Customer Reviews

Raphael

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I bought this marvellous book through Amazon nearly 8 years ago and in all that time not one review! What's gone wrong? Surely ART is still taught in schools and there's still interest in beauty - especially feminine beauty? If this is so it's inevitable students will eventually discover the highest standards of Art, Architecture and Portraiture were established in a 100 year period in one small town ( Florence) and this era was called "The Renaissance".

From there on it's a matter of deciding which of the Big 3 artists was the greatest natural born genius. After getting all excited about the size of the Sistine ceiling and finding Leonardo only created about 10 paintings it doesn't take long to discover Raphael wins by a street. From the beginning to the very early end of his life everything that flowed from his paintbrush has an unbelievable level of perfection. Too perfect it seems for those looking for angst and naked emotion speaking to them from a canvas. (In every large art gallery the largest crowd is always gathered around a Van Gogh)

Raphael's images on the other hand look so simple and uncomplicated. The reverse is true - what you see is the Art of disguising Art. Until much later in his career it never occured to him to create tortuous compositions using extreme movement and dramatic lighting. Just one continuous series of beautiful life-affirming renditions of the kind of subject matter his patrons commissioned. The lucky part being Madonnas were in such great demand he needed to find endless variations of the "Madonna and Child" theme. In the first part of this book you get just about all of them perfectly reproduced in a large format. And what makes this Raphael book better than any other is wherever possible the Italian author inserts all Raphael's preparatory sketches.

It's here the truth about what makes an artist GREAT emerges. The Florentines were all fantastic draftsmen. If the end product looks easy it's because all the hard work was done earlier - trying out every alternative solution until the final image is established. As Raphael's fame spread demand for his genius came from all sides and it was never in doubt he'd end up in the Vatican where his rivalry with Michaelangelo came to the surface. Very few art experts disagree that by sticking by his own convictions harmony was prefable to discord his contibution to the "Stanza della Segnatura" is one of the great landmarks in humanist art. Again this book reproduces every panel at large scale together with all the drawing Raphael considered necessary to make this room his masterpeice.

The rest, as they say is history. This book contains over 300 large very accurate illustrations nearly all in colour. You'll never find a better monograph devoted to the Prince of all Painters.