August 20, 2020 11
The Virtuoso
Ingrid D. Rowland
Raffaello 1520–
an exhibition at the Scuderie
del Quirinale, Rome,
June 2–August 30, 2020.
Catalog of the exhibition edited by
Marzia Faietti and Matteo Lafranconi,
with Francesco P. Di Teodoro
and Vincenzo Farinella.
Skira, 543 pp., €46.00 (paper)
(in Italian; an English translation
will be published in October 2020)
Like the artist himself, the long-
anticipated Raphael exhibition that
opened in Rome on March 5, 2020, was
struck down by infectious disease. Ra-
phael succumbed to a sudden fever on
April 6, 1520, his thirty- seventh birth-
day. The exhibition that marked the
five hundredth anniversary of his death
lasted only four days. On March 9, the
Italian government issued a decree
prohibiting “every form of gathering in
public places” to prevent the spread of
the coronavirus, and every public insti-
tution in Italy shut its doors. Raphael’s
birthday came and went with his legacy
under lockdown.
Thanks to those strict provisions,
however, Italy emerged from the
Covid- 19 crisis fairly quickly, which
has enabled “Raffaello 1520 –1483” to
reopen from June 2, its original closing
date, until August 30. Conditions are
different, of course: the virus is still
among us. Visitors are now admitted to
the imposing Scuderie del Quirinale,
the pope’s former stables, in groups of
six to eight people at five- minute in-
tervals. After temperatures have been
taken and shoes and hands decontami-
nated, a guard (reliably well- informed,
courteous, and efficient) guides each
little group through the exhibition.
The tour allots five minutes to each of
twelve display spaces, the whole cho-
reography regulated by an electronic
gong. With a break in the middle and
a lingering stop at the exit to admire a
view of Rome gleamingly unpolluted
by the usual smog, the visit lasts eighty
minutes. Five minutes, eighty minutes,
are never enough, but still the experi-
ence feels like a miracle, because it is
a miracle, really a whole set of them: a
thoughtful, practical, and courageous
response to the threat of lethal conta-
gion, and then the twin miracles of Ra-
phael and Rome, and the inseparable
partnership forged between a gifted
young painter and a city of infinite
resilience.
Raphael’s career is inconceivable
without Rome, and Rome, ever since
his arrival in 1508, has been incon-
ceivable without Raphael. No less than
Michelangelo but much more subtly,
he brought on revolutions in art and
architecture, and in thought itself. His
virtuosity as a painter—his natural
facility was on a par with Mozart’s in
music and Michelangelo’s in stone—
can distract our attention from that
ferociously analytical mind and its re-
lentless urge to subvert every kind of
convention. An early painting (circa
1507–1508; not in the exhibition), nick-
named La Muta, seems to show an aus-
terely attractive young noblewoman
sitting placidly for her portrait, but all
the while she is poking her index finger
against the edge of the picture, literally,
and knowingly, pushing its envelope of
illusion—hence the mischievous glint
in her eye. La Muta also provides an
early example of the vivid contrast be-
tween dark background and luminous
skin that would one day inspire Michel-
angelo Merisi da Caravaggio to change
his palette—in Rome—and become
the Caravaggio we know best.
The vast expanses of the Scuderie del
Quirinale provide a majestic venue for
exhibitions. Directly across from Italy’s
presidential palace (formerly the sum-
mer residence of the popes and then the
home of the king), they have become a
kind of national gallery for temporary
shows. Because of its original purpose,
however, the building also has its pe-
culiarities: the pontifical horses lived
in grand style on two levels of soar-
ing stalls, connected by a monumen-
tal, gently sloping ramp of travertine
bricks. A spiral staircase, decorated
with a Doric frieze, led to the two
mezzanines: one, now reserved for the
coffee shop and restaurant (and closed
for Covid), hosted the saddlery, while
directly above it, the topmost floor,
scaled to human tenants, housed sup-
plies and grooms. Today visitors to the
Scuderie sweep up the travertine horse
ramp to the cavernous upper stables
(the lower stables now contain offices
and the bookshop), and then climb the
spiral staircase to reach a sequence of
low- ceilinged, intimate spaces, finally
to emerge onto a glassed- in fire escape
with a spectacular panorama of Rome,
affording one of the city’s best views
of the ruins of the second- century
Temple of Serapis—in the new Covid-
conditioned itinerary, the fire escape,
too, is rightly allotted its five minutes
of glory.
