How Raphael Became A Master

0:00 [Music] If you wanted to understand an artist's

0:04 creative evolution, the best case

0:06 scenario is that they painted the same

0:09 subject at two different points in their

0:11 career.

0:12 That way, you could see exactly

0:14 where and how their craft and vision

0:16 advanced.

0:17 It'd be even better if they

0:19 treated that theme three times or four.

0:22 then the course of their progress, the

0:24 integration of their influences, their

0:27 experiments and realizations would

0:29 reveal itself in greater subtlety.

0:32 Fortunately for us, we do have a best

0:34 case scenario in Renaissance artist

0:36 Raphael's treatment of the Madonna and

0:39 child.

0:40 Only he didn't paint it just four

0:42 times.

0:43 He made a lot more than that.

0:48 Most of us know that Raphael was one of

0:51 the big three high renaissance artists

0:54 along with Leonardo da Vinci and

0:56 Michelangelo.

0:57 His most famous work is

0:58 the magnificent school of Athens fresco

1:01 in the Vatican papal palace, but of

1:03 course he painted many more works.

1:06 He didn't have Leonardo's problem of

1:08 constantly starting things and rarely

1:10 completing them.

1:11 Raphael completed a lot

1:13 in his two short 37 years of life and he

1:16 didn't have Michelangelo's problem of

1:19 well of a thorny personality.

1:20 By all accounts, Raphael was nice, courteous,

1:23 and a pleasure to work with.

1:25 If there's one thing you should know about him,

1:28 it's that he was a sponge.

1:29 She had an amazing ability to rapidly absorb the

1:33 innovations of great artists around him

1:36 and incorporate them into a style that

1:38 always remained uniquely his own.

1:41 His first influence was his dad.

1:44 Giovani Santi was an accomplished artist in his

1:46 own right, good enough to become a court

1:48 painter to the Duke of Erbino.

1:50 His work was shaped by the geometry of Pierro

1:53 dela Franchesca, the first person to

1:55 write a treatise on perspective, and by

1:57 the clarity, realism, and landscapes of

1:59 early Netherlandish painters.

2:01 All these influences filtered through the father

2:03 to the son.

2:04 Giovani died when Raphael

2:06 was only 11, so he never got the chance

2:09 to see his son surpass him, which he did

2:11 quite quickly.

2:12 Raphael was only 19 when

2:14 he made the painting on the right,

2:16 probably his first treatment of the

2:17 Madonna.

2:18 You can see that Raphael has a

2:19 better sense of three-dimensional bodies

2:22 and how to make them feel like they're

2:24 part of the space that they're in.

2:26 In this sense, he already outshines his

2:28 father.

2:28 And even Pierro, whose figures

2:30 have a flatness to them where he doesn't

2:32 outshine Pierro, is in the composition.

2:35 There's an awkwardness in the

2:36 arrangement of the figures here,

2:37 especially St.

2:38 Jerome and Francis, who

2:39 are cramped in at the sides and pushed

2:42 forward so that there's no separation

2:43 from the Virgin and Child in front of

2:45 them.

2:46 The other things this painting

2:47 lacks are emotion, relationships, or any

2:50 sense of narrative.

2:52 In this way, it's

2:52 like a thousand other Madanas that came

2:55 before.

2:55 Since the early Middle Ages, the

2:57 depiction of the Virgin had been a

2:59 mainstay of devotional painting.

3:01 These were static iconic images meant for

3:04 worship.

3:04 She's often enthroned and

3:06 following the Byzantine style,

3:08 backgrounded by a flat plane of gold

3:10 with golden halos.

3:12 It wasn't until the

3:13 late medieval and early Renaissance

3:15 period that religious painting became

3:17 interested in the humanity and story of

3:20 such scenes.

3:20 The key text here is Leon

3:22 Batista Albert's on painting from 1450

3:26 in which he praises histori.

3:29 [Music] The artists that influenced Raphael in

3:34 his youth, people like his father and

3:36 Pierro, people like Peruino and Pinterio

3:38 at work in Umbria, had not fully taken

3:41 up Albert's call for expressive

3:43 narrative.

3:44 Their work retained the

3:45 static iconic quality of earlier

3:48 devotional painting.

