Reconsidering Raphael's "embarrassing failure"
Assistant Professor of Art History Patricia Reilly delivered the provocatively-titled lecture "When Imitation is not the Sincerest Form of Flattery: Raphael's Michelangelesque nudes in the Vatican Fire in the Borgo" to a packed crowd on Monday in the Scheuer Room. The lecture came out of her current work on a book about the development of the Florentine pictorial vernacular.
Reilly argued for a different view. "Would Raphael really have botched his first commission for the new pope?" she asked the audience. Before "The Fire in the Borgo," Raphael's nudes were renowned for being proportionate, decorous, and pleasing, and yet "these nudes do not break with his previous style by accident or by benign neglect, but by choice." According to Reilly, Raphael was creating a visual argument in favor of his style over that of Michelangelo.
Pope Leo X promoted the arts and letters during his time in the papacy, and one of his most influential scholars was Pietro Bembo, who argued for the use of the Tuscan vernacular language in literature. In so doing, Bembo made the shocking decision to designate Petrarch, not Dante, as the greatest Tuscan poet. He reasoned that in writing, "what is valuable is not what they say, but how they say it." For Bembo, even if Petrarch's works had less content than Dante's, Petrarch's superior style made him the greatest Tuscan poet.
"Fire in the Borgo" asks to be judged by this same criterion of style over substance. In the leftmost third of the painting, Raphael borrows many figures from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel in order to cruelly parody Michelangelo's style. The parody was a common literary trick, but Raphael extended this practice to painting. For example, the nude man hanging from the wall is what Reilly called "an example of cartographic anatomy... a bloated sack of intestines... Michelangelo gone bad." The figure plays perfectly into the sterotype that Michelangelo's nudes were more anatomically correct than Raphael's, but also less graceful.
Once he is done with insulting Michelangelo, Raphael turns to the task of "demonstrating his position as the Petrarch of the pictorial vernacular." The rest of the painting serves as a foil for the "dreadful nudes" to the left; while the left is shallow, sculptural, and virtually monochromatic, the right is perspectival, painterly, and chromatically pleasing. Raphael shows that he is capable of producing "style for style's sake" with such objects as the garments of the water carriers.
Reilly concluded that rather than seeing this painting as an "embarrassing failure," we should see it as a successful visual argument. Through juxtaposing a dreadful parody of Michelangelo's style with his own virtuoso technique, Raphael successfully argues that his style is the perfect model upon which to base an Italian pictorial vernacular.
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