Raphael: the Drawings (A review essay)

Renaissance Studies Vol. 00 No. 00 DOI: 10.1111/rest.12382 REVIEW OF EXHIBITIONS Raphael: The Drawings (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 1 June – 3 September, 2017). Catalogue by Catherine Whistler and Ben Thomas with Achim Gnann and Angelamaria Aceto. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2017. 256 pp. Gathering one hundred and twenty drawings from collections across Europe and the US, Raphael: The Drawings represented the richest display of the master’s draughtsmanship in living memory: richer than any of the individual collections exhibited across Europe on the 500th anniversary of the artist’s birth in 1983. As well as constituting a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view such a spread of the artist’s graphic art in one place, it offered a significant provocation to Raphael scholarship too, arguing for ‘a fresh understanding of [the artist] through a focus on the visual and material eloquence of his drawing’. For co-curators Catherine Whistler and Ben Thomas, a chief aim was to counterbalance the art historical tendency to privilege a project-oriented attitude towards Raphael’s drawings. Rather than view them solely as preparatory for paintings or focus simply on questions of attribution and dating, it presented them as compelling, persuasive acts in their own right, with an artistic integrity and expressive force all their own. The exhibition catalogue develops that campaign admirably, with contibutions by Angelamaria Aceto, Achim Gnann, Ben Thomas and Catherine Whistler that make compelling arguments for altering the way in which we view and talk about Raphael’s art of drawing. With good reason, Raphael: The Drawings elicited overwhelmingly positive accolades in media reviews (superlatives like ‘magnificent’, ‘stunning’, ‘unmissable’, ‘astoundingly beautiful’ abounded) and attracted record numbers of visitors to the Ashmolean museum. Indeed, it is hard to imagine exhibition visitors being left unmoved by the beauty of Raphael’s drawings, though some may have felt cheated of the chance to compare them to paintings. Small-scale copies of some major paintings were displayed on the entrance wall to the gallery, but only to illustrate the artist’s chronology; and the catalogue follows suit, opening with the same illustrated lifeline. Moreover, the invitation to contemplate the ‘visual and material eloquence’ of the drawings as irrespective of their role in the production of larger commissions is controversial. In certain art historical quarters, in fact, to divorce early modern drawings from paintings is to ignore their real purpose and function. According to this view, it is all well and good to think of Renaissance draughtsmen in rapture to the muses as they sketch, but to present drawings as artistic ends in themselves is to indulge a historical fantasy. Within the busy art studios of sixteenth-century Italy, drawings constituted no more nor less than exercises for paintings, and there is scarce historical evidence to suggest there was any real market for them. Leading patrons neither commissioned, paid for, nor traded in drawings, and if they had no commercial, aesthetic or practical value back then, why should we C 2018 The Society for Renaissance Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd V 2 Review of exhibition champion them as autonomous artworks now? For experts of this persuasion, there can be little profit in studying drawings without paintings, when the real pleasure ‘derives from the fascination of seeing artists only gradually reaching their destination in the finished work after all sorts of false starts’ (David Eskerdjian, Apollo Magazine, Jan 2017). The major appeal of studying drawings, in other words, lies in the arc they trace either from the early to the later stages of an artist’s career or from the inception to the completion of an individual work. Why, then, derail drawing from its arc? Such questions were posed to the curators during a series of workshops leading up to the exhibition. Lively debate about the value and meaning of drawings animated each of these three events and drew into dialogue specialists working across a range of disciplines spanning art history, history, classics, literary criticism, psychology and neuroscience. Abundantly clear were the enduring appeal of Raphael’s draughtsmanship, the questions it continues to raise about technique, style and composition, and the further studies it invites of reception, cognition and affect. Equally clear, however, was the ongoing debate within the art historical world between practical criticism, on the one hand, and aesthetic theory on the other: between those interested in classifying and cataloguing graphic art within the scope of its teleological arc, in other words, and those who regard such art independently of painting while attending to the broader aesthetic conversation within which it was produced. It is this debate that animated David Rosand’s Drawing Acts (2002), to which the