ALASTAIR SMART

Raphael The National Gallery, London Until July 31 ★★★★★

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Raphael is the age at which he died: only 37. He accomplished so much that if we were told he’d lived until 137, it would seem believable.

An exhibition at The National Gallery aims to show just how varied his accomplishments were – as a painter, archaeologist, printmaker, tapestry designer and more.

By the end, the claim of his early biographer, Giorgio Vasari – that Raphael was ‘nature’s gift to the world’ – seems like an understatement.

While still a teen, he was inundated with requests to paint altarpieces and he went on to become the greatest painter of Madonna and

Child pictures of all time, notably The Alba Madonna (1511), right.

In the canvas commonly known as The Bridgewater Madonna (1507-8), he depicts the infant Christ wriggling in his mother’s lap. The child seems to have woken from a bad dream – perhaps one predicting his eventual Passion? – and looks up at the Virgin Mary with a mixture of affection and fear.

This exhibition was meant to be staged in 2020, marking the 500th anniversary of the Renaissance master’s death, but it was postponed due to Covid. It follows his path from the provincial duchy of Urbino, via Perugia and Florence, to Rome, the scene of his greatest triumphs (where he worked for, among others, two Popes).

Nobody has ever matched Raphael’s sense of harmony or grace. The portraits in the show’s final room are worth the admission price alone. They include that from 1515 of the handsome banker Bindo Altoviti, who wears a beret and turns his head confidently to gaze at us over his shoulder. Blond locks (fashionable for their relative rarity at the time) tumble effortlessly down his back. Raphael’s life may have been short, but his art very much lives on.