In ‘Raphael: Sublime Poetry,’ art points to a deeper reality

When we enter a museum like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, we see ourselves as viewers, as if our primary task is to look. But “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” invites us to do something else. “Painting is mute poetry,” Raphael claims, “and poetry is blind painting.” We have to hear and read art, not just look at it. 

The arts move us beyond the aesthetic, our physical senses, to get to the soul of the work. Raphael’s “The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia” reveals his Neoplatonic theory of art. The patron saint of music is surrounded by a few other saints: Paul, John, Augustine and Mary Magdalene. Cecilia stands contrapposto while gazing heavenward at the angelic choir above with a childlike wonder. She holds a pipe organ in her hands that is falling apart and will soon join the pile of other broken instruments at her feet. She listens to the true music of heaven, while St. Paul looks at the earthly instruments with the same pensive expression as Rodin’s Adam (“The Thinker”) contemplating the world’s sins. 

Like the abandoned instruments at St. Cecilia’s feet, music and all art forms are limited on their own. Raphael would see the arts as insufficient, only as a means that points beyond to a deeper reality. The arts help us transcend the sights and sounds to find goodness, beauty and truth. But to find transcendence means engaging with the arts with more than our senses. Raphael doesn’t only give us 170 artworks to look at in this exhibition—the first major show on the artist in the United States, according to the Met—but also a spiritual way of seeing. 

Active Imagination

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote frequently about Raphael. He contended that modern viewers engage with art in an Apollonian way. Apollonian art is primarily aesthetic and rational, like the god it is named after. We engage art in this way when we merely look, hear, watch and then move on, unaffected. Just as the disciples in Raphael’s “The Transfiguration” look to Christ from below for salvation, Nietzsche claims modern people look to art, or “the reduction of illusion to mere illusion,” to “make life bearable.” Nietzsche’s point is that art seen in this way cannot actually save us, but only help us pass the time while we grovel in the darkness and chaos, as the disciples do in the lower part of this painting. But he also offers a better solution, and it is surprisingly spiritual. 

Nietzsche claimed that to find such salvation, we need to rediscover the religious root of art, the Dionysian, which requires active participation. The church certainly recognizes this truth in the liturgy, which invites all to full and active participation. But how can visitors participate in a museum? Nietzsche asserts that we need a combination of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. He says that if one were to convert a song into a painting in one’s imagination, one would get closer to the Dionysian. Regarding the “The Transfiguration,” it is one thing to stare at Christ’s glory on the mount, but it is another to converse with Christ as Moses and Elijah do. It is by knowing Christ personally that we are saved, not just seeing him or witnessing miracles. True religion requires a relationship beyond the retina. 

For art to give us a spiritual experience, it needs to activate our imaginations. Raphael’s drawings are more accessible for this sort of experience. Often when we look at paintings, we slip into an Apollonian mode: We look, we see them as complete, we recognize what’s going on, and then we move on. Drawings beckon us to complete them in our minds. Many drawings on display at the Met were tools to create paintings, such as those from “The Transfiguration,” Raphael’s last painting. 

I was glad to see a drawing of St. Catherine of Alexandria, as I love the complete painting at the National Gallery in London. This drawing invited a different experience, one closer to what Nietzsche discusses. It invites us to be painters in our minds, to recreate this rough, energetic drawing into a more serene, softer painting like Raphael’s. Many, including myself, bypass drawings in an exhibit like this because we want to see the final product, the complete thing. Drawings demand our participation. It is easier to look at what has been accomplished than to paint or draw in our minds. But the imagination is what allows the image to become a window into heaven.

Raphael’s Innovation

Raphael employed his imagination by responding to and learning from others. He learned the most from his master, Perugino. Raphael takes Perugino’s serene figures and landscapes to create a sense of peace and perfection in all of his works. 

The “prince of painters” learned from two other greats during his time in Florence: Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Leonardo’s influence is explicit in such works as “Leda and the Swan,” but more subtly in a work like “The Small Cowper Madonna.” The soft outlines, the sfumato executed in the hair and veil, and the emotional inwardness of Christ and his mother are signatures of Leonardo. It’s hard to say what these two are thinking and feeling here, inviting us to enter into the hearts of these figures in our own meditation.

