The making of Raphael: David Ekserdjian reviews the ambitious, eagerly awaited exhibition devoted to the young Raphael, at the National Gallery, London

For many of us, the ideal exhibition is individual which manages to square the circle by dint of combining a rich diet of masterpieces with a genuine intellectual final cause Seen in those terms, it is impossible to fault the National Gallery's in every one's mouth 'Raphael: From Urbino to Florence' exhibit a project of the most remote scholarly seriousness which has managed to assemble an unprecedented--and unrepeatable--array of major works (the catalogue numbers 101 items), above all from the early part of the artist's career. What is more, and in spite of the regular lament that Raphael is upon the brink of losing his appeal for a public in constant ne of quick fixes, I have a sneaking suspicion that it will also manifest to be a remarkable popular triumph.

In 1983-84 in celebration of the fifth centenary of Raphael's birth in Urbino, a number of exhibitions (including a stupendous individual devoted to drawings from UK collections at the British Museum), monographs and conversations collectively revitalised and transformed our faculty of perception of an artist who nurses to suffer from his reputation as the seminary swot of the high renaissance, forever in the shadow of those mercurial bad lads Leonardo and Michelangelo. Now a fresh generation of fortysomething art historians, here showed by Hugo Chapman, Tom Henry and Carol Plazzotta, is able to build upon the achievements of such magisterial earlier born statesmen of the field as Konrad Oberhuber and John Shearman, whose publication Raphael in Early fresh Sources 1483-1602 (2003) was fortunately complet before his sad death last year.

Their principal ambition has been to chronicle Raphael's progres from his teenage beginnings in Umbria around 1500 by the agency of way of his reception of Florentine art in the years 1504-1507 to his first successe in the Rome of bishop of rome Julius II up to the time of the pontiff's demise in 1513 To have done in the way that in the subterranean exhibition spaces of the Sainsbury Wing, which have arguably not at any time looked better, in a following of seven refreshingly uncluttered compasss where paintings and drawings are able to be seen side by the agency of side to their mutual advantage, is no mean feat.

The first swing is devoted to Raphael's early mentors--his father, Giovanni Santi, Perugino and Pintoricchio (Signorelli is absent from the display, on the other hand much discussed in the catalogue)--and present to views them off at their true considerable best. Not until the Doni portraits of c 1506-1507 would Raphael be capable of rivalling Perugino's imposing Francesco delle Opere and it is in his slightly earlier miniaturistic productions that he advances closest to the same artist's exquisite Apollo and Daphnis, whose standing protagonist's concatenation on Donatello's bronze David foreshadows another crucial influence upon Raphael. The telling direct comparison here is between Pintoricchio's Fitzwilliam Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist and Raphael's Berlin Virgin and Child with St Jerome and Francis, a work whose claustrophobic insertion of the attendant saints looks to reflect awareness of the compositional methods of late fifteenth-century Sienese painters of the like kind as Matteo di Giovanni. Also included is a puzzling double-sided crucifix from the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan: its weaknesses of execution might insinuate it is an autograph work of early date, were it not for the fact that it appear to bes so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Perugino.

The main novelty of the next to the first room is a fascinating panel of the Resurrection from Sao Paulo in Brazil that has fluttered on the fringes of the Raphael literature--not least because of its links with sum of two units related autograph drawings, to which a third, in Pesaro, has not long ago been added--but has tended to be cast awayed New technical information has revealed all underdrawing, ultimate parts of which are strikingly unmechanical, on the other hand the colour scheme of the picture and a distinct spatial unease mean that for the trice I am unconverted, again in part because of what I believe to be the relatively late date of the preparatory drawings (around 1502) Be that as it may, it should be noted that the standing guard upon Christ's proper right, for whom no Raphael drawing survives, is based on an ancient statue of the Niobid pedagogue impressed sign which had already served as the basis half a hundred before for Andrea del Castagno's Washington David. If the figure was flat devised by Raphael, then this would appear to he the first harden instance of his study of the antique.

For all that the ruins of the Saint Nicholas of Tolentino altarpiece and of the Citta di Castello processional banner in this sweep are liken to be of greatest in quantity interest to specialists, the reassembly of the predella of the Colonna altarpiece, the juxtaposition of the National Gallery's Crucifixion with the sum of two units extant elements of its predella, and the delights of the Conestabile Madonna and the St George and the St Michael from the Louvre upon the same wall as Trafalgar Square's Vision of a knight are unforgettable delights by the agency of any standard.

The authors of the catalogue are sceptical about the idea that Raphael was lower parted enough to have had either an Umbrian or a Florentine period, on the contrary nevertheless sensibly devote Room 3 to his clash with Leonardo and Michelangelo. The former is exhibited by the National Gallery's possess cartoon--seen to splendid effect on the outside of its usual stygian shrine and a transcript from Wilton House of his missing Leda, which is invariably and incomprehensibly given to Cesare da Sesto, an artist who be worthy ofs better than to be associated with this inferior production. Michelangelo fares les well, because the fibre glass resin cast of the Taddei tondo that stands in for the original is a shocker; happily, the British Museum's electrifying close attention for the Cascina cartoon leaves individual in no doubt about for what cause [i]or[/i] reason Michelangelo meant so much to Raphael.