Raphael Symposium

Excellent three online talks from London Art Week over three days to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of Raphael. 

These were engaging and intelligent talks with high quality speakers from many of the planned celebrations and from ongoing projects and research work. They had left you feeling that you had been listening to three fascinating conversations and wanting to follow up lost of the leads and discussions. 

Day one looked at how the celebration had been affected by Covid-19. Touchingly the main three speakers were asked to show a handful of slides which encapsulated what the event had meant to them. Matteo Lanfranconi, curator of the main exhibition in Rome, showed photos of the pictures draped in black when the country went into lockdown and a picture of the front of the Pantheon where Raphael is buried on the actual anniversary and it’s deserted square again due to lockdown.

Day two focused on the tapestry cartoons in the Victoria and Albert Museum bringing together Anna Dedenedetti, the project leader for the refurbishment of the Raphael Court in the museum, with Michaela Zurla, who has oversite of the set of the tapestries in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua and Helen Wyld, curator of historic textiles at the Museum of Scotland who had an extensive knowledge of other sets particularly those made for Charles I at Mortlake.

Day three moved on to talk about collectors of  Raphael starting with looking at what was in the Medici collection plus a focus on the four they actually commissioned. This was followed by a fascinating talk looking at who the owner of the cartoons in Genoa might have been who sold them to Charles I then a look at  Prince Albert’s work to document and collect prints or photographs of all Raphael’s known works.