The making of Raphael: David Ekserdjian reviews the ambitious, eagerly awaited exhibition devoted to the young Raphael, at the National Gallery, London

Apollo, Dec, 2004 by David Ekserdjian

For many of us, the ideal exhibition is one which manages to square the circle by combining a rich diet of masterpieces with a genuine intellectual purpose. Seen in those terms, it is impossible to fault the National Gallery's current 'Raphael: From Urbino to Florence' show, a project of the utmost scholarly seriousness which has managed to assemble an unprecedented--and unrepeatable--array of major works (the catalogue numbers 101 items), above all from the early part of the artist's career. What is more, and in spite of the regular lament that Raphael is on the brink of losing his appeal for a public in constant need of quick fixes, I have a sneaking suspicion that it will also prove to be a remarkable popular triumph.

In 1983-84, in celebration of the fifth centenary of Raphael's birth in Urbino, a number of exhibitions (including a stupendous one devoted to drawings from UK collections at the British Museum), monographs and conferences collectively revitalised and transformed our sense of an artist who tends to suffer from his reputation as the school swot of the high renaissance, forever in the shadow of those mercurial bad boys, Leonardo and Michelangelo. Now a new generation of fortysomething art historians, here represented by Hugo Chapman, Tom Henry and Carol Plazzotta, is able to build on the achievements of such magisterial elder statesmen of the field as Konrad Oberhuber and John Shearman, whose publication Raphael in Early Modern Sources 1483-1602 (2003) was fortunately completed before his sad death last year.

Their principal ambition has been to chronicle Raphael's progress from his teenage beginnings in Umbria around 1500, by way of his reception of Florentine art in the years 1504-1507, to his first successes in the Rome of Pope Julius II up to the time of the pontiff's demise in 1513. To have done so in the subterranean exhibition spaces of the Sainsbury Wing, which have arguably never looked better, in a sequence of seven refreshingly uncluttered rooms, where paintings and drawings are able to be seen side by side to their mutual advantage, is no mean feat.

The first room is devoted to Raphael's early mentors--his father, Giovanni Santi, Perugino and Pintoricchio (Signorelli is absent from the display, but much discussed in the catalogue)--and shows them off at their very considerable best. Not until the Doni portraits of c. 1506-1507 would Raphael be capable of rivalling Perugino's imposing Francesco delle Opere, and it is in his slightly earlier miniaturistic productions that he comes closest to the same artist's exquisite Apollo and Daphnis, whose standing protagonist's dependence on Donatello's bronze David foreshadows another crucial influence on Raphael. The telling direct comparison here is between Pintoricchio's Fitzwilliam Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist and Raphael's Berlin Virgin and Child with Sts Jerome and Francis, a work whose claustrophobic insertion of the attendant saints seems to reflect awareness of the compositional modes of late fifteenth-century Sienese painters such as Matteo di Giovanni. Also included is a puzzling double-sided crucifix from the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan: its weaknesses of execution might suggest it is an autograph work of early date, were it not for the fact that it seems so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Perugino.

The main novelty of the second room is a fascinating panel of the Resurrection from Sao Paulo in Brazil that has hovered on the fringes of the Raphael literature--not least because of its links with two related autograph drawings, to which a third, in Pesaro, has recently been added--but has tended to be rejected. New technical information has revealed all underdrawing, elements of which are strikingly unmechanical, but the colour scheme of the picture and a distinct spatial unease mean that for the moment I am unconverted, again in part because of what I presume to be the relatively late date of the preparatory drawings (around 1502). Be that as it may, it should be noted that the standing guard on Christ's proper right, for whom no Raphael drawing survives, is based upon an ancient statue of the Niobid pedagogue type, which had already served as the basis half a century before for Andrea del Castagno's Washington David. If the figure was even devised by Raphael, then this would appear to he the first concrete instance of his study of the antique.

For all that the ruins of the Saint Nicholas of Tolentino altarpiece and of the Citta di Castello processional banner in this room are liken to be of most interest to specialists, the reassembly of the predella of the Colonna altarpiece, the juxtaposition of the National Gallery's Crucifixion with the two extant elements of its predella, and the delights of the Conestabile Madonna and the St George and the St Michael from the Louvre on the same wall as Trafalgar Square's Vision of a knight are unforgettable delights by any standard.

The authors of the catalogue are sceptical about the idea that Raphael was rooted enough to have had either an Umbrian or a Florentine period, but nevertheless sensibly devote Room 3 to his encounter with Leonardo and Michelangelo. The former is represented by the National Gallery's own cartoon--seen to splendid effect out of its usual stygian shrine and a copy from Wilton House of his lost Leda, which is invariably and incomprehensibly given to Cesare da Sesto, an artist who deserves better than to be associated with this inferior production. Michelangelo fares less well, because the fibre glass resin cast of the Taddei tondo that stands in for the original is a shocker; happily, the British Museum's electrifying study for the Cascina cartoon leaves one in no doubt about why Michelangelo meant so much to Raphael.