How Raphael Became A Master: Watch the Evolution of the Artist Through His Madonna Paintings

No artist became a Renais­sance mas­ter through a sin­gle piece of work, though now, half a mil­len­ni­um lat­er, that may be how most of us iden­ti­fy them. Leonar­do? Painter of the Mona Lisa. Michelan­ge­lo? Painter of the Sis­tine Chapel ceil­ing (or, per­haps, the sculp­tor of the most famous David, depend­ing on your medi­um of choice). Raphael? Painter of The School of Athens, as recent­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Raphael paint­ed that mas­ter­work in Vat­i­can City’s Apos­tolic Palace between the years 1509 and 1511, when he was in his mid-twen­ties. Under­stand­ing how he could have attained that lev­el of skill by that age requires exam­in­ing his oth­er work, as Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, does in the new video above.

Specif­i­cal­ly, Puschak exam­ines Raphael’s Madon­nas, a sub­ject to which he returned over and over again through­out the course of his short but pro­duc­tive career. In what seems to have been his first ren­di­tion of Mary and her holy son, Puschak says, “you can see that Raphael has a bet­ter sense of three-dimen­sion­al bod­ies and how to make them feel like they’re part of the space that they’re in” than his father, who’d been a well-regard­ed painter him­self, or even than Piero del­la Francesca, from whom his father learned.

“Yet the paint­ing also suf­fers from “an awk­ward­ness in the arrange­ment of the fig­ures,” as well as a lack of “emo­tion, rela­tion­ships, or any sense of nar­ra­tive” — much like “a thou­sand oth­er Madon­nas that came before.”

Yet Raphael was a quick study, a trait reflect­ed in the devel­op­ment of the many Madon­nas he paint­ed there­after. From Leonar­do he learned tech­niques like sfu­ma­to, the cre­ation of soft tran­si­tions between col­ors; from Michelan­ge­lo, “how to use the human body as an expres­sive tool.” But what most clear­ly emerges is the con­cept con­tem­po­rary the­o­rist Leon Bat­tista Alber­ti called his­to­ria: a nar­ra­tive that plays out even with­in the con­fines of a sta­t­ic image. In Raphael’s cir­cu­lar, abun­dant­ly detailed Alba Madon­na of 1511, Puschak sees the infant Jesus “not so much tak­ing as grab­bing his future and pulling it clos­er” as Mary looks on with emo­tions sub­tly lay­ered into her face. How, exact­ly, Raphael honed his instinct for dra­ma is a ques­tion for art his­to­ri­ans. But would it be too much of a reach to guess that he also learned a thing or two from his time as a stage-set design­er?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Pla­to, Aris­to­tle & Oth­er Greek Philoso­phers in Raphael’s Renais­sance Mas­ter­piece, The School of Athens

Artist Turns Famous Paint­ings, from Raphael to Mon­et to Licht­en­stein, Into Inno­v­a­tive Sound­scapes

Why Leonar­do da Vinci’s Great­est Paint­ing is Not the Mona Lisa

The Evo­lu­tion of The Great Wave off Kana­gawa: See Four Ver­sions That Hoku­sai Paint­ed Over Near­ly 40 Years

14 Self-Por­traits by Pablo Picas­so Show the Evo­lu­tion of His Style: See Self-Por­traits Mov­ing from Ages 15 to 90

The Evo­lu­tion of Kandinsky’s Paint­ing: A Jour­ney from Real­ism to Vibrant Abstrac­tion Over 46 Years

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.