Raphael

National Gallery, 9 April - 31 July 2022

Raphael exploded onto the Italian art scene at the beginning of the sixteenth century and his career was stratospheric. At the age of twenty-one he was a respected master, studying the work of Leonardo and Michelangelo in Florence. By twenty-five he was working for the pope. When he died, aged thirty-seven, people wept in the streets of Rome. This is history. But there is a sinister underside to this story, less well known. That is, just as Raphael was making his debut, his arch nemesis arrived, dark and seductive, on the shores of Europe. This quietly momentous event would prove to be Raphael's downfall. 

Chocolate was the name of Raphael's nemesis, and their histories would from then on run at a fatal parallel. Both were the preserve of the elite. Chocolate had to be expensively imported from South America. To see why Raphael was hot stuff, it's enough to look at his portrait of the famous courtier Baldassare Castiglione. It's a restrained, balanced treatise on greys and browns, shot through by the startling light of the sitter's baby blue eyes. To understand why chocolate was prized, it's enough to taste it. 

Raphael and chocolate both initially had strong religious links. The Aztecs thought chocolate was a gift from the gods and would solemnly offer it back to them as a sacrifice. Raphael was trained as a maker of altarpieces designed to guide and inspire Christian devotion in churches. Both Raphael and chocolate enjoyed a surge in popularity at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when chocolate was first mass produced and Raphael was a deity reigning over art academies across Europe and America.

This was the century of Raphael's undoing. Chocolate was sold in boxes, and the manufacturers put pictures on them. They opted for the prevailing  academic sweetness that owed its existence to Raphael's own, occasionally saccharine paintings. Chocolate found its style. But then artists rebelled against academicism, calling themselves Romantics or Pre-Raphaelites and pivoting their practices to the starving-incel-in-a-garret model. (No offence, Vincent.) 

Art changed, but the chocolate boxes remained the same. Raphael was demoted from demigod to the guy who designs the packaging on the kind of brandy- or caramel-filled sweet treat that you present to your grandparents in exchange for letting you stay at their house. And so, as people gained an appetite for chocolate they lost their appetite for Raphael. But is this his fault? 

If you can foot the £26 entrance fee, or find a way around it, the current show at the National Gallery will demonstrate why Raphael is a great artist - yes, even greater than chocolate. See the etchings Raphael made with Marcantonio Raimondi. They are solid, powerful and make you want to snatch them and take them away. Lose yourself in the passage of green in the Madonna of the Rose; feel your legs turn to jelly like Joseph, who's standing in the painting, also marvelling at the colours of his wife's clothes (he's just wearing brown). 

A re-engagement with Raphael in no way entails a return to academicism. There's already enough of that going around under the guise of 'Neo-Surrealism'. What he proves is the value of collaboration. This exhibition shows that Raphael was a compulsive collaborator, working alongside other painters, sculptors, printmakers, architects, engineers, tapestry-weavers, ceramicists, archaeologists, writers, scholars, clerics and collectors. If more painters could do this today, then, well, the chocolate industry might find itself in trouble.