Raphael &

Lisa Pon

Pages: approx. 256 p.
Size:240 x 240 mm
Illustrations:10 b/w, 144 col., 1 tables b/w., 1 tables col.

Language(s):English
Publication Year:2026

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ISBN: 978-1-915487-86-5
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This book is about the ampersand: &. Raphael worked well with others, more so than many Renaissance artists.

Subject(s)

BIO

Lisa Pon is an art historian interested in mobilities of art, artistic authority and collaboration, and the Renaissance concept of copia or abundance. She wrote Raphael, Dürer and Marcantoni Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print (Yale University Press, 2004), and Printed Icon: Forlì’s Madonna of the Fire (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Pon directs Collaborations in History, Art, Religion, and Music (CHARM) and is professor of art history at the University of Southern California.

Summary

Raphael worked well with others, more so than many Renaissance artists. In this long-awaited book, Lisa Pon reassesses Raphael's collaborations in painting and many other media, thereby re-evaluating period and current attitudes towards originality, authorship, artistic practice and value. In the process, readers will see not the familiar painter in "pursuit of perfection," but an unruly Raphael who exceeds our expectations, a Renaissance artist who experiments with artistic techniques, considers polyphonic music and humanist debates, and plans a virtual Rome to explore through new means of visualization.

This book is about the ampersand: &. Just as an anti-novel may look like a novel in form, this book may resemble a conventional artist's monograph in its attention to Raphael and some of his major paintings. But I subvert the classic monograph's basic premise by emphasizing not an isolated, singular artist but rather the many social and working relationships with which Raphael was emmeshed and the many media into which he delved. This book is fundamentally about how we write about art and artists, what we want to know and can know historically, and what sustains our visual interest and intellectual curiosity, especially after five hundred years.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Annotated Index of Names

Introduction About the &

PART I GROUPS

Chapter 1 Families
Giovanni Santi’s Wills, Raphael’s Letters
Nephews and Adoptive Family in Rome and Urbino
Painter-Fathers for an Orphan
Raphael’s Art World Family

Chapter 2 Flock
Comitas and the Lamb
Painting Experiments
Painting from Open Window to Woven Tapestry
Raphael’s Special "Mix"

Chapter 3 Likenesses
Families and Single Bodies
Doria Double
Extreme Portraiture in the Stanza della Segnatura

INTERMEDIO THE "LOGGIA IN THE MIDDLE"

Chapter 4 Conversations
Dialogue and Conversation
Disputa in the Texts of Giovanni Santi and Giorgio Vasari
Disputation in Suspension
Concord and Polyphony

Chapter 5 Weft
Between Places and Names
"Big Art" in Renaissance Rome
Painted Paper for Woven Threads, Counterproofs from Engraved Plates
Transmedial Design and Production at a Distance
Prints, Tapestries, and Painting

Chapter 6 Palimpsests
Saint Peter’s, Old and New
Raphael’s Virtual Rome
Visual Footnotes and Open Endings
Perino’s Post Script
P.P.S. [Post Postscript, or Pon’s Postscript]

Selected Bibliography