How “literate” was Raphael’s art? This question stands at the core of David Rijser’s Raphael’s Poetics, an ambitious study dedicated to the polymorphic relation—as the subtitle goes—between art and poetry in High Renaissance Rome. Divided into four chapters, each devoted to a major work by Raphael, and accompanied by a methodological interlude (surprisingly situated toward the end), the book is a partially revised version of a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Institute for Culture and History at the University of Amsterdam in 2006. As a result of Rijser’s multidisciplinary background (he is an intellectual historian with a specific interest in classical literature), the volume combines different approaches, from iconography to reader-oriented criticism and close-reading strategies. Special attention is given to the relevance of context—especially, literary context—and the importance of “living experience” for a historical interpretation and appreciation of works of art (an issue also recently expounded in The Secret Life of Artworks: Exploring the Boundaries between Art and Life [Caroline van Eck, Joris van Gastel, and Elsje van Kessel, eds., Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2014]).

Raphael’s art is considered through the lens of early sixteenth-century neo-Latin poetry, his images being investigated as the reflection of a cultural system imbued with classical literature and mythology. In this light, literary sources are construed not as descriptive texts (or, as Rijser sharply puts it, “instruments for Quellenforschung” (xxi)), but as cultural devices designed “to make visible and palpable subjects and places removed in time and space” (xxi). Building on research by scholars on Greco-Latin poetics (especially Willem J. Verdenius and Don P. Fowler), Rijser draws attention to the literary notion of evidentia, or vividness, claiming that both painting and literature share a common teleology, for they make their contents as real and present as possible in order to create a constant interaction with the recipient (a perspective recently addressed by Christian K. Kleinbub in Vision and the Visionary in Raphael [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011]) (click here for review). In fact, Rijser argues, Raphael’s art proves to be an ideal field for exploring this relation because of both the cultural relevance of his patrons and the attention devoted to his work by humanists and literati: an attention that generated a large profusion of poems and epigrams in his honor. Some of these texts are presented and thoroughly commented on by Rijser for the first time, and their publication is certainly a merit of this book, insofar as it contributes to expanding the corpus established by John Shearman some ten years ago (John Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, 1483–1602, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) (click here for review).

The first chapter, “Nature’s Anxiety: Epigram and Biography As a Guide to Raphael’s Achievement,” introduces the topic by considering the poetic reaction to Raphael’s death on Good Friday 1520, and the contextual foundation of the artist’s myth. Rijser analyzes a number of epigrams and other early epigraphical texts (including the funerary inscription on Raphael’s tomb in the Roman Pantheon (22)), stressing their impact in the making of Raphael’s “hagiography.” Baldassare Castiglione’s funerary epigram of 1520 (32–33), in which Raphael and the artifex god Aesculapius are compared, provides a good example in this respect, revealing the high potential of poetry in the creation of long-lasting metaphors and critical topoi of celebration. Rijser rightly suggests that typological reading—that is, the strategy of creating connections between persons or events across time and space—was especially relevant in this process, determining multifaceted parallels between the past and present. A similar process is also operative in Giorgio Vasari’s text, where poetic metaphors are digested into key concepts of art history, as is the case of gratia-grace ((79 ff.) exhaustively treated also by Patricia A. Emison in Creating the “Divine” Artist: From Dante to Michelangelo [Leiden: Brill, 2004]) (click here for review).

Chapter 2, “Rule without End: Virgil and Horace at the Vatican Stanza della Segnatura,” investigates the poetical resonance of Raphael’s frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, interpreting them as a visual manifesto of the papacy of Julius II and its “undeniably Augustan spirit” (118). Rijser draws a telling parallel with Augustus’s Rome, emphasizing the role played by sixteenth-century humanists and theologians in proclaiming the centrality of the new Rome through their effort to re-create the magnificence of the imperial past. A key figure in this context is Tommaso “Fedra” Inghirami, the famous Roman intellectual and tragic actor—his performances in Seneca’s tragedies were hugely acclaimed—who was appointed papal librarian in 1510, soon after the completion of Raphael’s frescoes. Following a major trend in the scholarship (recently summarized in Paul Taylor, “Julius II and the Stanza della Segnatura,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 72 (2009): 103–41), Rijser implicitly endorses Inghirami’s role as an iconographic adviser by interpreting Raphael’s frescoes in the light of his commentary on Horace’s Ars poetica. Inghirami’s overall conception of poetry, Rijser claims, “appears to be reflected in the art of Raphael in the Stanza” (140), especially in Raphael’s emphasis on unity and dispositio. However, the visual evidence provided in this case (as well as for other iconographical motifs of the Stanza della Segnatura supposedly inspired by Inghirami (148 ff.)) is not always straightforward and compelling.

