THE CHARMER.(Raphael)(Biography)

"What he had of art, he had from me," Michelangelo complained of Raphael, whose early career, from 1500 to 1513, is the subject of an enticing exhibition, "Raphael: From Urbino to Rome," at the National Gallery in London. Michelangelo, who was eight years older than his contemporary but survived him by forty-four years--Raphael died on his thirty-seventh birthday, in 1520--thus claimed first place in what could have been a long line of miffed masters. "Influence" scarcely covers the relation to Raphael's work not only of Michelangelo and the other titan of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, but also of Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi; Perugino, who may have been his teacher; Pinturicchio; and Fra Bartolommeo. The show, which incorporates works by most of those elders, demonstrates that the prodigy from the Marches extracted the formal essence of each man's art to feed a synthetic style that would become a beau ideal of Western painting for the next four centuries. Raphael was preternaturally talented in all elements of picture-making, afire with ambition, and so charming that no one, be it a colleague, a mistress, or a Pope, could do enough for him. I don't like him. I fairly swoon before his best paintings--including, in the show, the "Alba Madonna" (1509-11), "Portrait of Pope Julius II" (1511), and "Portrait of La Velata" (1512-13)--but his perfectionism has something callow at its core. His relative neglect since the late nineteenth century, when the academic tastes that exalted him succumbed to the sterner inclinations of modern art, is no more than a trifle unfair.

An only child, Raphael was breast-fed by his mother--this was unusual for the time--at the behest of Santi, an accomplished poet and courtier as well as painter, who was determined to shield his son from the low company of peasant wet nurses and their kind. (The young Michelangelo had suffered and, ultimately, profited from just such rough society.) Raphael's childhood, though marred by his mother's death, when he was eight, was sheltered, rich in aristocratic culture, and industrious. He was assisting in his father's workshop at the age of eleven, when Santi died. Entrusted to an uncle, he obviously thrived. The show opens with a startlingly adept and subtle self-portrait drawing from his adolescence, which depicts a clear-eyed, self-consciously irresistible boy. Equally precocious paintings from the same period, though rather forced in their prescribed religious content, conquer the style--sharply contoured active figures in atmospheric landscapes, sumptuously colored--of Perugino, then the leading painter of Central Italy. (Raphael's practical edge, from the start, was a yeoman's approach to preparation, proceeding through many drawings to fully resolved cartoons that were transferred to surfaces, usually wood, for painting. Other artists worked this way, but none more pertinaciously.) At the same time, Raphael not only absorbed the decorative grandeur of history paintings by Pinturicchio but provided that artist, almost thirty years his senior, with designs for major frescoes in Siena.

In 1504, at the age of twenty-one, Raphael arrived in Florence to take on Michelangelo and Leonardo, who were both working there. Perugino's manner vanished from Raphael's style, which soon displayed Leonardo's "chromatic unity, interlocking gazes, and pyramidal composition," in the accurate judgment of the art historian David Drogin. A portrait drawing from 1505-06 closely follows the "Mona Lisa" (1503-06), complete with a game approximation of the dumbfounding smile. Raphael added sugar to Leonardo's recipes, softening craggy landscapes into beamish vistas and demystifying shadows with warm tones. Meanwhile, Michelangelo's twisting, contrapposto figuration invaded Raphael's pictures, sometimes directly. He copied a stretching Christ child from a Michelangelo relief and, with adjustments, popped it into the "Bridgewater Madonna" (about 1507). (In how many endearing ways can a naked baby disport itself on a mother's lap? The Renaissance counted them.) And a dashing, ever so slightly epicene drawing after the sculptor's "David" bespeaks less inspiration than light-fingered grand theft. Gravitas falls away, leaving gladness in finely muscled, limber ...