Raphael Died Before 40. His Met Retrospective Asks:What if He’d Lived?

Imagine I asked you to name the famous Italian Renaissance artist who angered his patron by repeatedly missing deadlines because he was busy studying perspective. You’d probably answer Leonardo da Vinci. Other artists could be dilatory, but no other artist is as famous for putting his research before his painting. It’s practically Leonardo’s signature. 

Yet, in this case, you’d be mistaken. The artist in question is somebody unexpected—somebody set to receive a major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this spring, his first in the United States. His reputation holds him as the most enterprising, diligent, and proficient painter of the period: the short-lived Raphael of Urbino (1483–1520). Since Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550/68), Raphael has been considered the model of reliable efficiency, embodying the adage, “If you need something done quickly, find a busy person.” Despite dying young, in his late 30s, Raphael produced numerous drawings, paintings, and buildings. Study is not something legend tends to associate with him. Easily absorbing style after style, Raphael deployed them at will like a chameleon. His facility was so great that it was annoying: Michelangelo griped that Raphael stole everything he knew from him.

Raphael’s biography can read like a fairy tale. Like Mozart, he was a stupendous prodigy who, though born in a small city, vaulted to international renown. Trained by his father, he soon outgrew his surroundings. Resettling in Florence, he brought himself up to date, mastering recent innovations by Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Fra Bartolommeo. Off to Rome in 1508, he absorbed Michelangelo’s breakthrough Sistine Ceiling. A deft courtier, Raphael soon became Pope Julius II’s favorite painter, taking on ever larger projects beginning with the pope’s library, the Stanza della Segnatura, where he executed his School of Athens. He was even appointed the architect of New St. Peter’s Basilica despite his lack of experience. Growing rich and famous, he built a large workshop to carry out his snowballing commissions. Ever the storyteller, Vasari wrote that Raphael wore himself down through sexual overexertion, then died after painting the glowing countenance of Christ in his Transfiguration, as if anticipating heaven.

Raphael’s facility was not always held against him. For centuries, his name resounded in the halls of fame, where he was considered the greatest artist the world had ever known. Academies regarded him as the supreme model of classical harmony; but by the 19th century some critics, like John Ruskin, dismissed him as elevating style over substance. Over time, his fame, once so towering, was ever so slightly tarnished. Today, he is more recognized than known. His most popular image is but a detail of a larger painting—two bored cherubs apparently unconcerned with what is going on around them. They seem to confirm the idea that Raphael valued depth less than charm. 

Yet, if Raphael had lived, his reputation might have been very different. A longer life would have not only given him time to create more art, fully proving his artistic independence, but also shaped what was written about him. In old age, Michelangelo (1475–1564) inspired at least three contemporary biographies; had Raphael survived, his life would have been as richly described. Instead, his reception was partly determined by those jealous of his ascent—above all Michelangelo, whose charges of plagiarism colored Vasari’s otherwise positive account. Raphael simply did not live long enough to escape his own legend.

Yet, at his death, Raphael was not only professionally but also socially ascendent. There was talk of his betrothal to a cardinal’s niece, and even whispers that he might himself receive the red hat. To his palace, wealth, and retinue, Raphael would thus have added station, likely joining those rare artists who garnered ennoblement. The “Prince of Painters” may have literally become a prince.

BE THIS AS IT MAY, Raphael’s feud with Michelangelo probably wouldhave simmered on, perhaps driving one or the other to seek his fortune outside Rome. If Raphael had lived and thrived, Michelangelo might have had less work, and today we might not have St. Peter’s or The Last Judgment. Before Raphael’s death, Michelangelo had already withdrawn to Florence. Like Leonardo before them, one or the other might ultimately have accepted employment from the King of France or the Ottoman Sultan, who once asked Michelangelo to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. Always courteous and popular, Raphael may have fostered collaboration within and beyond his workshop, but it is perhaps too much, even in this sea of counterfactuals, to imagine a true rapprochement: Raphael and Michelangelo working together as friends.

At the very least, had Raphael lived, we would have more works to celebrate. Just before his death, he had begun the decoration of the enormous Sala di Costantino in the Vatican Palace in an experimental oil medium that, if it had been perfected, could have revolutionized mural painting. Simultaneously, Raphael was continuing his adventures in classical mythology with a Hunt of Meleager and a Triumph of Bacchus for Alfonso I d’Este of Ferrara—the commission for which he made the excuses with which we began. We can’t now know what these ambitious easel works would have looked like, but they would have probably rivaled the great mythological paintings of Titian, whose Bacchus and Ariadne was commissioned in its place after Raphael’s death. Had he completed his Triumph, Raphael might have positioned himself as Titian’s precursor in the genre, his alluring, high-spirited classicism playing off Titian’s looser, more improvisational approach to these themes. Such an outcome would likely have recentered later 16th-century debates contrasting Florentine and Venetian art, positioning Raphael, of the Marche region, as a conciliating figure bridging the divide between Michelangelo and Titian, respective masters of line and color.

