Raphael died young, at thirty-seven. He was, Vasari says, “a very amorous man with a great fondness for women whom he was always anxious to serve.” His passions were more powerful in the sexual transaction than in the artistic, for in sex there is reciprocity. The love is not praised: it is returned. This, it is clear, was a compelling experience for Raphael. Perhaps, like the Christ child in the Madonna of the Goldfinch, constant bodily contact with a woman, in other words his mother, was his way of seeing off the male competitor, who could not dislodge him physically even if he stole her attention in other ways. On one occasion, he was so besotted with a woman that he was unable to concentrate on the work he had undertaken painting the loggia of Agostino Chigi’s Villa Farnesina until she was installed there with him.
When Raphael first went to Florence as a youth, in his Perugino years, it was Leonardo da Vinci who initially attracted his succubus-like notice. Leonardo’s women were so beautifuclass="underline" the inclination of their heads, their soft, sympathetic expressions, their golden atmosphere of smiling female mystery. Straightaway Raphael’s Madonnas began to smile too, and incline their golden heads. The Madonna del Granduca, painted in 1505, emerges out of darkness like a figure in a dream, or like the love object emerging for the first time from her anonymity. She holds the Christ child upright against her side, and yet it is he who appears to be holding her. One hand rests proprietorially on her bosom, the other on her neck. He looks out into the eyes of the world, displaying her and owning her, this woman he has brought out of the shadows and whom he seems to grip lest she recede again. Later, when he was painting Agostino Chigi’s loggia in Rome, Raphael was asked where on earth he had found his model for the nymph Galatea. She was so beautifuclass="underline" how could she possibly exist? Raphael replied that she wasn’t painted from a specific model. She came from an idea he had in his own mind. It was, of course, here in the Villa Farnesina that Raphael’s mistress was now living with the purpose of oiling the wheels of his refractory genius. Did the presence of the real woman permit the ideal woman to be imagined? Or was this mistress, in fact, the living model of Galatea’s wondrous beauty whom Raphael, the possessive child, denied and hid away from other men?
Sistine Madonna, 1513 (oil on canvas), by Raphael
Raphael’s friend Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi, who found the painter’s promiscuous behavior disturbing, believed that marriage would be the answer to Raphael’s problems. Here Raphael encountered a rare and insurmountable certainty in himself: he did not want to get married. Perhaps, after all, the ideal woman, the Madonna, could not be conflated with the sexualized woman, the courtesan or mistress. But it was in the function of Raphael’s devious ego to give the appearance of being dominated and directed by other men: always, it was by this route that his true desires became known to him. In this case, however, the directive and the desire were mutually hostile. Typically, Raphael decided that what he wanted was not to get married but to be a cardinal, like his friend. Pope Julius was dead by now, and Pope Leo, a great patron of Raphael’s, had in fact insinuated that Raphael might receive the “red hat” once he had finished the hall he was painting. But Cardinal Dovizi had meanwhile elicited Raphael’s promise to marry his niece. Imitation and obedience collided: he couldn’t be a cardinal and get married. And in the prospect of marriage Raphael appeared to glimpse the frontier of his civilized self, beyond which lay the undiscovered hinterland of his true nature which he had never dared to enter. How can an artist attain greatness if he never knows the truth about himself? In the same way, I suppose, that a blind man can see the world, because people describe it to him. He refines his other senses. He learns to recognize the truth, even if he can’t personally see it.
Raphael responded to his dilemma by pursuing his pleasures, as Vasari puts it, “with no sense of moderation.” He contracted syphilis and became very ill, but because he concealed from the doctors the cause and nature of his illness they diagnosed him with heat stroke and proceeded to bleed him. From this last piece of self-deception, Raphael died, in 1520.
The Sistine Madonna, which Raphael painted in 1513, shows a rather different mother and son than the golden women and possessive boys of his earlier years. This mother is smaller, more lifelike, less dominating. The boy is larger and more confident. He is beautiful, with lustrous hair and a lithe, well-modeled body. He does not clutch or grip his mother. He reclines in her arms, one leg crossed at the knee, like a young man sitting easily in an armchair. He seems satisfied. Only his head, which rests unconsciously against her cheek, betrays the fact that she remains his object, his desire. For a moment he looks as if he might be getting up and going somewhere, but that resting head says it isn’t so. He is more relaxed, that’s all. The woman is more real to him. She isn’t a golden ideal he fears will be stolen from him. He doesn’t cling onto her. His hand lies lightly on his own leg. It is she who holds him, supports him, of her own volition.
In the Uffizi there is a late painting by Raphael, of Pope Leo with two of his cardinals. Leo is a big, heavy, fleshy-faced man, padded with garments of velvet and embroidery. He is powerful, ugly in his power. His embroidered robe is more beautiful than he. In his hand he holds a small magnifying glass, with which he has just been scrutinizing the great gilded book that lies on a table in front of him. Now he gazes forward, his brow faintly crinkled, his eyes calculating: clearly he is pondering some problem of state. Of the two cardinals attending him, one looks straight ahead, like the guards outside Buckingham Palace. The other looks out, askance, at us. He is in young middle age, a little unshaven, with dark eyes that are half innocent, half knowing. With both hands he grips the back of the papal chair, where Leo sits immersed in his trance of male authority. It is those clutching hands that suggest to me that this is a portrait of Raphael himself. And he has taken such care to describe the signs of age that are encroaching on those childlike eyes, the receding hairline, the lines around brow and mouth, the tired pouches that hang under the lower lids. With his steady gaze, this man is asking a question. Who am I?
Portrait of Leo X (1475–1521), Cardinal Luigi de’ Rossi, and Giulio de Medici (1478–1534), 1518 (oil on panel), by Raphael
Across the river, in the Pitti Palace, there is a portrait of a lady. It is by Raphael. Its title is La Donna Velata, “the veiled woman.” Her veil is rather spectraclass="underline" it has been pushed back from her face, but it seems that it might close around her again, like a shroud. How fine she is, though, in her moment of life! Later, in the proprietario’s library, I read that this woman is believed also to have been the model for the Sistine Madonna. Here, she is permitted her own reality, her necklace of amber-colored stones, her lovely dress with its gold piping, her white undergarment with its delicate gathered neckline and little ribbons tied in bows. In her hair, just where the veil has been folded back, she wears a single pearl. Her hand rests on the stiff material of her dress where it covers her breasts. It seems to be a gesture of invitation, but it hints, too, at a feeling of separation from her own finery. This is the woman who holds her child so willingly, so generously, in the Sistine Madonna. I wonder whether the veil is, at last, the symbol of Raphael’s self-knowledge. It is he who veils her, for her body is the drama of his subconscious. The veil is the psychic rift which separates one image of her from another. Is she to wither in her casket of gold piping and amber-colored stones? Is she to remain alone, like the pearl in her hair? When she fingers her cloth-covered breast, what vision of love rises in her large, dark, heavy-lidded eyes?