Arnold Nesselrath, Raffaello!; Marco Bussagli, Raffaello; Vincenzo Farinella and Alfonsina Russo, with Alessandro d’Alessio and Stefano Borghini (eds.), Raffaello e la Domus Aurea: L’invenzione delle grottesche, by David Ekserdjian
David Ekserdjian gives his verdict on three books that revisit Raphael five centuries after his death
Raffaello!
Arnold Nesselrath Rizzoli, €99
ISBN 9788891823946
Raffaello
Marco Bussagli Giunti, €85
ISBN 9788809889347
Raffaello e la Domus Aurea: L’invenzione delle grottesche Vincenzo Farinella and Alfonsina Russo, with Alessandro d’Alessio and Stefano Borghini (eds.) Electa, €39
ISBN 9788891890061
Raphael died on Good Friday , at the tender age of , so marked the fifth centenary of his demise. All manner of events, and not least loan exhibitions and academic conferences, had been planned to celebrate the milestone, but inevitably many had to be either postponed or cancelled. Nevertheless, a number of publications have successfully seen the light of day, and this review is of three of them.
As Arnold Nesselrath himself explains in the acknowledgements that preface his monograph, the length of time he has spent in daily contact with Raphael’s works in the Vatican has almost rivalled the duration of his hero’s short life. Unsurprisingly, therefore, many of the most illuminating passages in his book are concerned with the frescoes in the Stanze whose restoration he oversaw for three decades, and they are only enhanced by numerous stunning close-ups of the works in question.
More generally, what is most striking about his approach is the fact that he has followed the example of Frank Sinatra and done it his way. Instead of anything even vaguely approximating to a cradle-to-grave account of the artist’s career, after a brief prologue, the main body of the book is divided into five undeniably substantial – but at the same time distinctly quirky – thematic chapters. The first – ‘Raphael in the World and in Time’ – chronicles visits to the restoration scaffolding in the Stanze by such contemporary luminaries as Bill Viola, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz and Damien Hirst, and also explores Raphael’s admirers across the centuries (they include, perfectly reasonably, J.M.W. Turner with his Rome, from the Vatican. Raffaelle Accompanied by La Fornarina, but alas here Turner’s homage is captioned as the work of his namesake William). The next chapter – ‘Raphael through his Collaborators’ – is virtually exclusively devoted to his final years in Rome, but is not confined to the Stanze, and instead explores with considerable brilliance Raphael the
architect, antiquarian and print-maker. Then comes ‘Raphael among his Bambini’, which involves sensitive responses in particular to Raphael’s drawings of actual babies, and is followed by ‘Raphael Touched with the Hand’, which in the main reverts to the Stanze and celebrates the nitty-gritty of their manufacture, most unforgettably with the account of boiled beans discovered lodged in a cavity in the plaster of the fresco of the Fire in the Borgo (Fig. 3).
As a finale, Nesselrath comes up with ‘Raphael Loved’, where he argues that the Fornarina, which is very widely – but not universally – regarded as one of Raphael’s late masterpieces, is actually a deliberate counterfeit by no less a figure than Annibale Carracci (Fig. 2). However, what ought to be a bombshell runs the risk of being a damp squib, above all on the grounds of chronology. The painting is first recorded in Rome on 7 March 1595, but Annibale only definitively settled in the Eternal City afterwards, at the latest by 8 November of that year, having paid a short visit towards the end of the previous year (a letter from his patron Odoardo Farnese of 21 February 1595 says Annibale and his brother Agostino have been in Rome at his behest for ‘a few months’). Leaving aside any problems of style, one longs to know when and where Nesselrath thinks Annibale executed the Fornarina, and whether the paint was still wet when the inventory that first listed it was compiled.
Of course, this is not exactly the first monograph ever written about Raphael, but it probably ought to carry some sort of health warning, since its refusal to be comprehensive is almost gleeful, and this applies to the illustrations as well as the text. The result is that works of note – the Madonna della Tenda (Fig. 1) and the Madonna della Rosa, to name but two – are nowhere to be found, but also that neither the Disputa nor the Parnassus from the Stanze is reproduced complete.
Under the circumstances, it would be pleasing to be able to report that Marco Bussagli represents a safer pair of hands, but here too there are oddities and indeed problems. Up to a point, the structure of his monograph is more straightforward, since he begins with a mostly no-nonsense biography, and then continues with five thematic chapters on the antique, the golden section, anatomy, architecture and the workshop, which are altogether less eccentric than Nesselrath’s. Perhaps unexpectedly, they amount to less than half the book, and are followed by a long section devoted to ‘The Works’. Like Caesar’s Gaul, these are divided into three parts – ‘The So-Called Minor Works’, ‘The Large-Scale Works’, and ‘The Masterpieces’. It is mildly amusing to second-guess where various old favourites have ended up, but in fact the order of merit of the selection of paintings Bussagli singles out is entirely unobjectionable. Conversely, at least as far as I am concerned, the gimmick of accompanying the main images with circular details is a dead loss, although it may appeal to voyeurs who get a thrill from peering through keyholes. More disquieting, here too, are the numbers of important paintings consigned to the Salon des Refusés – and this time the Madonna della Tenda and the Madonna della Rosa are joined by the Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione! Worst of all, the author is simply not to be trusted when it comes not only to opinions, but also to facts: he says Raphael’s drawing in the Morgan Library for the Piccolomini Library is executed in red chalk, but it is not: it is in pen and brown wash over black chalk.
After all this, the exhibition catalogue on Raphael and the Domus Aurea, known in English as Nero’s Golden House, is a breath of fresh air. A team effort, it combines glorious reproductions of the interiors of a monument that remains something of a sleeping beauty (even under normal circumstances, it is only possible to visit it at weekends), and above all its hugely admired frescoes, with impeccable commentaries both on the Domus itself and on the influence of its visual language on grotesque decoration in the Renaissance. As a very considerable bonus, the catalogue also features a crop of immensely evocative virtual reality reconstructions of what various of the most prominent spaces must actually have looked like. The exhibition itself, postponed from last year, is scheduled to open at the Domus Aurea this month as part of Raphael’s displaced quincentenary celebrations.