We pass through the rooms, past Cimabue and Giotto, past Simone Martini’s Annunciation that seems spun from a cloud of gold. This is the old world, where man is unfolding as though from a bud, by increments. Simone’s Madonna draws her cloak around her throat, while with her other hand she marks her place in her book with her thumb. Nearby, Lorenzetti’s Christ child grips the Madonna’s chin, his fingers at her mouth. Slowly, awareness comes. The figures begin to look out of the paintings, out into the world. Fantasy and reality succeed one another in waves, going forward and then back and then forward again, but always climbing, encroaching on some imperceptible common goal. The Madonnas change, the Christs change, the saints acquire different faces. Then there is Leonardo’s Annunciation and the Madonna becomes Mary, a girl of flesh and blood. Perugino’s Christ in the garden at Gethsemane is a good-looking young man with a fresh, sensitive face. In Mantegna’s Circumcision two women stand talking in asides, slouching; one of them rests her arm on her own stomach, as women do when they aren’t self-conscious, while her other hand abstractedly touches the hair of the little boy who stands beside her. Suddenly we are on the firm footing of life, though the subjects have barely altered. We have arrived at the grandeur of the human. By the time we reach Correggio’s Adoration of the Child, Mary looks like what she is: a real woman who has put on a blue cloak in order to pose for the artist.
There is a self-portrait by Raphael in the Uffizi. It is a strange painting, of a frail, wistful-looking youth clad in black. It is faintly ascetic, even depressive: it is a portrait of Raphael’s captive ego. Nearby hangs the Madonna of the Goldfinch. It was damaged in the mid-sixteenth century, when the house of Lorenzo Nasi, who owned it, was destroyed in a landslide. Carefully it was pieced back together, but a long, sad scar runs through it, all the way down the Virgin’s breast and belly and lap. Shortly after he painted the Madonna of the Goldfinch, Raphael’s mother died. The woman in the painting is neither real nor divine: she is an emotion, a flesh-memory. The Christ child leans back against her knees, his small foot resting on her larger one, his head tilted back into her lap. The other child, St. John, is holding the goldfinch. He is showing the bird excitedly to the Christ child and the Christ child is reaching out halfheartedly to touch its head, gazing at his friend with sorrowful, almost baleful eyes. He won’t stray one inch from his mother to touch the bird. He has wedged himself between her knees. It is John who holds the bird, and it is John the Virgin looks at from her downcast eyes. It is John on whose bare shoulder her fingers rest.
Self-Portrait, c. 1506 (tempera on wood), by Raphael (1483–1520)
Madonna of the Goldfinch, c. 1506 (oil on panel), by Raphael
Michelangelo’s Tondo Doni (Holy Family with the Young Saint John) hangs close to the Madonna of the Goldfinch. Michelangelo’s attitude to the male competitor John is clear. He has put him in the background, behind a wall with the rest of lesser mankind; a respectful urchin in an animal skin who gazes up, lost in admiration for the hero of the hour, the vigorous Christ who is seen clambering naked from his father’s lap over the form of his mother and clutching her hair for balance. Mary has her arms outstretched to receive him, but it is far from clear that she is his destination. He looks as though he means to climb out of the picture and head off into the world to collect his due. He balances on top of his parents, the absolute egotist, crushing them underfoot and flashing his virility as he goes. This was perhaps the first time the Christ child was depicted towering over the Madonna, a lithe lass with a husband too old and too cautious for her. This son already owns his mother. She reaches for him while Joseph hovers, gray-haired and anxious, but she cannot possess him. He has already escaped his parents. He wears a band of victory in his hair, his only adornment.
In 1509 Raphael left Florence and went to Rome. A distant relation of his, Bramante of Urbino, was working for Pope Julius II and had persuaded him to commission Raphael to decorate a series of rooms that had just been added to the papal apartments. Raphael went straightaway, and when he arrived at the Vatican found numerous artists at work there, including Michelangelo. Raphael was given a lot of work to do, and for everything he did he received the highest praise. But praise has its own limits. The question of rivalry, which had dogged Raphael, though he had repressed it by a mixture of imitation and charm, now came to torment him face-to-face. Pope Julius admired Raphael, but it was Michelangelo he loved, Michelangelo he fought with and banished and begged to come back, Michelangelo who rebelled and was somehow loved the more for it. This passion of patron and artist found its best expression in Pope Julius’s desire for Michelangelo to sculpt his tomb. He had a drawbridge built between his room and Michelangelo’s, so that he could come and go as he wanted, and inspect the progress of his memorial. Raphael had never experienced this desperate, exacting kind of love. In art he was the lover, the aspirant, not the beloved. He was the one who hoped to please. But was there something else, a serpent, a secret desire to be first and best that masked itself in his humility? And was it in fact this mask that formed the blockage in Raphael’s art, its stubborn separation from reality? There is jealousy in the Madonna of the Goldfinch, but there is neediness too. Raphael needed something: but what? Michelangelo went around having fistfights and feuds with people, and dreamed of making giant statues in the Carrera quarries to leave behind him, as the ancients had. All he seemed to need were blocks of marble big enough for his ambitions, and the freedom to carve them. How was Raphael to go about satisfying his own unacknowledged need for greatness?
While Michelangelo was out of Rome, Bramante and Raphael set about trying to undermine his reputation. They suggested to Julius that to build his own tomb was to invite his own death. When Michelangelo returned, he was told by Julius that work on the tomb was to be suspended. Instead, he was to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a job at which Raphael and Bramante were confident he would fail, for Michelangelo was principally a sculptor, not a painter. Michelangelo locked himself into the Sistine Chapeclass="underline" no one was allowed in, not even Julius. It seemed that to fetter Michelangelo was simply to make his myth the more powerful. Soon, all of Rome was fixated by the mystery of what lay behind that locked door. Then, according to Vasari, Michelangelo had to leave Rome for a few days, and while he was away Bramante got hold of the keys. He and Raphael went in to look. And what they saw, of course, was the preeminent artistic achievement of the Renaissance and perhaps of the whole history of art, past, present, and future.
Seeing the Sistine Chapel, Raphael experienced the overwhelming reaction of his primal reflex, imitation. He immediately went and repainted whole parts of his own work in the Stanza della Segnatura in the style of Michelangelo. After the cataclysm and shame of rivalry, he retreated behind the mask of humility, never to come out again. With the world’s greatest painter as his template, he became a far better artist. And to the art critic’s eye he had gained far more than he lost, for in the end his borrowing of such greatness amounted to greatness itself. Not everyone who sees a Michelangelo can go off and paint a Michelangelo. Raphael was almost as good at painting Michelangelos as Michelangelo himself. His captive sensibility needed a love object to express itself. It is in this, perhaps, that the critics perceive what appears to be Raphael’s sweet disposition. They see it as humility, not the devious workings of a repressed ego. They see it as a tribute, not a theft. But Michelangelo saw it as a theft.