In Raphael’s Studio
- sofiapbaker
- Jul 26, 2017
- 1 min read
From his death in 1520 to the early nineteenth century, Raphael was widely regarded as the greatest painter of Europe. He was also the most studied by his fellow artists. The other leading painters of his generation, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, were much less influential in the world of the Old Masters. Leonardo’s most famous narrative painting, The Last Supper, quickly became a useless ruin, and his notebooks were hardly known before the work of the art historian Jean-Paul Richter in the late nineteenth century. Michelangelo was more esteemed as a sculptor, and his painting was seen by later artists primarily as a brilliant master class on ways to represent the adult male nude. Raphael’s painting, by contrast, was studied and copied not only by the artists who for centuries streamed through Rome—where his most famous work was to be found—but also by anyone with access to the numberless copies of Raphael’s disegni. These took the form of engravings, tapestries modeled on his cartoni, even maiolica based on his famous Madonnas. Raphael was perhaps the canniest promoter of his own work before Rubens, and along with Albrecht Dürer became the first major artist to disseminate his designs via prints, collaborating above all with the innovative engraver Marcantonio Raimondi.
After the early nineteenth century, however, Raphael’s reputation went into rapid decline…