Raphael borrowed compositions and motifs from the painters Perugino, Pinturicchio, and Leonardo da Vinci during a peripatetic early career that traversed Umbria, Tuscany, and the Marches. His connections with local artists and his adaptability to a range of commissions, from altarpieces to portraits and domestic paintings, prepared him to meet the demands of a diverse Roman clientele in the period covered by Alexis R. Culotta's Tracing the Visual Language of Raphael's Circle to 1527.
Culotta explores Raphael's reconceptualization of pictorial composition and the functioning of his workshop in light of his relationships with apprentices, assistants, and collaborators. The introduction defines visual language as “the components or phrases that are repurposed or reused across various works. These forms thus become a point of reference to adopt a variety of meanings—links, for example, between artists, themes, or epochs—that can enrich a composition's impact” (7–8). Among these are Raphael's quotations from antique art and architecture, works by contemporaries such as Michelangelo, and his own paintings. Raphael trained his shop artists in this visual language, which Culotta terms recombination, whereby the borrowings are transformed (like musical riffs in jazz) “as a source for ongoing novelty” (11). She draws on economic game theory, which proposes that a mixture of collaboration and competition produces the best outcome, to account for Raphael's expert management of his workshop.
The first three chapters analyze recombination in Raphael's projects from his arrival in Rome until his death, in 1520. His frescoes in the papal apartments at the Vatican and his paintings for the Villa Farnesina attest to his formulation of a visual language that incorporated references to ancient art, thereby capitalizing on the fervor for collecting antiquities in the Rome of popes Julius II and Leo X. He instructed his assistants Giulio Romano, Gianfrancesco Penni, Polidoro da Caravaggio, and Perino del Vaga in recombination and demonstrated the benefits of collaboration on projects with the architect and painter Baldassare Peruzzi and the stucco specialist Giovanni da Udine.
Culotta contends that Raphael granted his assistants an unusual amount of autonomy in the designing and execution of his paintings. Arguably, his delegation of much of the work to assistants was a practical measure to cope with an increasing number of large commissions and was likely something he learned from his experiences with the busy shops of Perugino, Ghirlandaio, and Pinturicchio. Chapter 3 concludes with the workshop artists’ completion of commissions unfinished at Raphael's death, among them the Sala di Constantino.
Chapters 4 to 6 address the perpetuation of Raphael's visual language by the artists of his circle before the 1527 Sack of Rome. Each chapter considers a single Roman residence and contains a biography of the patron, the artists’ connection to Raphael, the division of work among the collaborators, and their use of recombination in the iconographic programs of the chambers. Perino, Polidoro, and Giovanni da Udine teamed up for the decoration of the Palazzo Baldassini; Giulio Romano, Penni, and Polidoro worked at the Villa Lante al Gianicolo; and Polidoro and Maturino da Firenze embellished the Fetti Chapel at San Silvestro al Quirinale. The interior spaces of all three sites have been renovated, dismantled, or destroyed over the centuries, making the interpretation of subject matter and pictorial style challenging and provisional (illustrations of the associated drawings would have been helpful). Vasari had praised Raphael's perfection of art, coloring, and invention; perhaps the poor state of preservation accounts for the author's focus on the latter.
Game theory underlies Culotta's analysis of the artistic competition and collaboration at the Villa Farnesina. She describes Raphael's rivalry with Sebastiano del Piombo in the Loggia di Galatea as a spur to his creativity, whereas Peruzzi, whose gift for recombination made him a kindred spirit, became a friend and ideal collaborator. In the final chapter she returns to Peruzzi with a dissection of the architectural and figural sources in his Presentation of the Virgin at Santa Maria della Pace that deftly summarizes the art of recombination.
Readers may well conclude that Raphael and his followers cared more about collaboration than competition. Yet competitiveness flourished among Roman patrons who sought to display their social status by commissioning frescoes like those Raphael had created for popes and acclaimed literati. Who better to fulfill their wishes for the Raphael brand than his former assistants?