exhibition responds. In his book, Rosand praises the branch of art history that he calls practical criticism or connoisseurship for its ‘impressive and most venerable tradition’ of training the evaluative eye, carrying out rigorous historical research and cataloguing with considerable authority the art of the past (p. xxii). Declaring himself indebted to the connoisseur tradition, he presents himself, however, as an aesthetic theoretician wishing neither to catalogue individual works nor to confine them to the teleology of a particular artist’s trajectory, but to explore just what it is that they communicate in their own right. Lamenting the fact that early modern drawings are predominantly thought of as ancillary to paintings and, therefore, consigned to the dark recesses of museum archives, he proposes a new branch of study that evaluates them independently for what they reveal about an artist’s creative self and about the phenomenology of viewing. Similar ambitions inspire Whistler and Thomas, but, fifteen years on from the controversy of Rosand’s book, they seem more eager to bring the connoisseurs and the theoreticians into dialogue. To this end, they bolster the exhibition with a catalogue offering persuasive evidence to justify their non-teleological approach and suggest ways in which such an approach might complement rather than compete with the teleological drive of traditional connoisseurship. The catalogue combines advanced technical analyses (see Angelamaria Aceto’s important glossary of terms, ‘Raphael’s Materials and Techniques’) with rigorous historical research both into the relevant aesthetic contexts within which the art of drawing was discussed and the material circumstances within which actual drawings circulated (Whistler, ‘Raphael’s Hands’). It thus emphasises the historical legitimacy of valuing drawing as an expressive form of art. Exploring the classical artefacts that inspired early modern art and the classical rhetoric that afforded it a language, it constructs a vivid sense of Raphael’s own feeling for the form (Thomas, ‘Raphael and the Idea of Drawing’). Review of exhibition 3 Flanking these studies is a more teleological approach to the drawings; a persuasive account of how individual drawings in the exhibition illuminate Raphael’s overall compositional practise (Achim Gnann, ‘Raphael’s Drawings and the Design Process’). The result is an ambitious collection of essays that harnesses a range of art historical approaches, anticipates objections from certain points of view and advances the appreciation of Raphael’s drawings in new and persuasive ways. It revisits, for example, the question of just how valuable Raphael’s drawings might have been in sixteenth-century Italy. After Charles de Tolnay’s influential Old Master Drawings (1943), it was often assumed that drawings were of no real value during the Renaissance, unless to other artists who collected them as materials for study. More recent scholarship, from Petrioli and Rodin o’s contributions in I Disegni (1996) to Whistler’s own, Venice and Drawing (2016), have nuanced that view, showing how drawings circulated amongst princes, diplomats and men of letters, too, and were prized for intellectual and cultural reasons in addition to serving as instruments of instruction. John Shearman’s Raphael in Early Modern Sources (2003) shed new light on the circulation of our artist’s drawings amongst aristocrats such as Cardinal Domenico Grimani, for whom collecting was an index of intellectual and cultural sophistication. Further research by Whistler develops further this list of wealthy sophisticates. The fact that Raphael honoured prestigious figures like Alfonso d’Este with gifts of his drawings suggests almost certain ‘recognition of their value as autonomous works of art’ (Whistler, Raphael: The Drawings, p. 38). There can be no doubt, of course, that leading artists were busy juggling master craftsmanship with the business skills necessary to run thriving studios: As well as design and produce sculptures, paintings and buildings, they had to seek and secure commissions, source and buy materials, balance accounts, oversee the work of pupils and unskilled helpers, field the whims and eccentricities of patrons from bankers and merchants to popes and princes, and so on. Within this world of activity, drawings served more functions than one. They were preparatory – sketches and models were crucial to the conception and design of large projects – but they were often the very thing that secured commissions and convinced patrons of an artist’s superiority over his rivals as well. Pedagogical tools, prized objects of exchange and performances of virtuosity, they were designed to impress patrons and to inspire pupils and peers alike, as Raphael’s drawing for D€ urer (cat. 102, fig. 1) makes clear. Carefully catalogued in the Northern artist’s own hand as a gift from ‘Raphael of Urbino, who was so highly esteemed by the Pope’, it was made and sent ‘to display his [the artist’s] hand’. Surely no further testament is required to the esteem in which such drawings were held. The drawings, of course, speak for themselves. Liberated from the teleological thrust of more traditional exhibitions, where (‘preparatory’) drawings are shown alongside (‘complete’) paintings, Raphael: The Drawings transported visitors back to a place in time before those paintings existed. Wall captions focused not on links between drawings and paintings but on the technical and stylistic features most worth attending to. Many of the titles, too, resisted the temptation to fast-forward time from disegno to colorito by opting for the deliberately descriptive formula ‘A study of [. . .]’, rather than the more conventional ‘A study for [. . .]’