When I used to give a survey course for first-year students, I dreaded December. That was when I reached the High Renaissance and my audience fell away. It was not only the alternative seasonable employment that left the slopes of the theatre to echo vacantly my conventional claims for the ideal. Although I did not disbelieve the convention, it was hard to feel sure that the perfections of Leonardo and Michelangelo - the ideally empirical theory of knowledge and the ideal of human physique in the likeness of God - did not outclass the merely intelligent perfection of pictorial form, which was the apparent distinction of Raphael.

LRB 15 March 1984 | PDF Download