The better angels of our nature

Late one afternoon, early in the year, I was walking through the Vatican Stanze with a small group of critics and art historians. While we were admiring the Raphael frescoes that fill these private apartments of the Renaissance popes, Matthias Wivel, curator of the Michelangelo & Sebastiano exhibition at the National Gallery, made the most eloquent case for the painter I have ever heard. Suddenly, I felt a new enthusiasm for Raphael.

Essentially what he said is that Raphael is the supreme master of depicting human beings in interaction. Each of the frescoes around us, Wivel pointed out, was made up of a huge number of figures, all engaged with each other in fluently orchestrated groups. Indeed, Raphael organised his figures in almost musical terms — single notes, trios, quartets, cadences. The frescoes in that room are about the elements of civilisation. The ‘School of Athens’ is a choral assembly of philosophers — responding, debating, reacting, expounding. Other frescoes summarise the achievements of poetry, law and theology.

Here, Wivel argued, ‘You see people dependent on each other for the thoughts they express and the questions that they think about. This is what human civilisation is about; Raphael’s way of composing pictures is an expression of the fact that we can’t exist on our own. That’s why he is so intensely moving as an artist. He shows us the better angels of our nature: what we should aspire to as a society.’

In the modern age, many, I suspect, secretly feel Raphael (1483–1520) is a bit of a bore. Lucian Freud so detested his work he claimed he couldn’t tell which way up Raphael’s drawings were supposed to be. Even in the mid-18th century Joshua Reynolds confessed the ‘disappointment’ hehad felt on first seeing Raphaels in the Vatican Stanze.

Years later, in his Discourses on Art, Reynolds praised Raphael for all the academic virtues that an RA student ought to cultivate, such as ‘correctness’ of drawing.