Ingrid D. Rowland on Art History, Raphael, and Disegno

In this episode of Private Life, the art historian Ingrid D. Rowland joins Jarrett Earnest for an in-depth discussion about art history and disegno, an Italian word for “design” that was also a Renaissance-era concept describing some artists’ ability simultaneously to draw and to conceive of a grander scheme in their work. Rowland also talks about the lives and work of some of the Italian Renaissance’s most significant figures: Raphael; Caravaggio; Giorgi Vasari, a sixteenth-century artist and writer from Florence; and Agostini Chigi, a banker and art patron.  

 

Rowland is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Notre Dame. Her most recent book is The Lies of the Artists: Essays on Italian Art, 1450–1750 (2024). In 2017, she cowrote the biography The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari. She has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books since 1994, writing extensively on art, art history, architecture, and theater. Her debut in our pages was “Character Witnesses,” an essay about Renaissance portrait medals. Other articles have included “Caravaggio Lost and Found,” about two rediscovered Caravaggio paintings, “Roman Rivalries,” about Michelangelo and Sebastiano, and “The Virtuoso,” a rapturous review of a 2020 Raphael exhibition in Rome.  

Read the essays discussed in this episode and many others with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website. 

Creators and Guests

Host

Jarrett Earnest

Jarrett Earnest has contributed essays to the New York Review of Books on artists ranging from Tom of Finland to Jack Whitten. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) and has edited several collections of criticism, including volumes of Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl as well as artist's writings by Nayland Blake and Jesse Murry. His curatorial projects include the acclaimed 2019 exhibition "The Young and Evil" at David Zwirner gallery, New York.

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Jarrett Earnest: This is Private Life, a New York Review podcast. I'm Jarrett Earnest, and today I'm speaking with Ingrid Rowland. Ingrid Rowland is a historian who lives in Rome and has been contributing to the New York review of books since the early 90s on many things, including architecture, theater, contemporary art, and above all, on art history and the history of the Renaissance. One of my personal favorite books of hers is called The Collector of Lives. Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art from 2017, which she co-authored with Noah Charney. And that book tells the story of a 16th century artist who created the template for art history and criticism that we still live with today, with his book, which we now know as The Lives of the Artists. Just before this conversation, Rowland and I had each visited the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Raphael Sublime Poetry, which you will review in an upcoming issue. We reference works in that show throughout our conversation, as well as Raphael's relationship with Agostino Chigi, the Renaissance banker and great patron of Raphael, which Rowland has studied and written about at length. Partly I'm thinking about the wonderful book that you wrote on Vasari. But I wonder if you could explain for people who don't necessarily understand the status of those drawings in the Raphael show and how we might think about them and the fact that they were saved and that we treasured and looked at and how that related to the shifting status of the artist that Raphael himself kind of embodies.