Michelangelo’s stately influence is apparent in “The Alba Madonna.” The Christ child is more of a warrior than an infant, planting his cross like a conquistador in the hands of his obsequious cousin John. Mary is more of a Roman heroine, giving a stern gaze to the makeshift cross while wearing a military-grade sandal that seems more suited to Diana than to a pious peasant woman. 

Raphael was able to move fluidly between different styles, which led to his chief innovation: feeling and intimacy in sacred art. In “Madonna of the Rose,” the dark background and Joseph give contrast to the bright, smiling mother and these two children playing tug-of-war with John’s banner that reads “Ecce Agnus Dei.” The Holy Family shares this playful, human moment, which brings the heavenly figures down to join us on earth. 

We can miss much of Raphael’s innovation today because we see most of this style mass-produced on prayer cards in religious shops. But Raphael was not a conventional artist by any means in his time. He was highly imaginative, bringing the holy and human together in a way others have never achieved so successfully. He shows us that these figures we pray with are not Greek gods or crusaders, but mothers and nephews. Raphael shows us that we are really part of God’s loving family. 

Madonna of the Future

Raphael was a Madonnière, a specialized painter of the Virgin Mary. There are many good Madonnas in this exhibition, but I was disappointed that the “Madonna della Seggiola,” known as the “Madonna of the Chair,”  was not on loan from Florence. It is my favorite Madonna and Child, so much so that I painted my own copy of it for my personal devotion. 

This painting is also the focus of a short story by Henry James, “The Madonna of the Future.” James writes about Theobald, an American artist in Florence in the 19th century seeking to create the perfect Madonna, like the “Madonna of the Chair.” He has been there for 20-plus years working on his masterpiece. As the story goes on, the narrator begins to realize the true nature of this project: His patrons haven’t seen any of his work, his model is no longer young and beautiful, and the bambino died in childhood. At the end of the story, the narrator finally enters the artist’s studio, finding him paralyzed in his chair, staring at a worn, white canvas. Theobald dies shortly thereafter with only this blank canvas as his perfect Madonna. 

The story raises the question of what makes an artwork. Theobald was an artist, even though he just had this blank canvas as a Madonna. His image of the perfect Madonna exists in his mind, perhaps too perfect to be represented. It would ruin what he saw in Serafina, his model. Raphael’s Madonnas give us more to look at, but are they functioning as artworks if they don’t lead us to imagine Mary and converse with her in our hearts?

Theobald was unable to communicate his vision to others, but Raphael did. His paintings show us his immense imaginative energy, giving us a glimpse of his own mother. 

Raphael lost his mother at the age of 8, and his Madonnas carry a tenderness that feels experienced rather than contrived. Having lost my own mother to cancer at a young age, I understand the impulse to paint the motif repeatedly. To quote another Madonna who also lost her mother while young, “What fuels my ambition is the desire to be heard. And to find my mother, I suppose.” Art is perhaps an exercise of encounter: of finding those who have been lost to us. It is an exercise in introducing us to those we do not know. Raphael has given the world a great gift by introducing us to his mother as well as to Ours. 

“Raphael: Sublime Poetry” is successful when we can see what Raphael saw, not just in an aesthetic sense, but in an ethical sense. Depending on our upbringing and religious education, we might imagine Mary and Jesus as cold, distant or stern (as Michelangelo did), but Raphael invites us to reimagine them as fun, delightful and happy. To share this vision requires us to see beyond the canvas and to allow the artist to shape how we see. 

Leonardo once claimed that art is never finished, only abandoned. This exhibition shows us that Raphael’s work is still ongoing. Although the artist is no longer living, we now take his place. What hangs on the walls is only an underpainting. The rest is up to our imagination. 

Editors’s note: The author currently has a solo show, “Twilight of the Idols,” on display at The Church of St. Francis Xavier until May 29. 

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