Raphael

“To paint one beautiful woman,” Raphael told his friend Castiglione, “I should need to see several”—a charming remark that hints at the art of choosing, balancing, and transforming beauty.

In Renaissance Italy, generations of painters had brought art to a turning point, while Michelangelo’s restless genius offered a striking contrast to Raphael’s ease. In this early-twentieth-century study, Paul G. Konody asks what made Raphael’s work endure: its lucid compositions, its breathing sense of space, or the rare harmony with which Christian subjects and classical forms meet. Behind the celebrated Madonnas and Vatican commissions stands an artist who learned from those around him, gathered their achievements into a new whole, and made complexity seem effortless. But is beauty alone the secret of Raphael’s lasting hold?

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