Ingrid Rowland: There's Vasari who was born in 1511, so he's born right when Raphael's painting the Stanza della Signatura and just taking basically Raphael takes off about 1510. He was hired to do the School of Athens and what we always call the dispute about the sacrament but it's really the triumph of theology and he gets the contract in 1508 as one of a team and then by 1509 he's about it. Right that moment is when Giorgio Vasari is born in Arezzo of a family that Vazio means potter. So he's really George Potter and he's evidently intelligent so he gets a non-craftsman's education which Raphael didn't. Raphael went right into craft even though his father was a poet. And so what you see with Raphael is his. Effort personally to take himself out of a traditional social milieu, which is that of high-end craftsmanship, and become something else. And the way that you become something else is that you say your inspiration is divine. And that puts you into a category of human being that educated Italians know about from Plato, where Plato talks about the different kinds of. Divine inspiration you can have and that art is one of the ways along with poetry and philosophy where you get an intuition of the divine world and then you manifest it in our physical world. And so Vasari grows up with this ideal already happening but nobody's ever thought writing about artists as if they're as important as literary figures. That had never happened. And so his great intuition, which was sparked by the intellectual entourage of Pope Paul III, who was a young cardinal when Raphael starts his career, Alessandro Farnese's cardinalship was awarded in 1493 because he introduced the pope, the Borgia pope, to his last mistress and as a reward. Young Alessandro got a cardinal's hat, and so he's the most decadent, spoiled rat snob in the whole court because the Farnese go back to the ninth century, and he's lording it over everybody else. And then he's one who tells Giorgio Vasari, through one of his associates, you should really try writing a biography of artists and elevate them to... Stature of literary figures which he does with howling success because he's a really good writer and that goes back or he's oh good writer he's highly intelligent and he's massive gossip. It's right there at the foundations of what we do, Ingrid. It's gossip. Gossip means you're interested in people. And he's really interested in people. And so he also brings with himself the prejudices of somebody who gets his big break with the Medici's as a little boy, but he's from Arezzo. And Arezzo was colonized by Florence. And so everybody in Arezzo hates Florence by definition, just as everybody in Siena hates Florence, by definition. This still happens. That's why Siena Cathedral still has. The lances that skewered the Florentines at Montreperty in 1260, and every time Florence drives me crazy, you can go to Siena and look at those skewers and think, yes. He's also not going to badmouth Tuscany because he really thinks that the Etruscans had it all over the Romans, and the Farnese are Romans, but they try to be Etruscan. And one of the really... Funny things that happens in Vasari's career, along with Raphael's younger associate Antonio da Sangallo, is they end up working for both Paul III and for young Cosimo de Medici. Deadly enemies, and they both want Etruscan-themed architectural projects. And so you've got two rivals, They want to beat the same drum. How do you do it? And so Vasari very cleverly invents a kind of northern Etruscan style and a southern Etruscans style, so everybody can be an Etruscon, but they don't have to be like each other and regional rivalry can be preserved.

Jarrett Earnest: One of the lines in your book on Vasari that was so illuminating for me, because it was so clean and it held so much, was the observation that the book that Vasari wrote, The Lives of the Most Excellent Artist Painter, what is it? Painters, Sculptors, and Architects? You say it's the first book written in Europe about working people, about people who work for a living, Which is what artists... They work with their hands, they work, but the transform, the strange alley-oop of it is it's also that what they're working with is their mind. It's the transformation of it to being an intellectual pursuit that is inextricable from a manual pursuit that I think is a knot at the very center of our understanding of what art and artists are and it's right there in Vasari. So could you talk to me about that a little bit? Yeah, I think

Ingrid Rowland: Part of it is that he himself knows what he's doing. So he is a working person who, through education, got promoted into this other realm. And so when he paints, it's always densely intellectual. And when he writes his own life in the lives of the artist, he explains everything he's done. And so I did the Immaculate Conception, and this is what I did. I did this allegory and he lets you know how he's thinking and it shows you how complex his thinking is. And therefore all those other pictures that you're seeing from other artists are complex. And so he explains to his readers what these works of art mean and how much thought has gone into the conceiving of them, not only the themes, but also how you mass figures. And so he's saying, look, there's this intellectual content, but it covers not only the subject of the painting, it's also just how you go about the act of painting or sculpture or architecture, that there's thought behind manual labor, no less than if you take your hand and write a poem with it.

Jarrett Earnest: And he himself started amassing drawings and valuing them because they were a record of both the craft of the drawing but the intellectual work of the artist.

Ingrid Rowland: Yeah and he's really the first person to do that and so he personally elevates the value of these things through his collection and you know what that means it's also him talking about his collection to people. So that there's a great work of publicity going on simply in conversation. This you can't write all those lives without talking to lots and lots and lot of people and he had assistants, but his assistants have to talk to him. So there's this incredible literal conversation behind the book. And then he's got his scrapbooks to demonstrate it. And you can see, say, in the show, there's the drawing of the cartoon of Leo X, where it's a weird shape because it's just a scrap that was picked up after it had been used to pounce. It's the French word for punch, anglicized. So what you do is make a full-size drawing and then put pinholes around the lines you want and then you blow powder, charcoal powder, through the holes and so it's like connect the dots. And then that gives you an outline of your drawing transferred to the painting surface, whether it's fresco or a piece of canvas or a panel of wood. That's a working drawing that then you don't even expect it to survive.

