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Date: 2006-05-25

Raphael Redux; a Hide-and-Seek Church

An Exhibit Gives a Master His Due

By Elizabeth Lev

ROME, MAY 25, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Today's art viewers often give Raphael the short end of the stick. No one would dream of visiting the Vatican Museums and skipping the Sistine Chapel, and yet many people seem more than happy to take a pass on the Raphael rooms to hurry on to Michelangelo's ceiling.

And yet it is Raphael's art that reaches closest to perfection in painting, while Michelangelo's work is the anomaly, forsaking time-honored rules in favor of a sculptural approach to art. A new show at the Galleria Borghese, "Raphael: From Florence to Rome," offers a view of the exquisite craftsmanship and gentle spirituality of one of Italy's greatest artists.

Raphael Sanzio was born in Urbino on Good Friday 1483. His father, a moderately successful painter, trained his young son and exposed him to the lively artistic world of 15th-century Urbino, before he died leaving 11-year-old Raphael an orphan.

The budding artist is believed to have studied with the painter Perugino, who had worked in the Sistine Chapel under Pope Sixtus IV. Raphael assimilated much of Perugino's style before going to Florence where he came into contact with the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo which would further shape his own elegant style.

Often unfairly dubbed a copier of other masters, Raphael's gift extends well beyond that. He was intellectually curious and experimented with the sculptural effects of Michelangelo, the techniques of Leonardo, and the color blending of the Venetians, and his own style evolved considerably before he died in 1520 at the age of 37.

The Borghese show opens with a series of portraits, which made up one of the most popular commissions of the Renaissance. Here the influence of Leonardo's "Mona Lisa" (painted in 1503-1505) is in evidence as Raphael's portraits develop from a stiff frontal view in the 1502 "Portrait of a Man," to three-quarter profile, delicate sfumato and fine details in his "Lady with a Unicorn." A late portrait of Raphael's mistress La Fornaria again shows how much more his painting had developed in his contact with the monumentality of Rome.

A superb work, "The Dream of the Knight" manifests Raphael's ability to produce beautiful, almost miniature-type works. The panel, a mere 5 by 5 inches, stands next to the fine preparatory drawing, pricked so as to transfer the delicate design to the surface to be painted. The complex position of the knight, dreaming of the choice between pleasure and glory, and the jewel-like hues of the work, make this one of the treasures of the show.

The centerpiece of the exhibit, however, is Raphael's "Deposition." Painted for Atlanta Baglione of Perugia in 1507, this work served as Raphael's audition for his papal commission in Rome.

The exhibit pulls together several preparatory drawings for the work, demonstrating how Raphael started with one idea for the painting, a more typical "lamentation" type with mourning figures around the body of Christ lifeless on the ground, and then altered it for the rare entombment type which portrays the body carried to the tomb. The movement and monumentality of the finished design shows how closely Raphael followed the innovations of Michelangelo, specifically in the figure in green and yellow, the kneeling woman on the left and the arm of Christ that has fallen out of the shroud.

The most intriguing element of Raphael's work illustrates his idea of devotional spirituality. The Madonna and Child painter par excellence, Raphael experimented with dozens of compositions of the Madonna, Child, John the Baptist and St. Joseph. In his early "Madonna of the Grand Duke" (1505), represented in the show by a drawing, we see a Raphael working in a relatively simple composition. Contact with Leonardo's cartoon for the "Madonna, Child and St. Anne" spurred Raphael to increasingly complicated interaction among the figures enhancing the sense of life and movement in the scenes.

"La Belle Jardiniere" from the Louvre, the large "Cowper Madonna" from Washington and "The Holy Family with a Lamb" from the Prado, all show Raphael's growth as a painter of devotional images. The figures dominated the space and interact convincingly with one another.

What stands out is the beautiful representation of Mary. In the "Belle Jardiniere," her triangular form is the heart of the painting as her graceful hands gently caress her Son. A wonderful drawing of the head of the Madonna shows how Raphael, with a few short strokes of pencil, can evoke an image of the Virgin of such ethereal beauty one fears that she might disappear.

