The Dragon's Trail: The Biography of Raphael's Masterpiece - Softcover

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One exhilarating spring day in 1506, a brilliant young Italian painter named Raffaello Santi was summoned to the grand ducal palace in his home town of Urbino. There, in the presence of Duke Guidobaldo and his simpering courtiers, the painter was to receive a commission that was to change his life. Raffaello was still very young, just twenty-three years old, living only for artistic advancement and ravenous for recognition and fame. Behind him stretched years of hard-bitten apprenticeship: ever since he had been old enough to handle a paintbrush, Raffaello had devoted himself to his art, gradually focusing his precocious talents on the possibilities of sublime creation. But now, unfurling in front of him like a great golden banner, lay honor, glory, and immortal fame.

A recent self-portrait showed a pale, meek-looking youth, his pearly, opalescent skin licked with dark, damp curls, his full feminine lips troubled only by the slightest shadow of fuzz. But the portrait's vacuous beauty was a fiction. It betrayed none of the extraordinary energy and determination of Raffaello's paintings, no hint of the skillful manipulator of powerful patrons and the mercenary careerist that without doubt he had become even at this stage. Raffaello, now known to us as Raphael, reeked of ambition, certainly. He knew he would go far, perhaps to the top of his profession. But even he, in his most vainglorious moments, could never have imagined that he was poised on the brink of an artistic maturity that was to turn him into a mortal god of the Italian Renaissance. His name would be universally famous for the next five hundred years.

Raphael reached the palace and was admitted through the decoratively carved stone entrance. A contingent of armored guards conducted him, clanking along in their steel, through the beautiful pillared courtyard, up the stone staircase, and on through a sequence of vaulted halls, chambers, and apartments. Ushered past noblemen and ambassadors waiting in attitudes of stiff formality, Raphael was propelled toward the seat of power itself. Finally he stood in front of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino and ruler of one of the most powerful courts in Italy.

The duke had a high regard for Raphael, and his choice of the brilliant young painter had been a careful one. For on that spring morning, to the melodious sound of quills totting up ducats on parchment, the duke commissioned Raphael to paint a picture of St. George and the dragon. It was essential, Guidobaldo explained, that this should be his finest work yet. This jewel of a painting, he went on, this portrait of the great and romantic, chivalric hero was to be sent to England as a gift for King Henry VII.

Five hundred years later, fascinated by the extraordinary life of the painting that Raphael created for the Duke of Urbino, I stood in the same piazza, looking up at the monumental façade of the ducal palace. I had been intrigued by this picture, by its travels, by the people who had wanted it, ever since stumbling on the outlines of its story a couple of years earlier. Across the sweep of half a millennium and spread out over the breadth of half the world, a string of rulers and rich men had gone out of their way to possess this gem. Several had clambered their way to power by devious means. Most had filled their purses and bank accounts dishonestly. All were rapacious consumers of art, obsessed with the glamour and power it conferred. But who were these people, and why had they wanted Raphael's painting so badly?

I first saw the painting many years ago, hanging, where it is now, in the Raphael room at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. As I gazed at it, I had no inkling of what momentous events it had witnessed, the dangers it had survived, the passions it had engendered, and the mysteries it contained. In the intervening years, it continued to dance before my eyes. This exquisite work of art had unleashed its magic on me too. Of course I was in no position to have it for myself, but instead, now that I knew something of its story, I was possessed with the urge to pursue this mystery, to follow the trail and discover what lay beyond the aesthetic attractions of this masterpiece.

Although Urbino is no longer the place of patronage and power it was in the sixteenth century, its architectural glories are still there, reassuringly little changed, and the shrill and gaudy melee of continuing life swirls in little eddies all over its piazzas and up and down its precariously steep surrounding streets. If you were to go there today, you could still inhale something of the place where this painting was born, perhaps catch a glimpse of a ghostly footprint.