Jarrett Earnest: When I had my face pressed up against the glazing to look at those drawings, one of the great interests of getting very close is to see what was articulated in the pouncing. To see like, did he need to describe, he's not describing the edge of a nose, it's the shadow that describes the interior of the nose because it's like marking out where the light and the dark. I was really attentive to like, what information did he want to transfer over and what was not necessary. And that's, so what you're saying is that when we look at a show like Raphael's show that's at the Met right now, with this incredible proliferation of drawing, this is about the active revaluation of parts of art making that would never have been saved before as valuable. Could you talk about what that means in those Raphael drawings in particular?

Ingrid Rowland: And one of my favorites in that show is one that I'd seen before in the Ashmolean, where he's got a teeny tiny little ink sketch of a Madonna and child. And then there's a landscape and then he literally telescopes it out. And then he makes another. And so what you see is him doing a kind of technique that seems totally modern. And then there's that one drawing where he's got a Madonna and then he's gotta building right next to it and then the plan of the building. And so he's thinking about all kinds of things at the same time, but yet he thinks having, if not read Vitruvius, certainly had Vitruvious explained to him. And Vitruvia says, Any good architecture has to be rooted in the proportion of the human body because architecture's for people. And then he explains how, first there's mom and dad, or there's the handsome young man, and there's the matron, and so he's making images of handsome young men and matrons, thinking of them both as. Human beings, but also as principles of order for the architecture that he's thinking about. So I think he's multitasking at all times. And I suppose because they have such a rich poetic tradition of metaphors and images through Petrarch and other writers that they probably just think that way, natural. And it's the way, if you do life drawing in Italy. The models just pose like classical statues automatically. And I wouldn't know about that nose shadow if I hadn't been working on faces and life drawing. And it's not the nose itself, it really is the shadow that gets the projection. Yeah. The face is a three-dimensional thing rather than.

Jarrett Earnest: A flat

Ingrid Rowland: MOVE

Jarrett Earnest: Am I right to understand that you are saying you yourself take life drawing classes? Yeah. Have you always?

Ingrid Rowland: No, I was interested in drawing when I was a kid, and then my weakness was disegno drawing. Can you explain what that means? That it's the word that's at the absolute heart of Vasari's way of thinking about art and Raphael's way thinking about art, and it's been codified really by them in their age. What part of elevating your discipline to be a disciplined that's not from manual arts high school, but to classical high school or say really or something or collegiate, is that you have to have a philosophical basis for what you do. And one of the places they look is again, Vitruvius, where design is arrangement, but the first arrangement is the cosmos. So the universe is arranged, therefore a work of art. To be a proper citizen of an ordered cosmos must itself also be ordered. And so, disegno means design or drawing and the Tuscan tradition from which both Raphael and Vasari basically come. That drawing orders your mind. And there's a famous quote, which I've flogged a number of times in the New York Review, where there's the note of Michelangelo to one of his pupils that just says, disegna Antonio, disegnya Antonio, disegno Antonio, non sprechi tempo. Draw Antonio, draw Antonio, draw and don't waste time. So they think by drawing what you see, you also begin to understand better the order of creation or the bits of creation that you're drawing and through the ordering of the bits of creation you can get to a more comprehensive picture. And there was a point I was teaching in the school of architecture and I thought I can't watch the kids draw and not draw myself. So I went to my colleague and said, can I draw with you? And he said, yes. And then the great part is One day he had a drawing and he said, I don't know who this is. And I said, it's mine. He said, oh my God, I graded you. What was your grade? A minus. That's good. And from David Mayernick, A minus was just fine.

Jarrett Earnest: So what do you think you learned from that experience of coordinating your hand with your eye of actually doing the drawings?

