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By David Laskin
I meant to be Raphael’s year. Five hundred years after his death at the age of 37, the Renaissance master to obtain the exalted deployment reserved for artistic superstars: a success of exhibitions in museums in Rome and London; meetings and meetings at universities and cultural centres around the world; waving a flag and placing wreaths in his Italian city, Urbino.
There was even some controversy when the advisory committee of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence resigned en masse to protest the inclusion of a valuable papal portrait in the wonderful exhibition of the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome.
Then the coronavirus struck and Raphael’s annus mirabilis, the world’s annus horribilis.
When the news of the handsome young artist’s death was heard in Rome on April 6, 1520, Pope Leo X wept and church bells rang in the city. Half a millennium later, Rome was blocked with the rest of Italy as deaths from the virus increased.
The Scuderie show, an exclusive collection of more than 20 works (120 through Raphael) from around the world, forced its doors to be closed in just 3 days, despite a record pre-sale of 70,000 tickets. Raphael’s tomb in the Pantheon was intended to be adorned with a red rose every day in 2020 to commemorate his death, but the ancient temple was also closed due to the virus. Classes and meetings were canceled, postponed or published online.
Poor Raphael. Last year, the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death passed smoothly. Raphael’s faithful hoped that this year’s celebrations would repair the artist’s brilliance, which has faded over the centuries. When the world fell ill last winter, Raphael was one of the victims.
But not everything is lost. The Scuderie exhibition reopened on June 2 and will remain so until the end of August. Scuderie President Mario de Simoni expected another 500,000 people to see the screen pre-virus, but now says the number is unlikely to exceed 160,000.
For those who were unable to attend in person, the Scuderie has published an English edition of its video, recapitulating the highlights of the exhibition, room by room. You must press the pause button in Room 2 to appreciate two masterpieces borrowed from the Louvre: a self-portrait with a friend and a portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, one of the glories of the Renaissance portrait. The close-ups of her paintings of women in room 6 attest to the artist’s passionate appreciation for feminine beauty. Scuderie’s other videos (in Italian) explore specific facets of his genius, for example, the jewels he wears through his feminine subjects or the literary world in which he moved.
Tourist guides such as Clam Tours and Joy of Rome now offer virtual trips in which small teams can follow in the artist’s footsteps through Italy. On 13 September, for example, he can present himself to Renaissance scholar Antonio Forcellino and other experts of Italian art in the virtual exploration of Clam Tour of the incomparable frescoes of Raphael’s 4 sibyls at the Santa Maria della Pace Church in Rome ($25). Watch Joy of Rome’s two-minute loose video of Raphael’s frescoes at Villa Farnesina to see if you want to sign up for a two-and-a-half hour virtual tour (price on request).
Even on a computer screen, Raphael’s changing knowledge and bright silvery brilliance are evident. “Raphael’s year has been ruined, but it’s just changed,” said Marzia Faietti, curator of Show Scuderie. “Since many meetings and meetings have been postponed until next year, in a sense, there will be two years of Raphael.
For Italians, a ray of hope for the pandemic was the opportunity to savor their cultural treasures without the hordes of tourists. “Lloré,” said Francesca Pagliaro, founder of the company Joy of Rome, about the delight of status only in the recently reopened Sala di Costantino del Vaticano, one of the 4 rooms of the museum decorated with frescoes by Raphael and his students, and that you can see here. “This is the first time in five years that I noticed the Stanze without scaffolding, and I had it for me,” Pagliaro said. “It was magical.”
Americans, who are banned from traveling to Europe for the foreseeable future, will have to settle for all this virtual magic. It’s not ideal, but Raphael’s magic is powerful and durable enough to meet the challenge.
I can testify of this because in November 2019, I had the opportunity to stick to Raphael’s real, non-virtual lines in Italy. He was shaking in the room where he was born in Urbino in 1483. I knelt before the austere tomb in an inner niche of the Pantheon where he was buried 37 years later. I feasted my eyes not only on the paintings and frescoes, but also on the humble church and the excellent Roman chapel that bear witness to their nascent genius for architecture. My pilgrimage would be today. However, thanks to the wonders of the Internet and the ingenuity of the main Italian cultural institutions, I can re-enliven my steps from a distance, refresh my memory and relive the revelations.
The first revelation arrived correctly here at the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino, the magnificent Renaissance palace built in the late 15th century by humanist and warlord Federico da Montefeltro that houses the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche. Judge the beauty yourself by clicking on the awesome photo archive from Google Images. Another click places him in front of the exclusive paintings of the Museum of Raphael, the haunting portrait known as “La Muta” (“The Mute Woman”).
