Reconsidering Raphael
Hardback (Published)
(October 2026)
ISBN: 9782503604275
Price: $200.00
Reverence for Raphael as the “Prince of Painters” by centuries of worshipful artists and covetous patrons and collectors alike has contributed to the marginalization of his significant activity in myriad other fields, and an underappreciation of the personal networks that facilitated his extraordinary productivity—an imbalance that the new investigative approaches embraced in this volume of essays set out to redress.
One of the most brilliant and consequential artists in the western tradition, Raphael (1483–1520) was extolled during his lifetime as “prince of painters.” This indelible characterization, though fitting, has long obscured his considerable achievements in other arenas. Raphael was not solely a painter, but a creative impresario, active in many media and fields of endeavor: architect, urbanist, archaeologist-antiquarian, designer of sculpture, silver, prints, tapestries, and even of landscape. In recent decades, a richer understanding of his myriad undertakings has taken form: one that reckons not only with Raphael’s activity as a draftsman and as a designer in an array of media, but also considers his productive collaborations with other artists, and his meaningful interactions with patrons, advisors, humanists, literati, admirers, and friends. Yet scholarship has been slow to digest how his projects across categories related to one another, and lingering vestiges of the mythic Raphael enshrined by devotees of past centuries still color our understanding. Posing fresh questions that move beyond familiar lines of inquiry, this volume considers major themes in Raphael’s life and work that are still little understood: the nature and profile of his workshop, his inventiveness as a designer across many media, and his depictions of, and relations with, women and the significant roles they played as patrons, collectors, and viewers. Drawing on multiple approaches—including conservation and technical art history—Reconsidering Raphael explores these and other elements of his astonishingly inventive, diverse, and influential body of work, recasting Raphael not as the quintessential “old master,” but as a daring and bold innovator who in many ways anticipated the modern.
Other Titles in this Series
Naples as Laboratory / Laboratorium Neapel
Style Options, Artistic Rivalry and Self Fashioning in Neapolitan Baroque Painting / Plurale Stilbildung, Kunstlerkonkurrenz und Self Fashioning in der neapolitanischen Barockmalerei
A Collaborative Tapestry in Honour of Shirley Ann Brown / Une fresque brodée en l’honneur de Shirley Ann Brown
The Bayeux Tapestry Seen by her Colleagues and Friends / La Tapisserie de Bayeux vue par ses collègues et amis
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