Raphael; The Drawings. Ashmolean Museum 1st June – 3rd September 2017

It’s always a joy to go to the Ashmolean Museum. Apart from its fantastic permanent collection it holds a soft spot in my heart as some of my courting was done there, sometimes popping in to catch a look at the Uccello Hunting scene on the way home from the cinema, so I felt extra fortunate to be in Oxford during the opening week of their new exhibition Raphael; The Drawings.

This giant of art history whose works adorns the Sistine Chapel shows his workings in this extensive and beautifully curated exhibition. Famed even in his own lifetime for his ability to capture emotion and humanity in a way his more formal predecessors had not, his sketches show how he studied and reworked people and scenes until emotion was entirely distilled on the paper.  In his drawing for Madonna and Child we see how he moves and reworks the position of Mary and the infant Jesus’s heads, tilting and re-angling and shifting them until the intimacy of the mother/child relationship is entirely palpable, and deeply touching.  His confident hand meters out a foot or a cherub in a few, scant pen-strokes. I marvelled that he could have such skill at such a young age, apparently flawless at 17, and yet as I moved through the exhibition the drawings showed more and more skill and more and more clarity of thought and line.  Similarly, pages of sketches of babies, scratched out quickly from life and then flourishing with ideas for wings, and trajectories as he visually pondered how best to illustrate the cherubims’ flight with clarity.

Around much of the exhibition I trailed behind a visually impaired lady who had a guide to describe the works to her. Nosily I listened in to her descriptions;

“This one’s an image of Charity with her four babies clamouring for attention and nourishment…” she synopsied, flatly from the exhibition notes. I wanted to interject so much.  “Charity’s face is a vision of maternal love, but somehow at the same time, exasperation. (I recognise this, for I too am the mother of four children.) Her babies are a seething, tiring mass of youthful vigour” I would have said.

And for me, this was the most compelling aspect of his work; how it reached out of its frames and across half a millenium and connected me so directly with this Roman Goddess.

On the way through the gift shop and bought a jigsaw puzzle of the Uccello hunting scene, to give those four babies of mine, the product of those years of courting in the Ashmolean, and felt a little, comforting wave of Charity’s serenity.

http://Raphael; The Drawings Ashmolean Museum 1st June – 3rd September 2017