Raphael was believed to be 17 when he did this chalk sketch, likely a self-portrait. “What is really extraordinary is the perfection of his technique in drawing,” said curator Carmen Bambach.

You can see in this chalk sketch, by a kid, what was coming … how, in an incredibly short time, Raphael would be regarded as one of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance, right up there with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.  “I think posterity sometimes sees him in third place,” said Bambach. “I believe he is in equal place.”

Bambach spent eight years putting together the first comprehensive exhibition of Raphael’s work ever in the United States – 237 works in total. It has just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Born in Urbino in 1483, Raphael’s precociousness exploded into brilliance when he moved to Florence at the age of 21. “He encounters Leonardo, who is very interested in, sort of, the way that an artist can let the creative juices flow on the paper,” said Bambach. “Raphael absorbs this, and all of a sudden, we see this tremendous sense of movement, of drama, storytelling. He’s able to pick the climactic point of any story. He’s got to be one of the most amazing storytellers that way.”

The humanity, the tenderness of a mother with her baby … his drawings and paintings of the Madonna and Child are beautiful exercises in wishful thinking.

“Mortality of women of child-bearing age was stratospheric, and the same thing for children,” Bambach said. “When one has Madonnas that look like they’re a beautiful picture of health, these bambini that are plump and delightful – you want to pinch them! –  it’s like producing a kind of idealized universe that was entirely aspirational.”

As opposed to his portraits, which look like the real people he painted.

Bindo Altoviti was one of the pope’s bankers, and a friend of Raphael’s, who captured his gaze, the tendrils of hair down his back, the personification of sensuality. “Bindo Altoviti is kind of my favorite portrait in that I have always had a crush on that guy,” said Bambach.

Raphael’s friendships with well-connected patrons led to bigger and bigger commissions, and ultimately to Rome and the Vatican, at the age of 25, to produce frescoes for the pope’s private offices and library. (They are reproduced in the Met show at ¾ size.)

He slipped a likeness of himself into the most famous, “The School of Athens,” and of Leonardo. Some scholars say one brooding figure is Michelangelo.

Bambach said, “Michelangelo was intensely envious of Raphael. Raphael was the tragedy that happened to Michelangelo in many ways, because it came so easily to him.”

Raphael was commissioned to create the designs for enormous tapestries meant to hang directly below Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Of the artist’s drawing of an old and young man, Bambach noted, “This is the most beautiful drawing that Raphael ever produced. For somebody to get that foreshortening of the fingers, and the different planes of the hands in a credible way, this is how you tell the greatest artists from somebody who is just good.”

The drawing was for “The Transfiguration,” what would turn out to be his last painting.

On April 6, 1520, his 37th birthday, Raphael died of a fever in Rome. The inscription on his tomb in the Pantheon reads, “While he was alive, Nature feared she would be surpassed by him. When he died, she feared that she would die, too.”

     
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Story produced by Robert Marston. Editor: Remington Korper. 

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