The perfect placement of Mary in the landscape with the fine finished surfaces of her skin and hair along with the gentle drawing of her features, is perceived by many today as boring, but in Raphael's world, it was the perfect representation of the words, "Hail Mary, full of grace."

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Sterile Space

What should a church in the 21st century look like? The Vatican Jubilee project of 50 new churches for Rome seems to be exploring this question as edifices are constructed for recently developed neighborhoods which find themselves without a parish church.

American architect Richard Meier offered his answer in the millennium church in Tor Tre Teste, which opened in 2003 amid polemics and debate, but the European response has just arrived. Il Santo Volto di Gesù (the Holy Face of Jesus) was built by architects Italian Piero Sartogo and Canadian Nathalie Grenon and inaugurated on March 25.

This ultra contemporary church, a sort of revisiting of the Pantheon, certainly has a striking presence. The Magliana district is not one of Rome's more attractive areas and, for many years, it was known as a neighborhood of ill repute.

The new church's stark geometric design rises out of the flat landscape. The building is composed of circles and triangles -- traditional symbols of God's infinite perfection and of the Trinity. Two wedge-shaped structures, the church and the rooms for catechesis, converge on a transparent cross floating against a blue sky.

The church design is not alone in boasting important authors; the decoration, too, was overseen by notables from the art world. Several celebrated modern European artists contributed works from the confessionals to the Stations of the Cross. The church has been thus far well received and the parishioners seem pleased at the notoriety garnered by their innovative new parish home.

And yet, while visiting the church last week, I felt a strange dissatisfaction with this design. It took me a while to figure out what was missing, but then I realized it was Jesus. The flier presenting the structure states that the churches provide space not only for liturgical worship but also for meeting and socializing.

This came as no surprise, since the new church seems to put the socializing and worship on the same plane. The interior of the church is shaped like a hemispherical Greek theater with the altar in the place of the stage. While this emphasizes a sense of community, the lack of nave eliminates the effective image of our lives as a journey toward God, following Christ's example.

Slightly to the right of the altar stands a filigree cross with such a small corpus on it as to be invisible to people sitting at the back of the church. Instead of clear representations of Christ's redemptive sacrifice, there is a huge circular window reminiscent of the oculus of the Pantheon. This abstraction of God's luminous perfection is very dramatic, but the question becomes, do people really need more theological abstraction in this day and age?

If "The Da Vinci Code" has taught Catholics one thing, it is that we need to think more about the real Jesus, the Jesus who died on the cross for our sins. With Jesus' radical example of love before our eyes we remember how he loves us, and what we are called to be.

This church offers blank sterile space, like the anatomy theaters of old where the students would gather to watch the professor perform a dissection. The sole interior decoration of the church is the Stations of the Cross by Mimmo Paladino, a Florentine sculptor. Without the numbers scratched into the clay, the stations would be unrecognizable, due to the high degree of abstraction in the figures. If we can't even see Jesus as we follow his walk up Calvary, how can we appreciate his suffering?

The confessionals are painted with a feng shui deep blue, with the peaceful face of Christ incised in glass overlooking the rooms. Again, the Jesus-as-therapist motif seems ineffective in encouraging the faithful to "go forth and sin no more."

The tabernacle is a travertine globe inside the day chapel off to the side. While the pamphlet declares that it is visible from everywhere in the church, this is true only if you know what to look for. The sacred minimalism hardly invites the faithful to adoration, and seems to soft-sell the Eucharistic presence to the point of insignificance.

The catechetical space of the complex is painted with bright colors for children to play and joyously learn the Word of God. But in the Church of the Holy Face of Jesus it seems that the principal game is hide-and-seek.

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Errata corrige. In the May 11 "Men of Malta" article on the Knights of Malta, I wrote that the professed Knights were priests. This is incorrect. They have taken solemn vows and are religious brothers.

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Elizabeth Lev teaches Christian art and architecture at Duquesne University's Italian campus. She can be reached at lizlev@zenit.org.