This handsome catalogue accompanied the exhibition Raphael at The Albertina Museum, Vienna (September 2017–January 2018), as the sequel to Raphael: The Drawings, at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (June–September 2017). The volume appeared in museum and trade editions, and in English and German. The three central essays in this English-language iteration were also published in the Ashmolean catalogue, where the essay by Gnann, curator at the Albertina, appeared in slightly modified form. The twin exhibitions renewed international attention to Raphael, and they redefined our appreciation for his drawings. Not since 1983, with John A. Gere and Nicholas Turner's Drawings by Raphael, at the British Museum, has there been such an ambitious and extensive focus on the artist's graphic work. A signal attribute of these recent landmark events, founded on each institution's major holdings of Raphael, was simply their scale: the Ashmolean show featured 120 sheets, numbering, then, close to one quarter of Raphael's surviving drawings, while the Albertina exhibited some 130 drawings alongside twenty paintings. These exhibits allowed for an intimate, immersive, and, above all, riveting engagement with the artist in action. Visitors in both cities encountered an experimental, emotive, and sensuous personality, as opposed, perhaps, to the staid, classicizing figure of earlier reception histories. Viewers were presented with the variety of Raphael's graphic media, all handled with beguiling virtuosity: pen and ink, red and black chalk, charcoal, silverpoint, metal stylus, and brush with wash and white heightening.

In addition to the catalogue's authoritative entries, the volume offers four important and provocative essays: Gnann's account of “Raphael's Drawings: On Their Stylistic Features and Function in the Design Process,” Ben Thomas's “Raphael and the Idea of Drawing,” Catherine Whistler's “Raphael's Hands,” and Luisa Gusmeroli's “On the Restoration of the Madonna Dell'Impannata.” This combination, together with fine, good-sized reproductions, a bibliography, and comparative illustrations, constitutes an accessible, timely, and inspiring resource for students and scholars alike.

In his opening essay, Gnann distinguishes Raphael's process and style from those of his Umbrian teachers, especially Perugino, as well as those of his contemporaries. He begins with a comparison between a pen-and-ink sketch for the Esterházy Madonna and a red-chalk study for The Marriage of Alexander and Roxane. This is an effective and persuasive tactic, for the author deftly and convincingly encapsulates each work's distinctive formal characteristics before reflecting on stylistic continuities such as the “inner animation of the figures” (14). Gnann attends to the varied functions of the drawings, conceived as active elements in a disciplined and evolving process. Ben Thomas, who was co-curator, with Catherine Whistler, of the Ashmolean exhibition, gracefully balances his analysis of a selection of drawings with a consideration of Raphael's theoretical writings—his meditations, for example, on the identities of the painter and architect in light of Vitruvius. Thomas portrays an artist intent on privileging expression above all else; expression and affect are achieved, he argues, “through the reiteration and variation of modules” (37). Rather than the idealist and Platonic Raphael of previous generations, Thomas's Raphael is a systematic practitioner who drew on Alberti as well as on a Vitruvian construction of the “idea.” Raphael pioneered “a process of inventing forms of expression through the arrangement of modules guided by proportion and symmetry” (31). In her stimulating essay, Whistler, who is keeper of Western art at the Ashmolean, embarks on an original and multivalent exploration of “the eloquent hand”—“as an index of character and emotion, and his [Raphael's] interest in gesture as part of an evolving language of persuasive communication” (41). This focus on one compositional element invites parallel interpretive models by which to think about the constituents of figural rhetoric in early modern visual culture.

A unifying aspect of these essays is their meticulous and sensitive attention to individual works alongside their tactful avoidance of generalization. Each author implicitly shares the view that a drawing is an inimitable product of learning while also an object of learning in its own right. Raphael's drawings are testament to the imperatives of his commissions, but they equally register the inspiration drawn from fellow artists, the most intense observation of the antique and of nature, and the protean and mercurial revelations of his imagination.