Ingrid Rowland: In some ways it's everything, because there's the stage when you start out and the hip bone's connected to the thigh bone suddenly becomes supremely important, because if you don't get that, the whole thing falls apart. And then watching how shadows work, and watching how space happens, and so foreshortening, because one of the great virtuosic things you can see Raphael doing. There's that wonderful drawing where you have a young man's head and an old man's had, and then a bunch of hands coming straight at you. And how do you make it look like a hand coming at you instead of a hand with insanely stubby fingers? And Di Zenio teaches you that. So Di Zenia also teaches you about space, these invisible structures that are still holding the world together. And then they are. See about a hundred years after Filippo Brunelleschi codified one-point perspective and the Romans had perspective but they played with it in a way that the Renaissance didn't and I think that has to do with the Romans feeling on top of the world and interestingly both ancient Greece in the classical period and this period of the Italian culture They're highly conscious of a previous civilization that made great big things that are still lasting that they can't do. And it stimulates these two cultures in remarkable ways. And that culture is Egypt? What is, is the Treskens is what? So in Greece, it's the Bronze Age. Right, right, right. And then you've also got these Greeks who are. In the sixth century B.C., go down to Egypt and serve as mercenaries, and they see Egyptian architecture. They think, we've got a lot of stone, we can do that. And so these people come back, having seen places like Hatshepsut's temple, let's try it with our limestone, and then you get Doric architecture. And at the same time, you've got Eastern Greeks looking at the Persians thinking. We can do that. And so you've got these two different strains that are fundamentally inspired by outside cultures. Plus you've these giants that lived before you.

Jarrett Earnest: You did. I want to linger for a moment on this conversation around disegno, which means the way that it looks and its conceptualization at the same time, or that there is a fluidity between them or a contiguity between. And where does drawing fit in relationship to that conceptualization? Because I think of drawing as a way that on one hand feels so intimate. In related to thinking itself, or direct observation, even more than painting. Um, but yeah, what do you think? There's that.

Ingrid Rowland: One drawing in this show that has a little, I'll say cupid for people, what they would have been called in Raphael's day are spiritelli, so little chubby baby. And so you get chubby, baby, and then the chubby babies shifts his pose, and pretty soon you've got a chubby baby spiraling into space. And so it's as if he's twirling this figure around. In his disegno, it was just the most remarkable thing because one of his last paintings is the Transfiguration, which does the same thing. And you can't see it in the Trans figuration where it's displayed in the Vatican Museums. You have to go into the doorway between that exhibition hall and the next, and suddenly the whole thing pops out in three dimensions and what you've got is this vortex. That spinning around and that squashing the apostles down. Somehow in this eye of the storm up pops Jesus. Elijah on one side and so he's between two prophets and so they're completely defying gravity as we know it. It's a space that's not our space. He's inventing a new heavenly space that doesn't even work like earthly space and the person who picks that up is El Greco, El Greko, I think. Had to see Raphael, because Raphael's the only person that could have given him that kind of heavenly space that he does better than anybody, where he just, the laws of physics are blown apart in El Greco heaven. But Raphael is already starting that, and so he's using Di Zenio to explore other worlds, as well as what he's seeing. That drawing just seems to me the distillation of this, draw what you see becomes, draw that which cannot be seen.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, that move between like the drawing, which is observation, direct observation to abstraction, feels like it encompasses the scope of disegno, what they mean by disegnu as like a space of thought. And that art is a contribution to that. It's a contribution thinking.

Ingrid Rowland: Most gentlemen did design you. So an educated scholar or a prince write poetry and draw. And so somebody like Sigismund Romalatesta, who's, I shouldn't have a soft spot in my heart for him, but I do, but he designed his own fortresses. And so he's not just a mercenary soldier, he's also a military architect.

