The power of tradition

Joseph Shaw reviews the Raphael exhibition at the National Gallery until 31 July

While by no means comprehensive, this exhibition is large and logically arranged, a thorough introduction to Raphael, with something to teach even seasoned fans: it is highly recommended.

We know little about Raffaello Santi (or Sanzio) (1483–1520), and the stories told about him by the great biographer of the Renaissance artists, Vasari, must be taken with a pinch of salt. He died on Good Friday at the age of 37, after two decades of intense work as a painter, also producing prints, tapestry designs, architecture, and bronzes. A long letter in his own hand has been preserved begging Pope Leo X to halt the destruction of ancient buildings and statues in Rome: they were being burnt to produce lime for cement. Pope Leo put Raphael in charge of archaeology.

The exhibition makes clear a progression in Raphael’s work from the pale, brightly lit, and static early works such as the ‘Mond Crucifixion’ (1502-3), to the late ‘Madonna of the Rose’ (15167). In the latter, St Joseph, standing behind Our Lady, emerges dimly from the dark background, which contrasts with the shiningly cherubic infants, St John the Baptist and the Christ Child, on and around the Blessed Virgin Mary’s lap. Christ is grasping the scroll traditionally associated with these groupings, bearing the words ‘Ecce Agnus Dei’, which is being handed to Him by St John.

The Mond Crucifixion

The playful determination of Christ, in pulling this ribbon of parchment towards Himself, is very natural and evocative of the spirit of a young toddler. At the same time, of course, it is symbolically charged: Christ is accepting St John’s proclamation of Him as the sacrificial Lamb. This combination of realism and idealisation, and of the playful and the serious, is one of Raphael’s great gifts to Western art. At its simplest, it is on display in the intense joy and affection shown by his Madonnas towards the infant Christ: natural and authentic, and yet pointing towards something supernatural, eternal, and universal.

In Raphael’s religious paintings the figures tend not to look at the viewer, but at each other, heavenwards, or—in some cases, like the Ansidei Madonna— at copies of the Scriptures. By contrast, in many of the portraits, the sitter gazes at us directly. I felt that the personalities of Raphael’s friends, Bindo Altoviti and Baldassare Castiglione, and in a different way, of his patron Pope Julius II, impose themselves on the viewer with great intensity in these wonderful portraits, but Raphael is trying to do something different in the devotional works.

In these, we are not primarily concerned with the sitters, after all, but with what they represent. In the concern of the figures in each other, in heaven, and in the scriptures, they are not only acting as a model for our imitation, but are drawing us into the relationship they themselves are enjoying: the heavenly ambition of St Catherine of Alexandria, gazing upwards; the devotion to Our Lady of St Raphael the Archangel and his protégé Tobias; and the affection already noted of Our Lady herself to her Son. These are really efficacious signs: they show us the attitude we should have, and at the same time, they evoke this attitude in the devout viewer. We are encouraged in our own affection for the Christ Child, for example, by seeing the bond between Mother and Child in the painting.

Sentimental devotional art tries to fake this process, using powerful but inauthentic emotions: it aims for example to make us feel soppy about Jesus, which is destructive of real piety. More artistically challenging is to draw us into Our Lady’s complex, authentic, and dignified attitude: of natural affection, disinterested love, and worship.

Raphael is in many ways the culmination of what went before, and the model of what came after, until, eventually, deliberate attempts were made to get away from his influence. This was done in one way by the self-styled Pre-Raphaelites, and in a very different way by the modernists: Pablo Picasso remarked that it took him years to escape his early training ‘to draw like Raphael’. The power of this tradition evokes suspicion, envy, and hatred, as well as reverence and imitation. Before leaving the National Gallery, I visited the Sainsbury Wing, where the work of many of Raphael’s great predecessors is

displayed. Juxtaposed to these were a series of objects by the Gallery’s current Artist in Residence, Ali Cherri, which varied from the merely ugly to images suggestive of obscenity and sacrilege. This is the homage paid by inarticulate hatred to an artistic tradition it cannot hope to rival or displace. These will be carted away, I hope to be incinerated, on 12 June.

We can be grateful that no-one thought to be similarly clever with the Raphael exhibition itself.

Madonna of the Rose