelangelo, who are also represented in the exhibition. Michelangelo’s precisely modelled drawing of a twisting male nude clearly signposts the development in Raphael’s drawing style, from the gentle shading of his youth to the confident cross-hatching of his mature works.

There are echoes of Leonardo’s brainstorming sketches, full of bold variations on a compositional theme, in Raphael’s studies from this time. He studied the master closely, as can be seen from the detailed copy he made of Leonardo’s Leda and the Swan, where again the nude figure twists quite dramatically. Raphael’s figures and his drawing style were to be transformed as a result.

One clear demonstration of this personal revolution can be seen in our very own Bridgewater Madonna – usually resident at the National Gallery of Scotland. Hung near a cast of Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo, the spiralling pose of the virgin and child are clearly inspired by Michelangelo’s.

As well as understanding his sources of inspiration, there is another way to get inside Raphael’s mind; we can follow the progress of his ideas. The Entombment was a painting made to commemorate a young Borghese man who died in a family feud, 90 years before Shakespeare romanticised the theme in Romeo and Juliet. The painting is a complex mix of figure groups, their dynamic movement pulled together in a criss-cross of tense lines. Six drawings reveal Raphael’s thought processes in reaching this complicated conclusion.

First he experiments with a seated group, then tries them kneeling, and finally standing up. On the back of the latter drawing he copies a Michelangelo statue which finds its way, subtly, into the finished work. Then he tries out an extra figure group, nude for the purposes of anatomical correctness, but he decides it won’t work. Finally, he strips the Virgin right down to her bones, redrawing her as a skeleton to make sure he’s got her right. This habit, another one learned from Leonardo, was to be short lived.

While some of Raphael’s greatest works are forever embedded in the walls and ceilings of Rome, there are countless radiant Madonnas and glowing saints to be enjoyed at the National Gallery. Ending with a powerfully rich evocation of the authoritarian Pope Julius II, and an enigmatic portrait of a contemporary young woman, the exhibition points to a future style of greater fluidity and freedom of expression than ever before. And there – tantalisingly close to perfection – the exhibition ends.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 28.11.04