The New York Review of Books - USA (2020-08-20)

12 The New York Review

from her rival, whose other hand
makes a gesture suggesting that more
than flowers may be on offer. A lush
central Italian landscape stretches
behind the trio, extending uphill on
the left, downhill to flowing waters on
the right. The scene looks like a chi-
valric version of the ancient Greek
tale of Hercules at the crossroads, in
which two women presented the hero
with the choice between arduous vir-
tue and luxurious vice, and he chose
the hard road to glory. As Xenophon
tells that story, however, Hercules was
wide awake. Hence this sleepy Lance-
lot also conjures up memories of an-
other ancient hero: the Roman general
Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus
Aemilianus, who toured the cosmos
in a dream and learned (at least ac-
cording to Cicero) that the reward of
virtue is a place among the stars in
heaven.
Raphael painted this panel in Flor-
ence around 1504, when he was twenty-
one, and it is tempting to see the little
knight as a self- portrait, a handsome
youth with a head full of dreams whose
body clearly declares that he wants it
all, virtue and pleasure alike. In 1504,
thanks to a romantic dialogue by the
Venetian writer Pietro Bembo, who
would one day become one of Rapha-
el’s friends, lovelorn swains were all
the fashion, and the knight’s posture
seems to be making a modern argu-
ment that love and virtue need not be
enemies. It is a captivating painting
that provides a poignant glimpse into
a young man’s aspirations as he moves
among cities in central Italy: Florence,
Perugia, Siena.
In this chivalric idyll, it is hard to dis-
cern the steely ambition that drove Ra-
phael no less than Hercules and Scipio
Aemilianus. But visitors who come to
The Vision of a Knight in the exhibition
will already have seen Raphael’s draw-
ings and cartoons for the Hall of Con-
stantine in the papal apartments, where
ancient Roman soldiers are dressed
like ancient Roman soldiers rather
than Knights of the Round Table, in
metal armor that behaves like metal
armor. Once he reached Rome, Ra-
phael studied ancient statues and sar-
cophagi and the great military friezes
on the columns of Trajan and Marcus
Aurelius until he knew exactly what an-
cient Romans, male and female, wore,
in what epochs and on what occasions.
He studied the human body with the
same fierce concentration; the exhibi-
tion is filled with sketches of his shop
assistants, all young because he himself
is so young, taking an infinite variety
of poses, sometimes naked, sometimes
dressed as Madonnas, Apostles, an-
cient gods and heroes, and, in a pinch,
lovely young girls. As Raphael knew
firsthand, one of the professional ben-
efits of serving Pleasure as well as Vir-
tue was ample access to female models,
and we can see the difference between
his female nudes, drawn from the
women in his life, and Michelangelo’s
women, with breasts like citrus fruit
and the bone structure of the boys in
his workshop.

A just- completed restoration of the
frescoes in the Hall of Constantine
has revealed, among other wonders,
a marvelous range of greens that had
darkened over time, and with them a
knowledge of botany as specific and
exacting as Raphael’s grasp of human

anatomy and ancient Roman costume.*

The flower that Pleasure holds out to

the sleeping knight may be the branch

of a blooming cherry tree, but the like-

ness is not exact enough to identify it

beyond a doubt. The exiguous laurel

tree that supports his armored back is

pure fiction: in nature, Laurus nobilis

grows as a bush. Fourteen years later,

in 1518, when Raphael painted exotic

plants for Agostino Chigi, he had his

botany down as exactly as every other

part of his visual world.

Similarly, the turreted structures

in the background of The Vision of a

Knight look vaguely like the ducal pal-

ace at Urbino, where Raphael spent his

childhood (it was designed by a Slav

from Dalmatia, Luciano Laurana), but

they are vague and fanciful. The back-

grounds of the frescoes in the Hall of

Constantine furnish recognizable por-

traits of the Roman countryside, with

recognizable antique structures; by this

time, Raphael was an architect in his

own right, an architect who, moreover,

had designed some of the most influ-

ential buildings in Renaissance Rome.

The Hall of Constantine also displays

Raphael’s explorations of different

kinds of perspective, from the flattened

effect of ancient Roman historical re-

liefs (like the sarcophagi and the col-

umns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius)

to distant, deep landscapes in perspec-

tive, to an entirely new way of present-

ing heavenly space as a spiraling vortex

(which may well have inspired El Gre-

co’s fantastic celestial cloudscapes).

