Reconsidering Raphael

Yvonne Elet, Sheryl Reiss, Linda Wolk-Simon (eds)

Pages: 404 p.
Size:225 x 300 mm
Illustrations:16 b/w, 220 col., 3 musical examples

Language(s):English, Italian
Publication Year:2026

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ISBN: 978-2-503-60427-5
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Reverence for Raphael as the “Prince of Painters” by centuries of worshipful artists and covetous patrons and collectors alike has contributed to the marginalization of his significant activity in myriad other fields, and an underappreciation of the personal networks that facilitated his extraordinary productivity—an imbalance that new investigative approaches embraced in this volume of essays set out to redress.

Subject(s)

BIO

Yvonne Elet is Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY.

Sheryl Reiss teaches at the University of Chicago’s Graham School and is a Scholar-in-Residence at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Linda Wolk-Simon, a former curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and elsewhere, has taught for the past several years at New York University.

Summary

One of the most brilliant and consequential artists in the western tradition, Raphael (1483–1520) was extolled during his lifetime as "prince of painters." This indelible characterization, though fitting, has long obscured his considerable achievements in other arenas. Raphael was not solely a painter, but a creative impresario, active in many media and fields of endeavor: architect, urbanist, archaeologist-antiquarian, designer of sculpture, silver, prints, tapestries, and even of landscape. In recent decades, a richer understanding of his myriad undertakings has taken form: one that reckons not only with Raphael’s activity as a draftsman and as a designer in an array of media, but also considers his productive collaborations with other artists, and his meaningful interactions with patrons, advisors, humanists, literati, admirers, and friends. Yet scholarship has been slow to digest how his projects across categories related to one another, and lingering vestiges of the mythic Raphael enshrined by devotees of past centuries still color our understanding. Posing fresh questions that move beyond familiar lines of inquiry, this volume considers major themes in Raphael’s life and work that are still little understood: the nature and profile of his workshop, his inventiveness as a designer across many media, and his depictions of, and relations with, women and the significant roles they played as patrons, collectors, and viewers. Drawing on multiple approaches—including conservation and technical art history—Reconsidering Raphael explores these and other elements of his astonishingly inventive, diverse, and influential body of work, recasting Raphael not as the quintessential "old master," but as a daring and bold innovator who in many ways anticipated the modern.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Yvonne Elet, Sheryl E. Reiss, and Linda Wolk-Simon

Part I

All in the Familia: Raphael’s Workshop and the Business of Art
Linda Wolk-Simon

Raphael, Female Patrons, and Gendered Reception: From the Sixteenth Century to the Twentieth
Sheryl E. Reiss

Raphael’s Activity as Urban Planner
Hubertus Günther

Raphael, Landscape Architect
Yvonne Elet

Raphael and the Material Turn: A Technical Historiography, 1970 to the Present
Tiffany Lynn Hunt

Part II

Sappho in the Segnatura: Poetic Networks and the Lyric Subject in Raphael’s Parnassus
Kim Butler Wingfield

Raphael, Leo X, and Music: The Vatican Stanze and Other Spaces as Venues for Musical Performances
Anthony M. Cummings

Raphael’s Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel and the Renaissance of Early Christian Rome
Tracy Cosgriff

Raphael’s Late Color Style and His Interaction with Sebastiano del Piombo
Marcia B. Hall

Sex Shop: Raphael and the Erotics of Prints
Madeleine C. Viljoen

Raffaello legge Vitruvio
Francesco Paolo Di Teodoro

"Queste cose minute vogliono tempo": New Evidence for Raphael, the "arti minori," and France from the Correspondence of Baldassare Turini da Pescia (1518)
Eva Trizzullo

Woven Medici Riddles and the Rhetoric of a New Golden Age: The Giochi di Putti Tapestries of Leo X in the Sala di Costantino
Konstantinos Gravanis

Part III

Canonization and Its Consequences
Nicholas Penny

List of Illustrations and Credits
Abbreviations

Bibliography

Index