As in many of his portraits, Raphael placed this serious good appearance on a dark and forged background, avoiding any visual sign that evoked a sense of belonging.
How, I wondered, influenced Urbino’s art of her most prominent son?
I asked Peter Aufreiter, then director of the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, when I sat with him at his place of work at Palazzo Ducale. Mr. Aufreiter’s reaction was to click on a symbol of Raphael’s 1507 portrait of Frederick’s son, Duke Guidobaldo da Montefeltro (now in the Uffizi), and then call me to the window. “Look at the hill in the other aspect of the valley and this space at the foot of the hill, it is the same background that Raphael put in his portrait of Guidobaldo.” You can see exactly what Mr. Aufreiter meant through the function of expanding this symbol online.
Urbino’s green and rugged landscape, its transparent, smooth and crystalline architecture, can also get a clever concept here, have been printed on the brain and surface of the young artist in his work.
Although Raphael spent most of his career in Florence and Rome, Aufreiter insists that Urbino, whose urban landscape has been little repositioned since the Renaissance, is the position where one feels his brain with maximum intensity.
The spirit is felt in the neighborhood of the artisans that surrounds the birthplace of Raphael, son of the local court painter Giovanni Santi. Near the top of Via Raffaello, on a ski slope, a stone’s throw from the artist’s pompous bronze monument erected in 1897, Casa Natale di Raffaello has been preserved as a museum. There’s a pretty rudimentary virtual tour of your website, but get a broader concept of internal and external spaces in this YouTube video. In these bare and undeniable rooms and in the deep brick courtyard they contain, little attention is needed to put the level back on Raphael’s learning in the last years of the fifteenth century. Giovanni Santi’s bottega (workshop) occupied the floor, and the long-term teacher grew up amid the agitation of painters who polished pigments, stamped Madonnas and traded in art materials.
Father and son led a superior industry at the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino. Made of brick, stone and unwavering geometry, this palace is one of the glories of the Italian Renaissance, not only for its divine architecture, but for the subtle elegance of the nobles that accumulated there. This video captures some aspects of the palace’s perfection: the way its silhouette passes through the profile of the surrounding hills, the ideal proportions of its noble courtyard, the play of volumes and ornaments inside.
Baldassare Castiglione installed his 1528 masterpiece, “The Book of the Courtier”, in this palace full of history, and it was here that the young Raphael used his manners, sharpened his mind, cultivated invaluable relationships and acquired a lifelong pastime for classical antiquity.
Raised in the court, Raphael pursued through the hard (Popes Julius II and Leo X), esteemed through the brilliant (Castiglione and Urbino architect Donato Bramante were close friends) and worshipped through the beautiful.
“Rafael was a very loving person,” wrote Giorgio Vasari, his first biographer. It was Vasari who claimed that Rafael died after sexual abuse with his Roman lover, Margherita Luti. No matter what killed him on April 6, 1520, Raphael completed a wonderful deal and got up in his brief life, but never ceased to be “Master Urbinate”, Urbino’s teacher.
Orphaned after the death of his father in 1494 (his mother had died three years earlier), Raphael moved to adolescence as an apphireice before following orders in Umbria and Tuscany. Chances are he was in Florence in 1504, not as a permanent resident, but as a rental brush on the sofa.
Although Raphael’s footsteps towards Florence are weak, there is no doubt that here he met the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, including, at most, the Mona Lisa, which can be seen here, and the marble statue of David, which you can see. to see and read about the accademia detail.
Critics and connoisseurs have been measuring this Renaissance trio for 500 years. The Uffizi Gallery in Florence is the best position to revisit this rivalry, in the user and virtually. After a recent renovation, the paintings of the 3 giants have been exhibited in two magnificently lit adjacent rooms, and you can place them on the Uffizi site.
For me, neither Michelangelo nor Leonardo have ever matched the natural, fringed white-necked pictorial virtuosity that Raphael sewed around the neck of fabric merchant Agnolo Doni, or the small tooth that has made an incision between the young entrepreneur’s worried eyebrows (use the magnifying glass serves to enlarge this image). Agnolo’s 15-year-old bride, Maddalena Strozzi, hangs next to him, sitting like the Mona Lisa with her hands adorned with jewels on her lap, but dressed in a kaleidoscope of watery red silk, embroidered blue damask and gleaming gauze.
In the other aspect of the Arno are the glories of the Galleria Palatina of Pitti Palace, the largest collection of works by Raphael outdoors in the Vatican. Unlike the Uffizi, Pitti Palace maintains the ambiance and design of an aristocratic appearance: the paintings are stacked 3 deeply in golden rooms with upper ceilings; The works are ordered in an idiosyncratic than chronological manner; and lighting can be extraordinarily inadequate. Fortunately for remote visitors, the lighting is much greater on the palace website, as well as in the Italian and Spanish videos on the museum’s treasures, posted here.
