The Raphael Question

Lawrence Gowing

  • Raphael by Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny
    Yale, 256 pp, £15.95, May 1983, ISBN 0 300 03061 4
  • The Drawings of Raphael by Paul Joannides
    Phaidon, 271 pp, £65.00, July 1983, ISBN 0 7148 2282 5
  • Drawings by Raphael from English Collections by J.A. Gere and Nicholas Turner
    British Museum, 256 pp, £8.95, November 1983, ISBN 0 7141 0794 8

When I used to give a survey course for first-year students, I dreaded December. That was when I reached the High Renaissance and my audience fell away. It was not only the alternative seasonable employment that left the slopes of the theatre to echo vacantly my conventional claims for the ideal. Although I did not disbelieve the convention, it was hard to feel sure that the perfections of Leonardo and Michelangelo – the ideally empirical theory of knowledge and the ideal of human physique in the likeness of God – did not outclass the merely intelligent perfection of pictorial form, which was the apparent distinction of Raphael.

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