Raphael’s Poetics is an ambitious and thought-provoking book. Its focus on the literary Umwelt of Rome’s greatest painter in the High Renaissance, Raphael Sanzio da Urbino, is innovative and illuminating, and fits in with recent research done on the revival of classical culture in the emerging power of the papal state under Julius II and Leo X (such as the work by C. Kleinbub, reviewed in RQ 64.4 [2011]: 1219–20). Raphael appears to be one of the architects of the pictorial program to support the policies of these popes, as David Rijser refreshingly shows us with the pertinent questions that this volume tackles.

The book is divided in four main chapters, extended with an intermezzo, in which the author unfolds a Renaissance-inspired view of art in general. Its main thesis is that there is no essential difference between poetical and pictorial approaches to art, which in fact draws upon preromantic ideas about the hierarchy in, or unity of, different manifestations of the arts. In Raphael’s Poetics, it is poetry, sculpture, and painting that are subject to analysis. The unifying element is the perception of the viewer of a work of art, and the imagination, or fantasia, which directs the interpretation of the depicted scene. On the side of the artist, it is his genius that determines the outcome of his activity. In Raphael’s case it is especially his gratia, charis, or charm, which offers a key explanation for his person as well as his work (these two are not essentially different — it all comes down to style). Apart from charm, learning and intelligence are characteristic of the painter: he not only was an avid interpreter and emulator of ancient art (as is shown by his Galatea in the Chigi villa on the Tiber, on the model of the second-century author Philostratos’s Eikones), but also was advised by learned scholars of his time. One of them was the actor Fedra Inghirami, who is identified as the designer of the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican Palace and who based his work on Lorenzo Valla’s precepts of style, thus inviting an allegorical reading of the frescoes.

These examples of the unification of theory, poetry, sculpture, and painting are further illustrated by the epigrams that were attached to the Apollo Belvedere in the cortile of the Vatican Palace and to Corycius’s altar in the Sant’Agostino. This altar, a composition of Isaiah showing a Hebrew text to Anna, Maria, and Christ, provides an interesting mix of biblical (Old and New Testament), classical (Greek and Latin), pictorial (sculpture and painting), and literary (poetry and prose) motifs that only can be fully understood when approached as a coherent whole, as Rijser convincingly shows. Reviving the epigram culture was intended to bring to new life the aurea aetas of ancient Rome, much in the way that Vergil in his Eclogues lets nature sing the praise of a new era under a just ruler.

There is a shadow side to this study. The book, in a style as sweeping as it is elevated (Shakespeare is frequently peeping through), suffers from a lack of careful revision. Misprints aside, more than twenty titles referred to in the text — the instances of indirect reference (“quoted by”) not counted — are not mentioned in the bibliography. Spelling errors abound in the rendering of Italian texts especially (most of them taken from Shearman’s monumental Raphael in Early Modern Sources [2003]), while Raphael’s letter to Leo X on the antiquities, transmitted in three rather different versions, is quoted without distinction (see, e.g., Rijser, 62–63; Shearman, 512, 539–43). In general, however, following from the nature of the work, its quotations are frequent, long, and often well commented on (especially Rijser’s important work on the Vaticanus Latinus 2742 is worth mentioning), which makes the unnecessary flaws in the text the more regrettable.

These criticisms should not hinder the interested reader from consulting this otherwise magnificent work, which is daring in its scope and design. The numerous pictures accompanying the text (supplemented with eighteen color plates) make reading the book even more of a pleasure, while the theories proposed may provoke further debate for years to come. It is Rijser’s great achievement to have articulated the familiarity of the Renaissance with the classics by viewing its art through the eyes of scholars, artists, and art lovers of the time.