Raphael Reconsidered

To "rehabilitate" an artist who has been a favorite of plain people for four centuries is not so silly as it may sound. That is what the Oxford University Press has undertaken to do for Raphael. Its means is a new volume of its Phaidon series. The Paintings of Raphael ($4.50), just shipped to the U.S. (the present book of reproductions was published last winter in England). The prejudice which it seeks to correct has existed for many years among critics and criticasters in rebellion against the painter of the famous, widely and often ruinously reproduced Sistine Madonna.

Fame. Of all the artists flourishing in the 16th-Century Rome of Popes Julius II and Leo X--Perugino, Signorelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo--none was so gracious, so accomplished or so beloved as Raffaello Sanzio d'Urbino. The Church heaped favor, work and riches upon him. At 25 he was commissioned to do huge murals for the Pope's quarters in the Vatican. He became chief architect of Rome. Princely Cardinals and wealthy bankers sought him out to do their portraits or decorate their villas.

With the centuries his reputation increased, but of his many paintings, fame touched particularly his sweet, overblown Madonnas: The Madonna of the Chair, the Alba Madonna, the Sistine Madonna. The world agreed with Luebke, 19th-Century German art historian, that the Sistine Madonna "is, and will continue to be, the apex of all religious art." Queen Victoria thought Raphael "delightful" and refined. His Sistine Madonna became almost as familiar a Victorian figure as that of the reigning monarch.

Revolution of '48. Among the first to prick this Raphael bubble were seven young men who banded together in 1848 as "The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood," to defy academism by returning for inspiration to the freshness of Botticelli, Mantegna and other predecessors of Raphael. In art they left nothing rugged, but they did succeed in rolling up a mighty snowball of Raphael-belittlement. Even Academicians like John Ruskin agreed that Raphael's Madonnas bore no resemblance to the Jewish Mary. Manet said crudely: "Raphael turns my stomach." In the 20th Century Stark Young, standing in the solemn little chapel in the Dresden Museum before Raphael's Sistine Madonna, could say only: ". . . Fundamentally dull. ... In color it is stupid. . . . The cherubim faces are downright ugly, the infant Jesus equally so."

Rehabilitation. Without quarreling with such critics, the editors of The Paintings of Raphael furnish a wealth of illustrations to plead Raphael's versatility. Of mild Madonnas they show plenty. But the editors have pulled from Vatican ceilings and walls details of composition which tourists could never properly see--gritty old men with hair in their ears, powerful brooding figures as lonely as those of Michelangelo, heavy-hoofed chargers, pictures of fire and terror, men bowed under back-breaking loads. They have also dug out of obscurity original pen-and-ink sketches, such as Nude Men Fighting About a Standard, showing how spirited the artist could be.

Even to the casual eye it may be evident that here was a master in whose best work such idols of esoteric art as William Blake or even Picasso might have found a source of daring line and composition.

In The Paintings of Raphael, detractors will look twice at reproductions of The Fire in the Borgo, or The Deliverance of Saint Peter from Prison, may concede that the artist was neither Victorian nor too utterly refined.

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