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FocusOnRaphael

Raphael, Studies of heads and hands, and sketches after Leonardo, c.1505-7, metalpoint with white heightening, partially oxidized, on white prepared paper, 21 x 27.4 cm. Presented by a Body of Subscribers in 1846, Ashmolean Museum WA1846.176.

This small sheet is closely packed with studies that function as a compendium of Raphael’s concerns and interests at a time when, despite his many commissions in Perugia, he was increasingly fascinated by the art being produced in Florence. Here the head of a young man, the hand holding a book, and the resting hand, relate to the figure of San Giovanni Gualberto in the fresco of the Holy Trinity with Saints at San Severo in Perugia. Yet the diversity of studies on this sheet reveals Raphael’s ambition to assimilate and re-interpret Leonardo da Vinci’s expressive visual language and graphic methods.

Developing his thoughts for the youthful saint, Raphael achieved a powerful sense of presence and character through a web of painstaking and nuanced modelling with the stylus, adding some fine touches of white highlighting to the head with a brush. Typically, Raphael’s inventive spirit was spurred by ideas of contrasts and he turned the sheet to find space to draw the second head, which is clearly reminiscent of a recurring type of strong-profiled older man in Leonardo’s art. Raphael did not bring this head to the same overall level of finish, concentrating instead on the craggy profile with its furrowed brow, protruding lower lip and prominent chin. Older and less idealized, and more intense in expression, this head provides a vivid contrast with the young saint – even as the active and passive hands combine to form a visual version of the rhetorical figure of antithesis.

Turning the sheet again, Raphael made a rapid sketch after Leonardo’s inventive design for the Battle of Anghiari – a commission from the Florentine Republic for a mural in their newly constructed hall for the Great Council. This sketch captures with remarkable accuracy and economy a key section of the composition in which horsemen struggle for possession of a standard, while soldiers fight beneath the dangerously rearing horses. However, it also includes above a horse seen from behind which appears in another part of Leonardo’s battle design (the precise motif is found in a charcoal and black chalk drawing at Windsor, RL12339). This suggests that Raphael had direct access to Leonardo’s drawings, and was encouraged by the older artist to emulate his inventive drawing style, as well as absorbing his motifs.

Near this fluent sketch, and perhaps in response to the forms of the billowing standard, Raphael tried out some cork-screwing lines; these may relate to the patterns of hair or perhaps to the knots devised by Leonardo that also intrigued the younger artist. In the opposite corner, beneath the curve of the young saint’s shoulder, he lightly sketched the antagonistic heads of two horses, another idea taken from Leonardo, and a juxtaposition that accentuates the virtuosity of the expressive head above.

Ben Thomas, Art historian

Courtesy of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

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