Already in his frescoes for the Stanza di Eliodoro, Raphael made less use of his trademark idealization, grace, and harmony, playing instead with contrasts, difficult arrangements that featured tension, disjunction, and asymmetry. Under the influence of Leonardo, who also lived in Rome between 1513 and 1516, Raphael’s work grew darker, featuring intense chiaroscuro effects that might have heralded a more dramatic and visionary turn in his painting. If you squint, you may even glimpse Caravaggio. 

Given more time, Raphael would have built a Rome that looked very different from the one we have today. Specifically, it would look a lot more like the ancient city. Having commenced the labor of reconstructing ancient Rome on paper using ruins, coins, and texts, Raphael extolled the sumptuous, colorful architecture of the ancients, which he contrasted with the dull monochrome buildings of his time. He envisioned edifices built of costly materials and filled with vivid paintings, polychrome marbles, ornate stuccowork (Raphael’s workshop actually rediscovered the ancient recipe), and sumptuous statuary in stone and bronze. Having begun the Villa Madama, a Medici villa based on ancient Roman prototypes, Raphael might have brought it to completion. Sophisticated city palaces like the lost Palazzo Branconio dell’Aquila would also have come into being. In smaller, unfinished commissions like his two Chigi Chapels, Raphael had begun to set out this personal vision, merging architecture, sculpture, and painting in total environments that anticipated the Roman Baroque of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Raphael’s St. Peter’s would have dominated this all’antica Rome. He planned a gigantic edifice with a long nave, much larger than the basilica we see today. With ample room for painting, he would likely have filled the church with grandiose mural cycles, putting the biblical frescoes of his nearby Loggia to shame. 

We don’t talk enough about Raphael and the theater, yet he was heavily involved in innovative productions and applied theatrical principles in his paintings. Raphael projected at least one brick-and-mortar theater and produced moving sets for plays. His interest in stage sets can be deduced from the illusionistic and trompe l’oeil devices in the partly posthumous Sala di Costantino. Having demonstrated his capacity for historical research in his Vatican Stanze, Raphael would have made archaeological study central to both props and costumes, giving productions unprecedented historical precision. 

THERE ARE WAYS to see Raphael differently through the prism of morerecent scholarship—as one hopes the Met exhibition will do. Against the backdrop of Ruskin’s Raphael, the upholder of form over content, we might also consider this painter’s energetic endeavors to revolutionize sacred painting by making it more spiritually effective and involving. In this respect, I believe Raphael went beyond any medieval and Renaissance precedent. Other scholars see Raphael’s collaborative work, exemplified by the engravings made with Marcantonio Raimondi, as a model for art making that departs from the fetishization of the artist’s individual mind and hand. In this way, Raphael’s workshop may have prefigured 20th-century conceptions of authorship in the work and thought of Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol.

Above all, I believe we have overlooked the fact that Raphael was a learned artist, a researcher with broad interests. Like Leonardo, he took up the novelties of perspective, and we continue to uncover more about his investment in maps and surveying. But Raphael also dug deep into literary and cultural concerns that were of less importance to the older painter. If Leonardo defined painting against writing, Raphael moved the media closer together. In his notebooks, Leonardo pronounced the fruits of culture as an unsuitable subject for the painter’s study, nature being the proper source of everything. Raphael did the opposite, seeing art as a subject for art. Not surprisingly, this approach would later fuel Mannerism.

Among other things, Raphael knew Aristotle’s Poetics and commissioned a translation of Vitruvius’s ancient treatise on architecture from the Latin, correcting it in his own hand. He reportedly sent draftsmen to Greece to record Classical art and architecture, which might well have prompted a Greek revival 300 years avant le lettre. From his famous missive to Pope Leo X, we know that he pioneered the fields of historical preservation, archaeology, and art history. Raphael could date and identify different periods of Roman sculpture and plotted a timeline for the differential decline of Roman art and architecture. He was also interested in the innovations of his own time. Some read his School of Athens as a meditation on the problems of memory and citation in the brave new world of printing. The fresco’s geographers are shown discussing the recent European discovery of the Americas.

Whatever his ambitions, Raphael is not often associated with writing. Compared to Michelangelo, he appears to have been less skillful in poetry and letters, and some of his surviving literary productions were collaborations with friends like the author-cum-diplomat Baldassare Castiglione. But Raphael’s writings were once abundant. Knowing that Albrecht Dürer was his correspondent, we wish to read what was shared (beyond images) between them. Tantalizingly, Vasari wrote that he consulted Raphael’s papers for his groundbreaking Lives. Was Raphael already working on something similar, decades before Vasari? If Raphael had lived, perhaps he—not Vasari—would have published the first major book on art history.

All this is to say that five centuries after Raphael’s death, we are still reckoning with who he was and what, if he had lived, he would have become. The Met exhibition is a welcome opportunity to study his work in depth. Yet, with a marquee name like Raphael’s, it’s easy to play it safe, embellishing well-worn plotlines. Can an exhibition of this weight and scope recast our image of him? One hopes for a sophisticated view: Raphael as devotional innovator, theoretical thinker, proto–art historian, and master collaborator, as new scholarship recognizes. In the meantime, thinking about what might have been, not just what he got done, is perhaps the best way to understand what Raphael really meant all along.