3:49 And you can see

3:50 that quality in all of Raphael's early

3:52 Madanas.

3:53 And then in 1504 he went to

3:56 Florence where narrative, psychology and

3:58 an obsession with human anatomy and

4:00 movement were infusing the art of

4:02 Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

4:05 You can just witness Raphael absorbing their

4:07 influence especially Leonardo's in his

4:09 Madonna of the Meadow from 1505 to6.

4:12 This to me is a great leap forward.

4:15 Raphael adopts a pyramidal structure

4:17 that he learned from Leonardo and a

4:19 technique called spumato in which

4:21 transitions between colors and tones

4:23 shade gradually into one another

4:25 creating a more realistic sense of depth

4:28 and volume.

4:29 These three characters feel

4:31 like they're in this landscape.

4:33 The composition is sophisticated.

4:35 Mary holds Jesus in a gentle motherly way.

4:38 She is in a contropasto pose with her body

4:40 facing to the right and her head to the

4:42 left giving us the sense that she's

4:44 turning to look at the young St.

4:46 John and her eyline leads us down to him.

4:48 He's in a pose derived from Leonardo's

4:51 Virgin of the Rocks and his ey line

4:53 directs us toward the young Jesus who

4:55 returns the gaze.

4:56 The two children make

4:58 their own smaller triangle with the top

5:00 of the cross at its peak.

5:02 There's a narrative here.

5:03 St.

5:03 John is handing Jesus a symbol of his future suffering

5:07 which Jesus accepts.

5:08 Mary looking at John accepts this too.

5:10 And yet her gentle holding with both hands suggests

5:13 protection.

5:14 We're invited to imagine how

5:16 a mother might feel about all that is to

5:18 come for her child.

5:19 In the Florentine Madanas of this period, Raphael is

5:23 learning fast, but he hasn't discarded

5:25 the lessons of his earlier teachers.

5:28 I said before that artists like Perogino

5:30 retain the static quality of earlier

5:32 devotional painting, but he also

5:34 elevated that quality to a new level of

5:37 serenity and harmony.

5:39 In Madonna of the

5:40 Meadow, Raphael strikes a balance

5:42 between the harmony and clarity of

5:44 Peruino and the drama of Leonardo.

5:46 He takes from both to make something new.

5:49 Of course, Raphael's other great

5:51 influence was Michelangelo.

5:52 And though their relationship did become tense,

5:55 most of that bad energy came from the

5:57 older, grumpier, cattier artist who

6:00 famously wrote in a letter that Raphael

6:02 was quite right to be jealous of me.

6:04 For all he knew of art, he learned from me.

6:07 As we've already seen, that isn't true.

6:09 Raphael didn't learn everything from

6:10 Michelangelo, but he did learn a lot.

6:13 Namely, how to use the human body as an

6:16 expressive tool.

6:17 Michelangelo's sculpture and painting is filled with

6:20 monumental bodies stretching, twisting,

6:23 grappling, emoting with every muscle.

6:26 Of particular importance to Raphael was the

6:28 tad tando.

6:29 A tando being a circular work

6:31 of art.

6:31 Michelangelo's relief sculpture is unfinished, but what he did do here

6:35 is extraordinary.

6:37 Jesus sprawls across Mary's lap and looks back at a young St.

6:40 John.

6:41 This child carved in cold marble

6:43 feels like he's alive, like he's moving.

6:46 Raphael sketched this posture and

6:48 eventually used it for his Bridgewater

6:50 Madonna of 1507 in reverse.

6:52 This is unlike anything Raphael had done before.

6:55 Just compare the poses of these two

6:57 figures and how they interact to his

7:00 Madanas of just a few years before.

7:02 The difference is shocking.

7:03 In the later one, we have narrative, psychology,

7:06 movement, bodies with a sculptural

7:08 reality.

7:09 Look at how he foreshortens

7:11 this foot.

7:11 Look at the shading on Mary's

7:13 neck.

7:13 X-ray analysis showed that he

7:15 originally planned a landscape

7:17 background for this, but chose to remove

7:19 it in favor of this dark wall, isolating

7:21 the figures in the space, so that all

7:23 our attention is on the sineuous way

7:26 they interact.

7:27 Raphael still utilizes the pyramid shape, the fumato.