Chapter 3, “Let No One without Poem Enter: The Coryciana, Raphael and the Roman Intellectual Context,” further explores Raphael’s connection with the intellectual milieus of Rome, bringing into focus the figure of Johannes Goritz of Luxembourg, nicknamed “Corycius.” A distinguished member of the curia under Leo X, Goritz commissioned Raphael to paint the fresco with the Prophet Isaiah in Sant’Agostino, Rome (ca. 1511–12), subsequently assembling a collection of poems known as Coryciana (published in 1524, but gathered in the previous decade) to celebrate Raphael’s painting and the nearby Madonna and Child with Saint Anne (1512) by Andrea Sansovino. Defined by Rijser as “poetic altarpieces, abounding in quotation from ancient literature just as the visual arts quoted from the ancient remains” (189), the poems of Coryciana offer an ideal standpoint for a scrutiny of the critical responses to images in Raphael’s Rome, as well as for an observation of the interplay between literature and the visual arts specific to that period. Analogies between the two fields are found in particular in the common ground of prophecy and in the related notion of a “returning Golden Age” connected with the neo-Virgilian mode of contemporary culture. These ideas were especially promulgated by the Augustinian friar Egidio da Viterbo, an “avowed Platonist and an ardent advocate for church reform” (209), who is also identified here as a plausible candidate for the “conception of the program” (211) of the Goritz Chapel.

Be that as it may, Rijser seems to be more concerned with the “webs of allusions” implied in poetical texts than with the search for a historically defined “iconographical program” (250), a notion implicitly criticized in the interlude (“Silenus’ Song” (243–70)). There Rijser expounds his approach to the visual arts of the Renaissance, tentatively defined as an “associative grammar” (255). In other words, Rijser’s hermeneutical strategy is based on the assumption that poetry “encodes” viewers’ responses and that literature sets paradigms of reception (also defined as “frames of references” (353)) which enable the reader to understand correctly the visual contents of works of art.

This approach is fully exploited in chapter 4, “Airy Nothing Gets a Local Habitation and a Name: Art, Poetry and the Owner of the Villa Farnesina,” where a comprehensive reading of the frescoes in the Sala di Galatea at the Farnesina is combined with a detailed examination of their literary background and patronage. Commissioned by the wealthy Sienese banker Agostino Chigi and completed about 1514, Raphael’s frescoes are considered here a sort of “instantiation” of motifs from Latin literature, especially pastoral poetry, whose hermeneutical potential had already been probed by the contemporary poems of Blosio Palladio (Suburbanum Augustini Chisii (1512)) and Egidio Gallo (De viridario Augustino Chigii (1511)). According to Rijser, ancient and modern poems provide a coherent literary setting for the Sala di Galatea, where painting and poetry cooperate to design a cohesive microcosm, “the one by creating pictures, the other by supplying the words” (339). Rijser then proceeds to a close reading of the gallery, producing new evidence for the interpretation of the mythological lunettes and pendentives, in which he sees the presence of elements from the patron’s life translated into mythological tales.

Raphael’s Poetics deserves commendation for raising large and important questions about the intellectual nature of Raphael’s art and inspiration. Rijser displays a remarkable command of classical poetry and neo-Latin sources, which are translated in the text and indexed at the end of the volume. His thoughtful analysis of concepts such as interaction, typology, and visibility will undoubtedly appeal to scholars interested in the connection between words and images. However, the volume also presents some controversial points, in particular with regard to the notion of “context,” which is generally intended in its broader, overarching, and even transhistorical meaning. Little attention is devoted to single aspects of institutional history, or to the study of individuals and institutions in the promotion of taste, giving instead priority to the textual analysis of the poems. A similar criticism also applies to the visual evidence provided to support some of the book’s claims, evidence that is sometimes scarce and conjectural, as well as frequently linked to details of minor relevance (as in the case, for instance, of the “knot motive” in the Disputa, interpreted as a specific reference to Inghirami’s “enigmatum nodi” (148)).

Moreover, the book would have profited from a more substantial editorial revision (typos and misprints are frequent) and bibliographical excavation, especially on the side of the art-historical literature. Some seminal works are neglected, such as Julius von Schlosser’s pioneering study on the Stanza della Segnatura (Julius von Schlosser, “Giusto’s Fresken in Padue und die Vorläufer der Stanza della Segnatura,” Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 17 (1896): 13–100), and some areas of scholarship (especially recent North American literature) are in general overlooked. More exhaustive information in terms of bibliography would have certainly contributed to situating the author within a broader critical debate. This limitation is even more evident if one considers Rijser’s ambition to bring, as the back cover claims, “a wholly new perspective to the scholarly discussion.” Overall, although it may accomplish less than it promises, Raphael’s Poetics provides useful insight into Raphael’s world of the early 1510s, especially for a reader interested in the problematic relation between art and literature.