Jarrett Earnest: Speaking of having a soft spot, I think one of the great pleasures of this kind of scholarly work or writing life is finding, like reading all of your work, I can identify the people that you do have a kind of soft spot for, and they're very unusual in the fact that they all seem to be characterized by this very extreme kind of interdisciplinarity in which different modes of knowledge and different kinds of inquiry are nested into each other. And so we've already been talking about Vasari, but I'm also thinking about your work on Giordano Bruno. And when I was reading through your Bruno book and something that I hadn't quite conceptualized before is that when he talks about his method for memory, the art of memory through images, there's a way that it's the images themselves that are used to hold ideas, to be the memory, and I want to know more about that because it seems to have huge consequence for what it is that we do, making at, looking at, and thinking about art.

Ingrid Rowland: That all got unlocked for us by Francis Yates, who used to contribute to the New York Review of Books. Even though by now I disagree with a lot of what she says, but she's the person who figured out that in antiquity, the way a lot people memorize their speeches was by setting up a visual system in their heads. And physiologically we now know that the minute you start, when a baby starts pointing, that's exactly when they start talking. So pointing and talking. Identical phases of brain development. Apparently, the first thing I would, there are some kids who are reachers and they're pointers. I was a pointer and the first word I said when I was pointing was C.

Jarrett Earnest: You were destined.

Ingrid Rowland: Some of this was obviously just hardwired in my own brain structure and I suspect Giordano Bruno was probably a pointer as well. But he's got this ability to take the classical system and then project it onto an infinite universe. And so before anybody else, everybody else is just trying to figure out is there solar system. And he says, not only is there a solar system, every star in the sky is a sun around which revolve its planet. So he's taking the conventional universe and just blowing it out to the immeasurable dimension. Makes Galileo look very tame. I'm done. Hahaha. But I think that's what I like about him is that he stuck to his guns.

Jarrett Earnest: Right, all the way-

Ingrid Rowland: to the end. And Galileo was willing to negotiate a little bit. And then he also wrote to Galileo and said, you're using Giordano Bruno. And of course he's not saying so because already Is this a way to get in big trouble?

Jarrett Earnest: Well, I think part of what I was responding to, like reading through your writing over the years for the review, is the way, it's very subtle, the way that you approach writing about visual art as in and of itself, completely inextricable from literary history, social history, texts, and belief structures are all over it. It's almost like a hologram. And I think that there is very close formal attention to exactly what's there and how it looks. But those things are never separable from the stories that they hold and the spiritual practice that they're put in the service of. And that's a particularly nuanced and I would say unusual way of writing. And I want to know how you think about those things in terms of what is the art itself? Like what constitutes it as an object of study?

Ingrid Rowland: One of the things I realized with the art of memory is that anybody who did slide lectures back in the day when we did slide lecture, that was a memory system because, and when you had a carousel it was even better because it was like Bruno's world or his wheels. And so in ninth grade I was supposed to give an oral report and my dad said to me, do it without notes and you'll get an A. And basically that's the principle behind the ancient art of memory. Do it without notes and you'll get an A. And that's why they had this elaborate art. Cicero didn't use it, he just did rote memory because he could, and not everybody could. Images we're doing for speakers in the ancient world was holding down content that was related to the images, but it was also all sorts of other things. And then you get the same thing. If you see baby Jesus or the Madonna, the Madonna is easier in some ways. So Saint Bernardino is talking about the Madonna on August 15th, 1427, and he says, okay, I'm going to tell you twelve things about the Madonna, take them three by three. She was really smart. And that just blew me away because the first thing he says about the Madonnas, she's really smart. And then he says, she knew everything. And then the angel comes and tells her and she asks him a question, but he's just a dumb angel and all he does is what he's told. So of course he doesn't get it when she asks it and so he gives her a dumb answer, but Then he has this vision of the Madonna floating up over the city of Siena, and he says that she sees it. Like, and then she gets a little higher. And so he's got bird's-eye views of the floating Madonna on the day of the Assumption of the Virgin. And the whole thing's just phantasmagoric. And so I think all these people were walking around with amazing structures of thought and belief in their heads and what I think art gave me as a way of trying to get into those skulls that were otherwise impenetrable and trying to find out what's in there. And of course, what's and there's also beauty and love and all these wonderful emotions. And so I'm not a big proponent of the ugly Renaissance, even though because being graduate student is a difficult time of life. I fixated on a number of people who were domineering in the Renaissance because they were so much unlike me as a graduate student. So Agostino Chigi, richest man in Europe, Raphael's most important private patron, and I think also probably the most interesting patron to Raphael because he doesn't think like anybody else. He's thinking about. International financial monopolies, centuries before the robber barons. And there's only one other person thinking like him in those days, and that's Jakob Fugger and Augsburg. And the two of them somehow figure out how to corner the metal trade of the planet in their own hands. When Julius II's thinking about how to make the Catholic Church extend over the globe. Commerce and theology are thinking along the same lines of globalization, which you wouldn't necessarily think, but there it is.