. Swimming upstream to the prehistory of Raphael’s major works, we were witness to moments when ideas storm the page in swirling, whirling loops of creativity, when nascent concepts merge with stock images stored in the vast repertoire of 4 Review of exhibition Fig. 1 Studies for three standing men, c. 1514–15. Vienna, Albertina 17575. the artist’s memory to find expression in studies as fresh and arresting as the moment they first materialised. In drawings like the so-called ‘Sheet with inventive ideas and studies of a seated male nude’ (cat. 81, fig. 2), for example, an intense knot of arcs and loops in the bottom right-hand corner disentangles itself into emergent shapes of upstanding Review of exhibition 5 Fig. 2 Sheet with inventive ideas and studies of a seated male nude, c. 1511–14. Ashmolean Museum, WA1846.200. soldiers, huffing zephyrs, cloud-borne putti and a reclining man, recoiling in amazement at an apparition hovering off-page. The whir of Raphael’s imagination, like the scratch of his stylus, are almost audible. Elsewhere, we observe him pondering the basic modular 6 Review of exhibition composition of his figures, altering a limb here, rearranging a robe there and making practical choices that bespeak the aesthetic, cultural and spiritual considerations that inform and shape his craft. Changes of mind are evident: In ‘The Virgin with the Pomegranate’ (cat. 12), for example, faint marks of an erased left hand and a barely visible left arm still cross the child Jesus’s torso and come to rest on his tummy, vestiges of an earlier plan before the artist finally settled on a more open gesture, mirroring that of Mary, and on a chubby hand half-inclined towards the hieratic gesture that characterises depictions of the adult man. The most incomplete of the drawings were, in some respects, the most eloquent. Curatorial comments highlighted Raphael’s expressivity even in empty spaces. With the extension of an arm or the twist of a torso, the artist manages to activate blank tracts of page, compelling our mind’s eye to complete the narrative into which isolated figures will eventually be inscribed. It is hard to identify the cognitive processes called upon here: is it the irresistible pull of teleology that helps us fill in the gaps; or is it the communicative force of Raphael’s line that manages both to express and to imply, to represent material form on the page and to invoke additional forms not yet inscribed on it at the same time? It could certainly be said that sheets such as the ‘Studies for an executioner and a kneeling woman’ (cat. 68) jog memories of a complete ‘Judgement of Solomon’: how can we help but project those visual memories of paintings back onto the drawn page? Sometimes, though, the sketches bear no direct relation to paintings by the artist (the bathers, cat. 26, for example) or exist, at one remove from Raphael’s paintings, as experimental prototypes for themes to which he will return time and again (see his many experiments with the Virgin and Child, for example, as in cat. 38, fig. 3). In those instances, potential narratives and compositions jostle for expression in our mind’s eye. Unarticulated shapes and colours cluster around the outlines on Raphael’s page. One of the most exciting things about viewing his drawings in the way Thomas and Whistler invite us to do is that we feel drawn into the creative process. After retracing the marks of his visible activity, we are called upon to imagine the implied activity beyond those lines and to infer the prospective figure of a wise king sitting in judgement on a false mother; or of a river fast-flowing before the eyes of two bathers; or of the invisible plaything, playmate or other distraction that twists an infant Jesus’s body out of his mother’s lap. Freed, here, from association with the works they precede, the drawings bustle with creative energy and with the manifold possibilities they still entertain. In more complete drawings, the artist’s creative process has moved on. Design challenges have been overcome, and compositional and conceptual choices have been made. As the curators point out, Raphael works these sketches up to a level of polish that requires neither a line nor a dot more. Displays of technical and artistic bravura, such drawings demonstrate the master’s unerring sense of precisely