Thanks to curator Francesco Paolo

Di Teodoro, the exhibition’s treat-

ment of Raphael as an architect marks

a milestone in assessing the true ex-

tent of his importance as a builder

and theoretician, and is reinforced by

spectacularly detailed photographs of

architectural drawings. The palazzi he

designed in the neighborhoods around

the Vatican—Palazzo Alberini, Pa-

lazzo Jacopo da Brescia, Palazzo Bran-

conio dell’Aquila, the latter two later

demolished—like the related projects

of associates like Giulio Romano and

Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, per-

manently transformed early modern

Rome because they hewed to such a

consistent style, and they achieved con-

sistency by adhering to a systematic set

of theoretical principles inspired by the

ancient architectural writer Vitruvius,

and to a standard repertory of basic

forms drawn from ancient buildings

like the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the

Basilica Aemilia in the Forum, and

the Forum of Augustus. For Raphael,

archaeological correctness was not an

end in itself; rather, clear understand-

ing of how the ancients thought and

worked was crucial to creating good ar-

chitecture to fulfill present- day (that is,

sixteenth- century) purposes.

In the same way that his drawings

(and hence his paintings) began to

distill first the elements of the human

body, and then entire compositions,

into symphonies of ovals, so he began

to think with similar universality about

the orderly elements of architectural

design. It was he—or perhaps Bra-

mante, but Raphael was the first to

write about it—who began to apply the

term “orders” to the various kinds of

ancient columns, such as Doric, Ionic,

and Corinthian (ancient writers called

them “families”). He did so in an ad-

dendum to a letter (on display in the

exhibition) he wrote to Pope Leo X

in 1519 or so, in which he decries the

destruction of Rome’s ruins by care-

less contemporaries (and thus makes

a pioneering plea for historical pres-

ervation), presents the first known dis-

cussion of historical style by noting that

the Arch of Constantine exhibits well-

thought- out architecture but is deco-

rated by crude sculpture, and ascribes

a certain grace to the architecture that

he calls German and we call Gothic.

Raphael studied Vitruvius in Latin,

but he also commissioned a transla-

tion into Italian to ensure that he truly

understood what the ancient writer

meant. And then he struck out on his

own, creating new forms that main-

tained the qualities he admired in an-

cient art but also drew from the works

of Rome’s Middle Ages. Renaissance

architects, who grew up beneath the

towering naves of medieval churches,

finally lifted the ceilings of all Rome’s

surviving early Christian basilicas; to

their eyes, ancient proportions were

too squat to be truly beautiful. When

Raphael looked back, he did so in order

to look forward. He would have navi-

gated through the time warp of his cur-

rent exhibition in perfect tranquility.

However deftly he came to shape

the irregularities of the human body

into graceful ovals, Raphael’s portraits

reveal his delight in the quirks of per-

sonality. Like La Muta, quietly poking

at her pictorial frame, Cardinal Ber-

nardo Dovizi da Bibbiena overturns

his stately pose and silken robes with

unruly shocks of sparse, frizzled hair;

this was a man who loved to laugh, and

only because of his bozo hair can we

accurately read the mirth in his eyes.

Raphael’s portrait of portly, wall- eyed

Tommaso Inghirami turns a physical

peculiarity (that still runs in the fam-

ily) into an eye trained on the higher

realm of inspiration. The curators

reject the often- floated idea that the

nude portrait known as La Fornarina,

or the baker’s daughter, is by Raphael,

or that it depicts his lover, despite the

armband that explicitly claims his au-

thorship. The harsh, glossy execution

and the hopelessly clumsy left hand

show that this is one of the courte-

san portraits that Giorgio Vasari says

Raphael’s workshop furnished to the

members of Rome’s demimonde (in a

city of nominally celibate churchmen,

prostitutes made up the largest female

professional class, and “Fornarina,” as

the curators suggest, probably refers

to her profession—think “a bun in the

oven”—rather than her father’s). As a

workshop product, the painting fully

qualified as a Raphael, but the ostenta-

tious signature is a bit vulgar. The gor-

geous Florentine banker Bindo Altoviti

may have been painted by Raphael’s

workshop too—albeit by his best stu-

dent, Giulio Romano—but Bindo was

far too rich and refined to need to flaunt

the painter’s identity; everyone of taste

would have recognized it at once.

To see Raphael’s real hand, the exhi-

bition gives us what truly must be the

portrait of his lover, La Velata from

the Galleria Palatina in Florence, all

Raphael: La Velata, circa 1512–

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*Thanks to Covid- 19, the Vatican Mu-

seums are now admitting only 1,

people a day rather than the hordes of

tens of thousands of close- packed vis-

itors that have made visiting the Ra-

phael rooms a misery for decades. It

is suddenly possible to follow a visit to

“Raffaello 1520–1483” by really seeing,

at luxurious leisure, the newly restored

frescoes in the papal apartments.