If there can be any consolation for the sad passing of John Shearman in August of 2003, it is the legacy of this magisterial book, which the author was able to see through to press before his death and which will continue to impact future scholarship for generations to come. Raphael in Early Modern Sources (1483–1602) succeeds Vincenzo Golzio’s venerable but outdated Raffaello nei documenti (Vatican City: Pontifica Accademia dei Virtuosi al Pantheon, 1936), a book Shearman greatly admired (he confesses in his introduction ² that while his own book was taking shape over several decades, he affectionately referred to his files for the new volume by the name “Golzio II”). In its proportions, however, the new “Golzio” compares to its precursor much as the new basilica of Saint Peter’s did to the old. And Shearman has done far more than multiply the corpus of Raphael documents (to about 1,100 separate entries); through painstaking analysis, he has also thoughtfully constructed a historical and critical context that illuminates each document’s meaning and historical significance. In a broader sense, Raphael in Early Modern Sources sums up four decades of research by one of the world’s most rigorous and reflective art historians on one of history’s greatest and most influential artists. It leaves the landscape of Italian Renaissance art irrevocably reconfigured.

The book presents written sources for the majority of Raphael’s major works, though the caprices of destiny have left many lacunae. Not a single contemporary document, for example, survives for the Sistine Madonna. But other aspects of Raphael’s career are surprisingly well documented, like the painter’s imaginative attempts to evade Alfonso d’Este’s agent, who was hounding him for a painting, or the spiteful gossip about his work that circulated, over many years, in the ambient of Michelangelo. Fascinating glimpses of Raphael’s intimate life emerge, from his purchases of horse fodder (461) and advice on dealing with a smoking chimney (561) to particulars about the existence of a hitherto little-known daughter (49–50). Shearman sensitively investigates the problems of Raphael the writer, who appears in many different guises: composing bread-and-butter letters to friends (111), annotating Marco Fabio Calvo’s translation of Vitruvius (397–404), describing the Villa Madama (405–13), and compiling lists of rhymes for sonnets (133, 137–38). The book is a valuable source for students of Renaissance literature, laden as it is with reactions to Raphael on the part of poets and writers, both famous and obscure. It will also prove a rich mine to political, social, and cultural historians interested in the world in which Raphael lived.

Only about one quarter of the two-volume set contains documents dating from the years of Raphael’s lifetime. The other three-fourths enable readers to trace the posthumous fate of his works, property, and—above all—his reputation. Hundreds of items, in Italian, Latin, Greek, German, French, and English, attest to the formation of the mythology of Raphael and the collecting, reproduction, and discussion of his works. The book provides a fertile field for scholars of the later cinquecento and the Baroque era by tracing the ways in which Raphael was “canonized” and held up as the embodiment of specific artistic ideals promoted by critics of those generations.    

The transcriptions of the documents are executed with scrupulous care, following modern semi-diplomatic criteria, which the author clearly sets forth in his prefatory matter. Many of the more complex documents are furnished with detailed glosses of specific passages. Most texts in humanist Latin (as opposed to the simpler, notarial language of legal texts) are translated into English, rendering the book more useful for art historians accustomed to notarial Latin but less at home in parsing convoluted humanistic prose. The bibliographies trace the fortuna critica of the individual documents, allowing readers to follow their waxing and waning influence on the field of Raphael studies over the longue durée.

Shearman’s book is well worth buying for its introduction alone, which should be required reading for all Renaissance art historians. There, the author reflects on the fortunes and misfortunes of archival research in art history from the early modern period through our own time, and how those vicissitudes reflect emerging historiographic trends. Shearman is particularly compelling as he explores the expanded role of archival research in the neonate Kunstwissenschaft of the early nineteenth century, fueled by the notion of the artist as a heroic, creative individual whose life and thought could be better understood through documentary evidence. He also explores the backlash against documentary research on the part of more traditional writers, who were fearful that the new demands of such research would stifle the creative freedom of the scholar’s pen. As late as 1875, the seminal biography of Raphael’s father Giovanni Santi, published in 1822 by Luigi Pungileoni, could be damned by a critic who complained of it as “filled, or over-filled, with notes and documents” (13). The reaction of postmodern theorists against empirical art history in the 1980s turns out to have a remarkable genealogy!