It was autumn when I was there, a time of ungraciously bitter winds, which stung my cheeks as I spun round trying to imagine the scene of Raphael's summons. Dozens of university students hurried across the piazza, trailing long knitted scarves and bags of books. They stopped here and there to confer in little huddles before disappearing into cafés for coffee and canoodling. Tourists ambled across the uneven flagstones, their heads buried in their guidebooks, trailed, perhaps unwittingly, at a distance by pickpockets. And all around were shops and stalls flogging cheap goods, their determinedly jocular proprietors the descendants of the colorful hustlers of old. As I walked around, I tried to flesh out imagined pictures of that earlier reality, with all its maddening and unpossessable detail.

The massively precocious Raphael must have been barely able to contain his jubilation at the news of his commission. Here was one of the most influential and enlightened courts in Italy summoning him to paint a greatly symbolic picture for the king of England. It was to be beautiful. It was to convey an important message and carry with it a strange power. And although Raphael did not know it at the time, its many-sided allure was to take it on a journey to fabulous worlds as yet undreamed of.

For one so young the request was almost unimaginable. How could this youth, not long out of adolescence, possibly have won such a prestigious commission? The answer is that Raphael was no ordinary twenty-three-year-old. The story of his development as a painter was familiar to Guidobaldo; it is worth recounting, for it reveals much about the ruthless ambitions of Raphael, ambitions that were to be invested, at their most intensive, in this small but radiant painting that would go on to dazzle the world.

It was well known that Raphael had matured astonishingly fast as a painter. His name was already famous in the region for the many Madonna and Child devotional paintings he had completed for wealthy Florentine clients. These were small and outstandingly refined works that had succeeded in spreading Raphael's name as a rising star. But he had also made his mark with a number of larger narrative paintings. One of these was the Marriage of the Virgin, commissioned by the Albizzini, a leading family in nearby Città di Castello, for the church of San Francesco. For a painter just twenty years old, this work, which now hangs in the Brera Museum in Milan, was astonishingly assured. Its powers of narrative and subtleties of perspective and design, as well as its grace, ensured that Raphael's name reached the ears of the most powerful men in the land.

Painting had always been in Raphael's blood. He was born in 1483, the only surviving child of Magia Ciarla Santi, a merchant's daughter, and Giovanni Santi, a learned poet and minor courtier at Urbino who had taken up painting late in life, just a few years before Raphael was born. As a child, Raphael had virtually grown up in his father's studio, spending his days in the small airless workroom adjoining the family house, its whitewashed walls hung with sketches, the floor strewn with supplies, sections of altarpieces, and devotional works in progress.

If you were to go there today, you would find the structural bones of Raphael's house little changed, but it is now a tourist attraction, a small house-museum, cold and unbreathing in the way house-museums so often are. It is filled with reproductions of works by Raphael and a thin little assortment of period furniture. But at the back, in a small shady courtyard, there is the original well where the boy helped his parents draw water, and a stone slab where pigments were ground. It had been worn down into a hollow. I reached out and felt its smooth surface, imagining the small boy who had stood working away there, grinding colors for his father, unaware of the reverence that would still be attached to his own name five hundred years later. Next door is the studio, now an art gallery, but still laid out as a series of rooms as it would have been in Raphael's time. I wandered round trying not to look at the gaudy acrylic landscapes being touted for sale. The place was full of tourists: Americans, French, Germans, and some Italians, haggling for a piece of art that had hung in Raphael's studio. You have to half-close your eyes to imagine the eager little boy, busying himself among his father's apprentices.

Raphael carefully observed the work going on around him as he helped with the mixing of pigments, dabbling at sketching and painting his own pictures. He must have shown early signs of promise, for soon after Giovanni died in 1494, the eleven-year-old Raphael was sent off to work in Perugia as an apprentice in the studio of Pietro Perugino, the most popular and prolific painter in central Italy.

Perugino's achievements in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel in the 1480s had brought him many major commissions in Tuscany and Umbria, and he was famous as a painter of frescoes. During the 1490s, he was commuting frequently between Florence and Perugia and constantly receiving new commissions. To complete these works he maintained a large workshop which, given his frequent absences, was required to reproduce the master's style with complete fidelity.

Arriving with little experience to speak of and only the recomm...