Raphael Rediscovered

Most contemporary ideas of who and what an artist is and does are relatively new. Five hundred years ago, the High Renaissance in Italy set the standards.

Leonardo was the scientist-artist, a probing and inquisitive polymath who searched for a unifying mechanism by which the world could be understood in all its seemingly unrelated aspects--physical, spiritual, perceptual. Michelangelo was the misunderstood genius--isolated through temperament, sometimes volcanic and always larger than life.

And then there was Raphael, the third and youngest of the Big Three. He matched their skill at creating stunning rhetorical effects in painting, effects that went around established consensus on what mattered in art and instead directly engaged the emotional capacities of individual beholders. His ambitions, like theirs, were vast.

Yet Raphael was also very different from Leonardo, 31 years his senior, and from Michelangelo, who had just begun the heroic, solitary task of painting the Sistine Ceiling when Pope Julius II summoned the younger man to decorate the papal apartments. Raphael established a singular profile. He was the artist as a man of the world--literate, socially adept and capable of marshaling a large workshop of assistants to synthesize the pictorial innovations of his elders. His large fresco decorations virtually define High Renaissance art.

Still, Raphael is today the least popularly known of the three. Leonardo’s scientific bent has helped keep him in the forefront of our technologically driven age, while Michelangelo’s brooding persona is the model for Modern artists ranging from Van Gogh to Pollock. But the globalizing art world might be setting the stage for renewed appreciation of Raphael’s man-of-the-world character. Opening today at the J. Paul Getty Museum, a marvelous exhibition of drawings from the collection of Queen Elizabeth II is adept at showing this distinctive quality of Raphael’s achievement and significance.

Of the 66 sheets, 20 are from Raphael’s own hand. Another six are attributed to him or were produced in his bustling workshop. The remaining 40 sheets show the work of his teachers--notably his father, Giovanni Santi, and the gifted Umbrian painter Pietro Perugino--as well as artists for whom Raphael was master. Giulio Romano, Perino del Vaga and Polidoro da Caravaggio rose through his workshop and subsequently developed careers of their own.

One measure of the breadth and stature of the drawing collection at Windsor Castle is that so much important territory can be covered in such a compelling way.

Drawings are an exceptionally good means for understanding the art of Raphael (1483--1520). As his fame grew after he moved to Rome and the volume of his commissions mushroomed, he needed the help of assistants to execute the ambitious fresco cycles. Drawings, painstakingly worked out as guides to direct those assistants, were the surest way Raphael could maintain control over the process.

Especially when they’re used in preparation for painting, drawings are also revealing as an indicator of the way an artist’s thought develops. The first Getty gallery focuses on “Raphael’s Masters and His Early Years,” and it includes a svelte depiction of the mythological Leda and the swan based on Leonardo, as well as a double-sided sheet whose energetic figures of Hercules clearly echoes Michelangelo.

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The gallery also features a sheet by the artist’s father, who died when Raphael was just 11. One of only two known drawings by him, it demonstrates through contrast the magnitude of artistic change that would occur in the brief but frenzied period of the High Renaissance (roughly 1495 to 1520).

Giovanni Santi’s static image of a woman in flowing garments, with one hand on her hip and the other gesturing, has the feel of an all-purpose emblem. Indeed, the show’s excellent catalog explains that the drawing was used as the model for figures in several different paintings.

Hanging nearby, a Raphael drawing made during his four years of study in Florence isn’t all-purpose anything. “The Virgin and Child With St. Elizabeth and the Infant Baptist” (circa 1507) dispenses with emblematic representations, in favor of highly individualized figures engaged in remarkably complex and specific interactions. Partly it shows what he had learned from Perugino, but its extraordinary composition goes far beyond that.

In addition to their individualized personalities, the four figures are laid out in a circular arrangement that is marked by a double X: the two parallel bodies of the women lean in one direction, the two parallel children lean in the other. The compositional bull’s-eye that results is located in the lively intersection of space among the four figures.

Social interaction becomes an energetic focus of this exceptional drawing. Raphael includes the viewer as an active, seeing participant in a visually driven conversation. By contrast, the social dimension of an emblem, such as the one drawn by Raphael’s father, is severely limited to a simple recognition of the figure’s established role or gesture. Raphael’s drawing shows that, even as a student, he was developing the notion of social engagement--of being a man of the world.

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Social discourse in fact became a central subject of Raphael’s magnificent frescoes for the papal apartments, which he began not long after moving to Rome in 1508. The second Getty gallery features drawings from this period, which was characterized by intense and often exhausting work. (Raphael died of fever just 12 years later, at the youthful age of 37.) Two are studies for “The Dispute of the Holy Sacrament.” Probably the first of the apartment frescoes, the painting displays dozens of heavenly and earthly figures engaged in an obscure but critically important theological discussion of a central mystery of the Catholic church--the ritual of bread and wine, which represents events at the Last Supper.

One drawing plots a portion of the complex design in brown washes and white highlights that lend an ethereal air to the mystery. The other, rendered in black chalk, has the sketchy feel of a drawing in which figure placement and poses are being tried out.

The Getty has added a helpful information room to the exhibition, which was organized by the library at Windsor Castle and has already been seen in Washington and Toronto, the only other stops on its North American tour. A large photographic mural of “The Dispute of the Holy Sacrament,” which is almost the size of the original, is accompanied by several didactic panels that clearly explain Raphael’s working process. (According to the Getty, the huge photo-mural is the first color reproduction to be published of the newly cleaned fresco.)

The second gallery also includes a drawing that anticipates part of what’s to come in the show’s final room. An exquisite, spatially complex study in red chalks, the drawing shows sword-wielding soldiers on a rampage among women who either flee or resist. It’s one of several studies for “The Massacre of the Innocents,” an engraving executed by Marcantonio Raimondi working under contract to Raphael.

Raphael hired Raimondi to make engravings because he wanted his work to be as influential as possible. Through wide distribution, prints could help that happen. So could talented studio assistants, who learned from the master and then moved on. A related show of drawings from the Getty’s collection, which includes three sheets by Raphael, is installed in the museum’s permanent collection galleries, and its examples by Poussin, Ingres and others amply demonstrates the breadth of Raphael’s continuing influence in subsequent centuries.

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The third and final gallery of the show presents drawings by three who left Rome after Raphael’s death and worked in different parts of Italy. Elaborate stylization marks the work of Perino del Vaga and Polidoro del Caravaggio, who are known today mostly by specialists. It also characterizes the drawings of the most gifted of the three--Giulio Romano, who is represented by wonderful examples that show strangely foreshortened figures or bodies in eccentrically twisted poses. The death of Raphael (and, a year before, the much older Leonardo) created an artistic vacuum, which was filled by a surge toward increasingly expressionistic art.

Like any drawing show, “Raphael and his Circle: Drawings from Windsor Castle” is demanding because it requires close scrutiny. But it’s neither too large to be comfortably seen in one visit nor too small to give a satisfying sense of the pivotal place occupied by a dynamic artist. If it also helps us understand art as a social dynamic, so much the better.

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* J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, (310) 440-7305, through Jan. 7. Closed Mondays.

* Martin Clayton, author of the Raphael catalog, will lecture Thursday at 7 p.m.. For reservations: (310) 440-7300.