Lifelong Learning in the Renaissance – the case of Raphael

Raphael Self Portrait 1506 c. Palazzo Pitti,
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After visiting the brilliant Raphael exhibition in London, I thought I would see what Georgio Vasari had to say about him, in his famous Lives of the Artists.  After describing many of Raphael’s paintings and summarising his life story, Vasari sets out his own take on Raphael’s genius. His analysis is framed in terms of style and in terms of the manner in which Raphael learnt from his contemporaries. Raphael, we are told, was an imitator of Perugino but was ‘amazed and entranced’ when he subsequently encountered the works of Leonardo. Only with study and great difficulty did Raphael learn from Leonardo, but despite his great ‘grace in colouring’ he could never equal the sublimity of Leonardo.  Vasari writes that the style that Raphael had ‘adopted so effortlessly’ from his master Perugino when he was a young men, ‘started to impede and restrict’ his development and it was only with immense difficulty that, ‘he forced himself as a grown man to learn within the space of a few months something which demanded the easy aptitude of youth and years of study.’   Yet, according to Vasari, Raphael recognised that he could never match Michelangelo as a painter of the male nude so, despite achieving great improvements in this domain, he turned to other fields of painting.  Then, says Vasari, Raphael turned his attention to Fra Bartolommeo, from whom he learnt a balanced combination of drawing and painting – and he continued to learn from other artists to form a style that was ‘entirely his own’. 

Raphael, The Alba Madonna, c. The National Gallery, London,
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Raphael’s style, according to Vasari, results from his remarkable capacity to keep learning, to transcend his own limitations, to create a harmonious, middle way that synthesises the innovations of other painters.  Raphael is celebrated by Vasari because he is not just an imitator – he recognises that he cannot match some of the achievements of Leonardo and Michelangelo and therefore he abandons his attempt to imitate them.  Instead he creates a syncretic style which is fully his – his own genius. 

Lastly, Vasari credits Raphael with a particular gift – the capacity to live and work with other artists – whose natural disposition is anything but cooperative – and to motivate them to collaborate harmoniously.  Just as Raphael, the painter, could blend the styles of others in his painting, as a master of works he led collaborative teams that worked harmoniously to produce splendid collective works, such as the Stanze in the Vatican.

In sum, Vasari praises Raphael not only as a virtuoso painter but also as a virtuoso and career-long learner.  Raphael’s capacity for professional learning and collaboration and his readiness to change his own style seem to have supported his meteoric reputational ascent. The Renaissance was a period of technical innovation in painting processes but also of change in the ‘consumption’ of painting.  Artists were experimenting with painting processes, with paints, with surfaces, with subjects and ideas and customers, at least some of them, were commissioning and paying for these experiments.  Raphael, it seems, was ready to profit from these changes:  he quickly picked up on the innovations of Michelangelo, Durer and Leonardo and partially assimilated them.  He extended and refreshed his own repertoire by collaborating with innovative architects and engravers.

Raphael’s lifelong learning, in Vasari’s biography, is informal and life-wide:  it is structured by personal relationships – with his father, his master, Perugino and his rival Michelangelo.  It is shaped by his movements around Italy, from Urbino to Perugia, on to Florence and then to Rome.  His learning was embedded into his work as an artist, and it followed the itinerary of his career – Raphael learnt when he felt challenged or inspired by fellow artists or chose to work with them or because he responded to the ambitions of his clients.

On this reading, Raphael comes across as technically brilliant and super-adaptive, serially modifying his style to meet the needs of the market and assimilate the innovations of his peers.  Highly ambitious, an inspirational, if sometimes distracted team-leader rather than a lonely genius – Raphael was more an Elon Musk or a Steve Jobs than an Alan Turing.  The fact that Vasari explicitly praised Raphael’s capacity to master new techniques, to navigate his own career and to coordinate the skills of others reveals that Raphael’s contemporaries understood that in an age of technological and cultural-revolution, fortune favoured those who could learn both by themselves and with others.