when to lay down his pen and walk away, a talent the great ancient Greek artist, Apelles, found lacking in his rival Protogenes. For Apelles (according to Pliny, Natural History, 35.36), knowing when to take one’s hands from the pallet is especially the mark of a fine artist, a lesson rehearsed centuries later by Raphael’s friend, Baldassare Castiglione, in his Book of the Courtier (I, 28). The hallmark of sixteenth-century grace, such measured control is nowadays sometimes seen as mannered, the triumph of ‘the dogma of academic art’ over ‘the dogma of liberty in art’ (as Giulio Carlo Argan Review of exhibition 7 Fig. 3 Sheet of studies of the Virgin and Child, c. 1507. Vienna, Albertina 209. once said). Yet the exhibition encourages those who view Raphael’s paintings as excessively conscious in their execution, and therefore anathema to a modern or even postmodern aesthetic, to look differently. It invites them to see in Raphael an 8 Review of exhibition Fig. 4 A man carrying an over man on his back, c. 1513–14. Vienna, Albertina 4881. Review of exhibition 9 experimental draughtsman who was receptive to ideas and influence, willing to take risks and seeking a style that would be novel and unique. Much has been said about the grace of Raphael’s drawings, from Lodovico Dolce’s claim that they were well-wrought and ‘full of grace’ (Dialogo della pittura, 1557) to Ben Thomas’s catalogue chapter on how the artist invited us to ‘see and judge the grace’ of his own design (pp. 45–53). Implicit in the invitation to see and judge grace is the profound intuition that art makes its mark not just upon the artist’s page, but in the eyes, heart and mind of its beholder. An artist’s grace is not truly graceful until it has been received and fully registered in the body of someone else. Raphael’s art is designed for affect, in other words, to stimulate in the viewer a tangible response. Incredibly, his drawings trigger that response five hundred years after they were first drawn. From awe and wonder, to compassion and disdain, they elicit pleasure and pain. Amongst the particularly moving drawings in the exhibition was the sheet portraying ‘A man carrying an older man on his back’ (cat. 101, fig. 4). Not yet inscribed in the ‘Fire in the Borgo’ painting, it is a self-contained study of a mature man’s struggle to carry an older man from danger to safety. Signs of the bearer’s physical exertion – from the awkward straddle of his legs to the uncomfortable curvature of his shoulders and neck – enhance the precariousness of his load. The intimate contact of their naked bodies and the grip of the young man’s hand on the old man’s wrist evokes both the humanity and the desperation of their shared plight. Before 14 June 2017, when the Grenfell Tower disaster in nearby London took the lives of countless people and gave rise to trials of extraordinary physical endurance, no one could have anticipated the immediate relevance the presence of this drawing would come to have in this particular exhibition. In drawings like this, Raphael’s grace is neither easy nor sweet in its effect, but harrowing. Both exhibition and catalogue close with ‘arguably the most impressive of all Raphael’s drawings’, the page entitled ‘The heads and hands of two apostles’ (cat. 120, fig. 5). A portrait of surprise, it also elicits surprise. The speechlessness of its subjects is a mirror to our own. From the taught sinews on his neck to the furrows on his questioning brow, the old man struggles to grasp the meaning of the drama off-page, just as we seek to grasp the source of the drawing’s success. As he draws himself back, his young companion leans forward, accepting of and responding to the events. The contrasting movements of the two figures provoke a mirrored response in us as our gaze zooms in, towards the detail, then back out for the overall effect. The lasting impression is of a grace that resides not in the graphic traces on the page, but in the dynamic loop that connects the head and hands of each apostle – and, indeed, of the artist himself – to ours. A sister exhibition at the Albertina Museum in Vienna ran from 29 September 2017 to 7 January 2018. Here, a number of the same drawings were displayed but this time reframed within the context of Raphael’s overall artistic practise and recast as stages in the longer journey towards painting. In Vienna, the teleological clock ticked again, and the drawings were rewritten into the narrative drive towards their painted conclusion. Yet the drawings as displayed in the Ashmolean exhibition and analysed by its accompanying catalogue have opened up a new window on the old debate about what drawings are really for. Thanks to Raphael: The Drawings, they have stood up to scrutiny in their 10 Review of exhibition Fig. 5 The heads and hands of two apostles, c. 1519–20. Ashmolean Museum WA1846.209. own right, offering a unique and eloquent record not just of the communicative capacity of the line but of the very eyes and mind of Raphael. University of Birmingham Ita Mac Carthy