One victim of the Covid-19 pandemic had died 500 years earlier. Raphael (1483-1520) was due to get the quincentennial treatment from some august museums. Then the doors shut. When at last his moment came, the shows were drowned out in the hubbub of a reopening world. And so a big chance was lost to arrest two centuries of reputational drift for the artist. Raphael will continue to be seen as the bronze medallist of the High Renaissance, some distance beneath Michelangelo and Leonardo, whatever his technical perfection, whatever his former standing as their equal or better.
How did his star drop? For one thing, the modern mind finds it hard to believe that so uncomplicated a lad could be so total a genius. The Raphael who comes down to us in the records is cheerful and well-adjusted, an obliging courtier, a delegator, with manners as smooth as his face and, despite being orphaned at 11, few of those Florentine neuroses. “One couldn’t write a bestseller about Rah-file,” drawled the art historian Kenneth Clark, in a dig not at the painter, but at our own demand for inner torment and outer conflict in our heroes.
We know that not all temperamental people are geniuses. But the idea persists that all geniuses are temperamental. And this isn’t just an academic mistake. It leads to the indulgence of bad behaviour: to the excusing of it as something world-historical individuals can’t help. Elon Musk is the ultimate living case in point. His followers, at best, brush off his odder doings and retweets as the waste products of a great mind. Worse, I think more than a few read genius into them. Had he the outward blandness of, say, Richard Branson, he’d be taken for what he is: a brilliant man in his core domains, but no general-purpose sage and quite often banal in his obiter dicta.