Peter Schjeldahl: The Charmer

For me, Raphael’s version of the beautiful is the sublime of the pretty: sheer comeliness, to the nth power. His paintings lack the element of reverent awe that informs beauty. They are about liking, albeit intense liking, rather than love. In this, Raphael was less a creator of the Italian Renaissance than its definitive human creation, a demigod whose capacities rivalled those of the divine. It’s perfect that Leo X evidently planned to make this skirt chaser a cardinal. That was the historic moment when the profligate amorality of Rome, financed by the sale of what amounted to get-out-of-Purgatory-free passes to the faithful, brought on the Reformation. (Luther posted his “Ninety-five Theses upon Indulgences” two and a half years before Raphael’s death.) The next youthful phenomenon of Italian painting, Parmigianino (1503-40), trying to square Raphaelite pleasures with the time’s mounting religious and political anxieties, kicked off the long, floundering hysteria of Mannerism. There would never again be anyone like Raphael—as his more alert contemporaries must have sensed—because never again would a fully developed, energetic, urbane culture coast on a tide of such complacent aplomb.