For this distinctive setting, Raphael’s
artistic trajectory presented a stiff lo-
gistical challenge because it runs so
precisely counter to the built- in rhythmof the Scuderie: like every Renaissance
artist, he started small and only worked
on an epic scale for the last twelve years
of his life. The curators of “Raffaello
1520 –1483,” Marzia Faietti and Matteo
Lafranconi, with the help of Francesco
Paolo Di Teodoro and Vincenzo Fari-
nella, faced the problem with ingenious
aplomb: they decided to reverse time’s
arrow and begin with a full- scale fac-
simile of Raphael’s tomb in the Pan-
theon, progressing backward in time to
end with the tiny, tentative works of his
youth.
The scale of the Scuderie’s first-
floor interior allows for displaying an
astounding array of epically oversize
objects: the cartoons (paper patterns)
Raphael and his assistants used for fres-
coing the papal apartments in the Vat-
ican, two of the tapestries he designed
to hang on the walls of the Sistine
Chapel (one real, one a life- size high-
resolution photograph of the cartoon
in the Victoria and Albert Museum in
London), architectural models and an-
cient statues, and large- scale paintings,
all interspersed with smaller drawings,
printed books, manuscripts, engrav-
ings, painted panels, ancient artifacts,
and architectural plans to provide a
glimpse into Raphael’s world as well as
his working methods. The upstairs gal-
leries contain some of his best- known
portraits, an impressive collection of
working drawings for St. Peter’s Ba-
silica, of which he was named chief ar-
chitect in 1514, and some little- known
gems like an exquisite rock crystal ves-
sel for holy water crafted around 1517
by the goldsmith Valerio Belli, whom
Raphael honored with an appropri-
ately fine- grained miniature portrait
(also on display), decades before Nich-
olas Hilliard made a specialty of the
genre.
This reverse ordering of Raphael’s
life offers its own insights. As the ma-
ture man’s skill and sophistication aregradually stripped away, we realize
how remarkable his career really was,
and how utterly unlikely; how many
factors, how much hard work and ruth-
less self- criticism, combined to trans-
form a promising young painter into
an artistic entrepreneur of a kind that
Italy had never seen before: painter;
architect; designer of jewelry, sculp-
ture, and graphics; pioneer of histori-
cal preservation; artistic theorist. The
catalog even has a refreshingly serious
look by Lucia Bertolini and Francesco
Paolo Di Teodoro at Raphael’s sonnets,
usually summarily dismissed as infe-
rior to Michelangelo’s.
He shared a penchant for thinking
large with contemporaries as disparate
as Pope Julius II, who hired him to por-
tray a vision of the Church triumphant
through space and time on the walls
of the papal apartments, as well as the
pope himself, in a penetrating oil por-
trait that is one of the highlights of the
exhibition; the banker Agostino Chigi,
who hired him to decorate his opulent
palace, now known as the Villa Farne-
sina, with a vision of commerce on an
imperial scale; the architect Donato
Bramante, the distant uncle who intro-
duced him to Rome and first discerned
the overarching system that governed
ancient architecture; Germans like
his fellow artistic impresario Albrecht
Dürer, with whom he exchanged draw-
ings; the papal banker Jakob Fugger,
for whom he designed an altarpiece in
Rome; and a onetime visitor to Rome,
Martin Luther, who would use art and
print with an acuity as sharp as Rapha-
el’s to diffuse the vision of a Christian
Church radically different from that of
the papacy.
The early sixteenth century was a
veritable age of entrepreneurs, every
one of them giddy with the excitement
of intercontinental exchange. Rapha-
el’s frescoes for a loggia in Chigi’s new
headquarters include meticulous like-
nesses of plants from the New World
and China, as well as allusions to an-
cient Greco- Roman myth. The Rome
that excited Raphael was not simply
the Rome of classical antiquity, but
also, and especially, the modern Rome
that fully intended to surpass the an-
cients in this life as well as the next.
Indeed, Rome’s identity as the Eternal
City came to urgent life with Rapha-
el’s artistic maturity under the reign of
Pope Julius II (1503–1513), and it is in
many ways that same vision of Rome,
five hundred years young, that spreads
at our feet when we emerge from the
exhibition onto what must be the city’s
most glorious fire escape.A chronological exhibition might well
begin with one of the final gems in
“Raffaello 1520–1483”: a tiny tempera
panel from London’s National Gallery
often called The Vision of a Knight,
but more prosaically titled An Alle-
gory on the museum’s website. A win-
some cavalier reclines on his shield, a
slender laurel tree supporting his back,
his shining armor—navel and all—im-
probably twisting with his somewhat
chunky torso, as two young women, a
plain brunette and a fancy blond, hold
out gifts: a sword and book from the
austere figure, a blossoming branchRaphael: An Allegory (The Vision of a Knight), circa 1504National^ Gallery,^ London