7:30 He still has Mary in a Leonardoes contropasto.

7:34 His colors are rich like paraginos, but

7:36 a bit more muted.

7:37 And to this, he adds

7:39 an expressive, dynamic posture that he

7:41 learned from Michelangelo.

7:43 The baby looks like he's just woken up frightened

7:45 from a dream.

7:46 Reaching out for his mom,

7:48 he grabs her shawl.

7:50 What was he dreaming

7:50 about?

7:51 Did he have a vision of the

7:52 passion?

7:53 Mary looks down at her child

7:54 with calm and comfort and just the

7:57 slightest hint of concern.

7:59 In these later years in Florence, Raphael's

8:01 Madanas are incredible.

8:03 The compositions are much more innovative and complex,

8:06 but he executes them in a way that feels

8:09 effortless, and that really is his

8:11 signature.

8:12 In 1508, Raphael moved to

8:14 Rome at the invitation of Pope Julius II

8:17 and was soon commissioned to work on

8:18 what would become his masterpiece, the

8:20 so-called Raphael rooms in the Vatican

8:23 Palace.

8:24 In this early Roman period, he

8:25 also made what I believe is his greatest

8:28 Madonna, the Alba Madonna in tando form.

8:31 Raphael attempted Madanas on circular

8:33 canvases three times before.

8:36 The first is an uninspired run-of-the-mill

8:39 devotional image.

8:40 The second is more

8:41 interesting, but the composition clashes

8:43 with the shape of the frame.

8:45 In the third, you can see him engaging with

8:48 this exact problem.

8:49 He's designed the poses to work with the circle, curving

8:52 the postures of Mary and Joseph.

8:54 The intense look here between Jesus and his

8:56 foster father tells a story of real

8:58 emotional potency.

9:00 It's it's a beautiful

9:00 painting, but it has nothing on the

9:03 album Madonna of 5 years later.

9:05 Everything Raphael has learned comes

9:07 together in this image.

9:08 The arrangements of Leonardo, the physicality of

9:11 Michelangelo, the serenity of Peruino,

9:13 the geometry of Pierro, the clarity of

9:16 the Netherlandish landscapes.

9:18 It's all here filtered through and augmented by

9:21 Raphael's genius with Mary reaching

9:24 around to enclose both boys.

9:25 The three figures make an oval shape that fits

9:28 perfectly in the tando form.

9:30 Raphael had never painted such an expressive posture

9:33 for Mary.

9:34 It speaks to Michelangelo's

9:35 influence as does Jesus's contropasto.

9:38 You can feel the weight he's putting on

9:40 his left arm.

9:41 It recalls Adam from the

9:43 creation of man.

9:44 The details here are

9:45 never ending.

9:46 Mary's intricate leather shoe, John's tactile fur garment.

9:50 Don't miss the anemies he's gathered into his

9:53 arms, or the super tiny figures on

9:55 horses in the distance.

9:57 Raphael's become a master at depicting the folds of

10:00 fabric, at situating figures

10:02 realistically in a three-dimensional

10:04 landscape.

10:04 And at this point in his

10:05 career, he's really learned how to

10:07 capture the haziness of atmosphere and

10:09 light in the blue distance, a crisp,

10:11 pale blue that echoes the blue of Mary's

10:14 robe.

10:15 The colors here are my favorite in

10:17 any Raphael painting.

10:18 And we can't forget the narrative.

10:20 Mary and John looking at the cross and Jesus not so

10:23 much taking as grabbing his future and

10:26 pulling it closer.

10:27 Raphael surpasses himself in the subtlety of emotion that

10:30 he layers into the virgin's face.

10:33 There's less than a decade between this

10:35 painting and Raphael's first Madonna.

10:38 In that period, he learned, practiced,

10:40 absorbed, and experimented.

10:42 We're lucky to have any of his work, but we're

10:45 especially lucky that the Madonna was

10:47 such a popular genre of painting for

10:49 wealthy private owners, for churches,

10:51 convents, confraternities.

10:53 Because what we have isn't just evidence of Raphael's

10:56 artistic evolution.

10:58 We have the story of

10:59 it.

11:00 The story of a young painter's

11:01 journey into greatness.

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