At the core of Shearman’s book lies a challenge to the persistent view of archival research as “nearly mindless … a non-interpretive exercise, like trawling, in pursuit of hitherto unknown scraps” (9), or what Herman Melville in Moby Dick called the domain of the “poor devil of a burrowing grubworm of a sub-sub-librarian.” As the author reminds us, the practice of archival research is, by its very nature, fundamentally heuristic. It brings to bear historical knowledge, interpretive skill and judgment, and—in great measure—creative intuition on the central problems of art history. Shearman cautions against the fallacious assumption, implicit in many expressions of anti-archive prejudice, that the documentary record of Renaissance art is stable and closed. He admonishes us, rather, that in the archive, as in the conservation laboratory, we share a collective responsibility not to rest complacent with the body of data we have inherited, but to plumb ever deeper and afresh the depths of what we do not yet understand.

A noted historian once quipped that the most important archival discoveries are invariably made at three o’clock in the morning. The kinds of discoveries one makes in the wee hours, of course, are those that involve asking the questions and formulating the problems that each new archival discovery can stimulate. In that same spirit, Shearman’s Raphael frames each of its sources within a painstaking historical and contextual analysis. The exhaustive discussion of individual documents is unrivaled by any previous documentary corpus in the field, with glosses on single texts often extending over many pages. But their principal arguments are laid out concisely and with the surgical precision of a restorer reintegrating a mosaic from hundreds of scattered tesserae.

Nearly a hundred pages of the text, and much of the introduction, are devoted to “phantom” documents that are mentioned in the literature but probably never existed, and to deliberate pastiches, fakes, and forgeries. The forgery of documents was endemic to the early modern period (as shown by books like Anthony Grafton’s Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990]), but spurious Raphael documents were concocted in numbers unmatched by any other Renaissance artist except Baccio Bandinelli (as discussed in the introduction to my own book, Baccio Bandinelli and Art at the Medici Court: A Corpus of Early Modern Sources [Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2004]). Shearman’s reconstruction of the Raphael fakers’ activities is a page-turning saga of forgery, pious fraud, and scholarly intrigue.

As Shearman points out, some of the false Raphael documents were created from high-minded motives. Shearman is not the first to deattribute the so-called Letter to Baldassarre Castiglione, which revolves around the Platonic notion of the artistic “idea”, but he makes a very compelling case, based on stylistic and historical grounds, for his verdict that it was written by Castiglione himself around 1522. As Shearman argues, the text belongs to an established genre of the “letter-as-portrait”; another example of the type is Castiglione’s 1519 Elegy, which creates the fictional premise that the authorial “I” belonged to the real writer’s wife. For early modern writers such as Carlo Cesare Malvasia or Giovanni Bottari, both of whom forged or doctored art-historical documents, the archive was a font of illustrative history; to them, as for Thucydides, it was right and proper for the historian to furnish a voice for his long-dead heroes. The nineteenth century, by contrast, saw the growth of a huge commercial market for autographs, which fueled the careers of both archive thieves and a new class of forgers, who now aimed their sights not at scholarship and publication but at commerce and financial gain. With Holmesian inductiveness, Shearman reconstructs the gripping history of the “Roman scriptorium,” a group of forgers active around the third quarter of the nineteenth century. These fakers endowed their products with a veneer of authenticity by incorporating unpublished information drawn from genuine archival sources—they even consulted scholars to learn what kinds of documents they wished they could find to “verify” their emerging hypotheses. Small wonder, then, that ingenuous art historians, who themselves often lacked first-hand archival experience, played right into the forgers’ hands.

Whether Shearman’s critical lens is turned upon the task of probing documents’ historical veracity or that of charting their multiple strata of meaning, this book problematizes a vast body of source material whose evidential value has all too often been taken as read. Surprisingly enough for those who like to think of documents as tidy and neat, the issues explored often revolve around the most elementary levels of signification. And the way he navigates these minefields of meaning can be as instructive as the answers he seeks: Shearman’s glosses are models of balance and characterized by a refreshing air of common sense. By reminding us just how fraught with questions the documentary record is, Raphael in Early Modern Sources leaves the reader with an inspiriting awareness of how much the archives still have to teach us—that is, if we follow Shearman’s wise example in never assuming that a document was written to tell us what we, as modern art historians, might want it to say.

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