Was Raphael the Runt of the Renaissance?

It’s rare that history offers up a simple diagnosis of cultural decline, but we happen to know the exact moment when all of European art headed for ruin. According to the critic John Ruskin, the disaster was called Raphael. The Renaissance master, whose name is only ever sighed in the same breath as Leonardo and Michelangelo, supposedly traded truth for beauty, and ended up destroying both. His work was dull and vapid, a “tasteless poison,” Ruskin said. Just think of all those vacant Madonnas, structurally perfect compositions, and obedient daydreams of antiquity. A modern eyeball can handle only so much before it starts to derange itself in search of a single painterly quirk or sliver of personality.

I had some of this antipathy knocking around in my head before seeing “Raphael: Sublime Poetry,” a show in the works for eight years, at the Met. The good thing about exhibitions of scale, featuring hundreds of objects and once-in-a-century levels of rarity—this is the first major Raphael show in the U.S., a herculean undertaking by the curator Carmen C. Bambach—is that it’s almost impossible to be unchanged by them. Either the crust of your resistance thickens, or it crumbles in the face of genius. In this case, my experience was much stranger. I found an artist so spongelike in his adoption of other styles, so dispersed in his influence on other artists, and so mythical in his stature that I could barely form a clear picture of him.

Like all great myths, Raphael’s is full of symmetries. He was born on Good Friday in 1483 and died on Good Friday in 1520. Given that he lived in the center of Christendom, this wasn’t an insignificant coincidence. Even though he died at the age of thirty-seven, reportedly from having too much sex—not from a venereal disease or a fantastic sex injury but literally from an excess of lovemaking—people often preferred to believe that he died at thirty-three, for its Christly associations. His most influential biographer, Giorgio Vasari, said that Raphael was the beneficiary of his mother breast-feeding him instead of handing him off to a wet nurse, and a recent biographer concurs: “This welcoming maternal breast was undoubtedly one of the factors that helped the future artist.” Ah, yes. Undoubtedly.

The more concrete circumstances were no less auspicious. Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi, was a well-regarded painter and poet in Urbino, a court town that revolved around the palace of Duke Federico da Montefeltro. The Duke, a lover of the arts, drew the twin currents of Quattrocento painting into his fiefdom: the geometry and the structural intelligence of the Italian manner, as represented by Piero della Francesca, who brought his talents for linear perspective to town not long before Raphael was born; and the fetish for detail in the Flemish manner, as represented by Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck. Raphael’s father soaked up both traditions and ran a bustling artist’s workshop, or bottega, in a building connected to the family home. As a child, Raphael would have learned not only how to create charcoal from willow twigs or how to handle a brush made with hog bristles; he would have seen the rigid hierarchies of the bottega—who fetched the water and ground the pigment in the porphyry stone, who conceived of the design for paintings, and how competing personalities were orchestrated toward a single aim. Raphael’s father could manage people below him but also, as a courtier who wrote an entire epic about the life and exploits of Duke Federico, flatter the powerful above him. These were two talents he imparted to his son. Even the most complimentary appraisals of Raphael, which celebrate his multimodal genius—painter, draftsman, architect, poet, surveyor of antiquities—also mention his exquisite social tact and career climbing. He wasn’t just a brilliant artist. He was the politest apparatchik of the High Renaissance.