<body><![CDATA[<b>If you like a virgin – or St Michael with a dragon, for that matter – the National Gallery’s Raphael show is the hottest ticket in town. By Frank Whitford</b> For years he was widely thought to have been as pious and morally unblemished as the subjects depicted in his paintings: madonnas and saints, their eyes directed heavenwards, their hands in gestures of submission or prayer. He was, according to a contemporary report, “so gentle and so charitable that even animals loved him”. Then the truth came out. The model of rectitude was a libidinous womaniser, who may well have died from a fever caused by a surfeit of sex. The painter, one of the most famous in history, was Raffaello Sanzio de Urbino, known familiarly as Raphael, and he was only 37 when the exhausting end came. Born in 1483 at Urbino, he packed a huge amount into his short life. The National Gallery’s show, the first large Raphael exhibition staged outside Italy, begins with a painted church banner created when the artist was a mere 16. Ten years later he was decorating the pope’s private apartments at the Vatican. Nor was Raphael only a painter: his brilliance also embraced design, archaeology and architecture. Indeed, in 1514 he was appointed papal architect. By then the man who had begun his career working for small provincial churches had become the envied rival of Leonardo and Michelangelo. Raphael is still considered to be the painter whose work most completely embodies the ideals of the High Renaissance: in it are combined the study of nature and the study of classical art so as to produce an ideal beauty. More prolific but less inventive than Leonardo, more diplomatic and agreeable than Michelangelo, Raphael painted in a way for which the words sweetness, harmony, grace, purity and beauty might have been invented. What a contradiction between Raphael’s art and his private life. Raphael: From Urbino to Rome, National Gallery, London; Oct 20-Jan 16: 020 7747 2885. Click <a href="asfunction:Tardis.webPageOpen,http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/raphael/default.htm"><b>here</b></a> for more information and to book tickets.<b>Right: Raphael self-portrait, c1504</b>© The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford]]></body>