Raphael was summoned to Rome in 1508 through Pope Julius II, and remained there until his death in 1520. The last 12 years in the Eternal City marked the pinnacle of his career. Painter, architect, entrepreneur, archaeologist, pioneer engraver, Raphael has become the prototype of the artist as a celebrity: the Andy Warhol of the Renaissance.
In pre-pandemic Rome, he had to pass through the queues and teams of tourists who tormented the Vatican museums to spend a few moments crowded with one of Raphael’s ideal achievements: the 4 papal halls, known as Stanze di Raffaello, such as the artist and his studio decorated with frescoes between 1508 and 1520.
These days, visitors to the reopened Vatican Museums enjoy the Stanze and the nearby Sistine Chapel in ideal conditions. But remote tours can also be rewarding, thanks to the superbly produced videos and virtual tours that are now on the Vatican website. With the click of a mouse, you can pass between the virtual roof of the Sistine Chapel and the Raphael Stanze and for yourself what is the largest masterpiece.
“Everything I had in art, I had it from me,” Michelangelo once grumbled his younger rival. When you look at their cycles of fresh fresh maximums one after the other (or look like on your computer), it’s transparent that Raphael has done much more than borrow. “The School of Athens,” Stanze’s most prominent work, has the propellant tension of a film pending its climax. The cast members – an aggregate of classical philosophers and Renaissance scholars – converse, discuss, write, read and declaim in an extensive but unified “together” framed through classical architecture. On the other hand, Michelangelo’s Sistine roof, despite all his bravery, reads like a series of static cells.
After Raphael Stanze of the Vatican, a next logical stop, either or virtually, is Villa Farnesina, with its two very good lodges adorned with frescoes: “The Triumph of Galatea” in one of the lodges and “Cupido and Psyche” in the other.
Despite its name, this riverside trastevere monument is neither a villa nor originally a Farnese property, but it is a suburban hostel that Agostino Chigi built for himself in the early 16th century. Chigi brought the most productive artists of the time to paint the lodges; the result is a delicious duvet full of mythological scenes and astrological symbols. Raphael’s “Galaté,” with its windssharated braids, elegantly twisted nude torso and dolphin-driven scallop raft, has become an icon of the grace and spirit of the High Renaissance, and you can see it and other highlights in the villa’s video archives. . Even if you don’t speak Italian, it’s worth exploring short films just for images.
In the latter phase of his career, Raphael increasingly moved from portraiture to architecture. Unfortunately, its main architectural achievements, the gigantic unfinished Villa Madama, perched on a wooded hill 3 kilometers north of the Vatican and Raphael’s classically encouraged lodges, the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, were inaccessible to the public even before the pandemic, and became important again.
To get an idea of Raphael’s architectural genius, head (or click) on the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, in the square of the same name, at the northwest end of the historic center. Like so many transplants, Raphael fell in love with the ancient substructure of the Eternal City: Rome itself, its layers, ruins and relics, its incessant industry with the past, have become a source of inspiration. The chapel he designed for Chigi inside the church of Popolo shows how Raphael has internalized this inspiration in a profound and fruitful way. At first glance, it is only a church chapel: narrow, tall, decorated with art and embedded with valuable stones. But in this place, you can glimpse the almost miraculous geometry of this area: the interaction of the disc and the dome, the rhythm established between the vertical folds of the Corinthian pilasters and the elongated triangles of the dual red marble pyramids that mark the tombs of the Chigis.
No wonder, the artist who faithful the last years of his career to the measurement, cataloguing, preservation and cartography of Roman antiquities, was buried in the greatest classic layout of all time: the Pantheon. If a physical hall of fame vacation isn’t on the charts, you can transfer it to Tom Hanks as a consultant in this clip from the movie “Angels and Demons.” As for his tomb, a simple niche overlooked with a statue of the Virgin, modest and vague, presiding over the glass coffin, you can see it here.
Marzia Faietti, curator of the Scuderie exhibition in Rome, was impressed by the way the virus has stepped forward in Raphael’s reputation and a greater awareness of the dual beauties of his art and character. “The other young people in particular reacted with an outpouring of enthusiasm and benevolence that I didn’t expect,” he said. “The pandemic has caused many other people to suffer, but Raphael’s year will be remembered more, not in spite of the virus, but because of it.”
David Laskin, an ordinary traveler to Rome, is “The Family: A Journey to the Heart of the 20th Century.”
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