Raphael Lets Loose

Plenty of faces keep you company in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Raphael: Sublime Poetry”—saints and sinners, popes and poets, ladies in posh frocks or nothing at all—but the most disarming is the first to greet you, that of a boy in a fun hat. With a long, straight nose; soft, bright eyes; and an uplifted chin, he carries the wary confidence of a teenage heartthrob. It isn’t just the face that makes you pause. So does the stripped-down assurance of its execution: A single strong line eloquently maps the contour of cheek, chin, and neck; a handful of deft arcs convey dark lashes above pale irises and a sweet double bow where the lips meet. A gentle swing of shoulder-length hair provides the only hint of motion.The drawing, a presumed self-portrait, would have been made when Raphael was about 17, sometime around 1500. It gives a hint of his natural talent and also of something more—an attitude of mastery worn lightly, of elegance too dignified to call attention to itself. Raphael’s friend Baldassarre Castiglione later codified that manner as an ideal of refined behavior, for which he coined the term sprezzatura—the art of making it all look easy.As with so many things, Raphael excelled at it. In his 37 years on the planet, he appeared to sail effortlessly through every domain he set his mind to—drawing, painting, architecture, client management, enterprise scaling. He had been lucky in his origins. His father was an artist and a poet at the ducal court of Urbino, home to Europe’s largest collection of books and to a culture of intellectual inquiry in which mathematics and perspective were pursued as both practical tools and a means of understanding the cosmos. Form and meaning, the visible and the eternal, were seen as mirrors of each other. (Castiglione set his sprezzatura-defining The Book of the Courtier in Urbino.)Raphael’s mother died when he was 8, and his father three years later, around the time Raphael began his apprenticeship with the Umbria