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The National Gallery celebrates Raphael's Renaissance harmony

2022-04-07T03:52:21.088Z


The exhibition, delayed by the pandemic, brings together more than 90 works from museums around the world by the genius of Urbino, a contemporary of Leonardo and Michelangelo


During his 37 years of life, the "divine Raphael" must have been convinced that the center of the universe was divided between Urbino, Florence, and above all, Rome.

“He had no other experience than that of European art, and with his enormous work he ended up creating by himself the Western canon of beauty”, summarizes David Ekserdjian, Professor of Art History at the University of Leicester and one of the three curators who have organized one of the most anticipated exhibitions of the last two years at the National Gallery in London:

Raphael.

The Credit Suisse Exhibition.

There are more than 90 works spread over eight rooms, some of them from the collections of the British art gallery, but many others on loan from artistic institutions such as the Prado Museum in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Louvre Museum in Paris or the Vatican Museums.

Painter, draughtsman, sculptor, architect or archaeologist.

Rafael's career was dazzling, almost strictly chronologically.

An artist who soaked up the works of his two great contemporaries, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti, and other masters such as Perugino, or his own father, Giovanni Santi.

More information

Rome hosts the largest Raphael exhibition in history

“We wanted to present Rafael as the center of an entire artistic enterprise, rather than just looking at his specific work.

The two Popes with whom he is linked, Julius II and Leo X, give him the opportunity to do great things that he never imagined he could do”, says Gabriele Finaldi, director of the National Gallery.

“He was considered too perfect an artist, at a time when he was no longer interested in such harmonious art.

But in a world like the current one, atomized and broken, Rafael offers a utopian vision that we believed necessary to re-study”, he assures.

Raffaello Santi (1483-1520) condensed in less than four decades of life the beauty accumulated in the period of the High Renaissance.

A precocious artist, protected by the nobles of his native town, Urbino, he came to witness the enormous battle of two colossi like Leonardo and Michelangelo for four years in Florence.

From the first he learned the intimate expression of the characters and a perfect composition of their figures;

from the second, he breathed life into his paintings with the use of chiaroscuro and a dynamic mannerism.

But Rafael extracted all those lessons to create his own work, human, harmonic and classic.

“Raphael gives [his figures] superhuman clarity and elegance, in a universe of Euclidean certainties,” Michael Levey, the British art historian and director of the National Gallery for more than a decade, once wrote.

Euclides crouches on the ground to explain to the students around him notions of mathematics and geometry.

He is in the lower right corner of that universally known monumental fresco called The School of Athens.

It is one of the works that Pope Julius II commissioned from the young artist to decorate his rooms in the Vatican, and which ended up being known forever as the "Raphael rooms".

The exhibition reproduces the fresco on a practically real scale, with a precise digital photograph, in one of its rooms.

It was necessary to contemplate this great scene, inspired in part by the works of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, to fully understand the trajectory of an artist capable of the most delicate miniature and an almost superhuman scale in some of his works.

'An angel', pen and brown ink over geometric indications in blind stiletto. Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

An essential part of the exhibition are the author's drawings.

“At that time, drawings were a means to an end, something instrumental.

They were not considered art.

For us, however, they have become pieces of enormous relevance, which help us to understand the artist's work and offer us essential intimacy”, explains Ekserdjian.

Rafael knew how to offer his collaborators and students, as well as other artists with whom he competed, a generosity and patience that made him a revered figure.

There were hundreds who went to pay homage to him during his funeral, at the Pantheon in Rome.

“Raphael rests here, for whom Nature, the mother of all things, feared being defeated and dying with her death,” reads the epitaph on his tomb.

His main biographer, Giorgio Vasari, attributed his early death to a fiery night of amorous excesses.

Over time, reality seems to suggest that it was a venereal disease like syphilis that ended the "genius of Urbino".

In the last room of the exhibition, among the commissioned or friendship portraits made by an artist devoted above all to great works commissioned by the Church or the nobles, there is

La Fornarina,

the nude

of a young woman that Rafael kept in his own house, and that some experts believe to be Margherita Luti, the daughter of a baker from the Roman neighborhood of Trastevere, and one of the painter's lovers.

The exhibition has managed to bring together several of Raphael's

Madonnas

scattered throughout museums around the world, which are actually Holy Families.

The virgin and the child, the motif with which the artist achieved a beauty of composition, an aesthetic balance and an intimacy and tenderness that became the model to be followed by later artists.

The Virgin of the Rose, from the Prado Museum, faces the other end of the room with the Madonna of Alba from the permanent collection of the National Gallery.

'The Virgin with Child and the Baptist (The Virgin of Garvagh)' (1509-1510), oil on wood.© The National Gallery, London

There is an overwhelming moment in the exhibition tour, and it is none other than coming face to face with the portrait of Julius II.

Sitting on a chair, instead of on a papal throne, the Pontiff's tired and humble face contrasts with the customary majesty that used to be expressed in this type of portrait.

The fragility of the character was a precursor and model for the work of later artists.

'Portrait of Pope Julius II' (1511), oil on poplar.The National Gallery Photographic Department

Rafael, aware of his own artistic dimension.

The exhibition has at least four of the painter's self-portraits throughout his life.

From the charcoal drawing of a fifteen-year-old boy with luminous and curious eyes, to the painter with his main assistant, Giulio Romano, when he barely had a few months left to live.

An intimate but hierarchical relationship, in which Rafael seems to direct his assistant's arm with his arm.

The tapestries for the Sistine Chapel, commissioned by Leo X, Raphael also dared to design, show the versatility of an artist that the National Gallery has been able to recover, two years after the 500th anniversary of his death (the pandemic delayed the opening of the exhibition), his immense contribution to the way in which the West understood beauty during the following centuries.

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Source: elparis

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