Jarrett Earnest: And so you have been thinking about Raphael a really long time.

Ingrid Rowland: So I know when it happened is I thought it was going to be a Greek scholar in an era where it was assumed that the American woman could not possibly know as much Greek as the British man. Yeah, so Yeah, this is obvious. Oh shit Plus if you tell people I have a new interpretation of Greek tragedy, they go to sleep. And so I was reading about Agostino Chigi on the side, and this all happens. I went to the American school in Athens when I was a junior, I was 19. And then I got to graduate school in Greek studies. One of my fellow students said, I did this summer session at the American Academy in Rome, and it might not be as wonderful as Athens, but it was pretty good. I sign up, day one, we went down to see Piazza Navona and then our instructor said, you wanna see something really remarkable. And so we got into Borromini's San Evo. And so I'm 21, which is when your brain starts being synthetic in a way that it's never done. And what happened is the Baroque architecture coincided with my brain maturing. And Boramini somehow gave me ordering principles, so my own intellectual development was triggered and consolidated by Baroque architecture, which then has this... Yeah, spiraling all to heaven. So I think I'd seen the light. And then the end of that week, so three days later, I went into the Vatican, which was then not crowded. And I looked at the School of Athens, which I knew from on my ninth birthday, I'd gotten a bunch of little books about the Fontana Pocket Library of Art. So it was everything, Dufy, Flaming, Michelangelo's Last Judgment, Leonardo. I thought I loved Leonardo and Botticelli and the School Of Athens, which was too big for the page. So it's not all of the School of Athens but even as a kid I knew. A group of people who are where they're supposed to be. So then I see the real thing. And it's so much more marvelous than an oleograph 1962 image that's partial. And then I looked over at the Parnassus and there's Homer singing to Virgil and Dante. And I realized I knew what they were saying because I knew Italian, I knew Greek, and I knew Latin. This man's fantasy world from 1511 is a fantasy world I can get into. And so then I realized, I can go into this. And I knew more classics than most art historians and therefore had a kind of solid ground. And everybody told me I was crazy.

Jarrett Earnest: What is so beautiful about that story is it lays out exactly what I was trying to understand, which is how you, in your writing, can look at images and out of them situate the text that is coming through them, is a part of them, the way that the image transforms the text, the ways that the text infuses the image, and that that is a layered process, that it's always changing in time, and in fact, it's about its transformation in time.

Ingrid Rowland: And it doesn't go away, it doesn' lose its usefulness. And so I got through my career on crusading zeal and I wanted people to be able to see that. And I realized I could help them. And you can do cheap tricks, so with my students I'd say, and I could see that Homer's saying, Mayne and I, and if they out, Pele, Ado, Ahileus, and Virgil's answering, And I remember we were on break, I know. And Dante says, no, mezzo no, come in di nostra vita. And they realize I know a lot of stuff they don't know. And there's nothing better if you want to get a student interested. I learned this trick from my classics professor as he went down the first day in our political process in the ancient world seminar. And he wrote the word dikayosune in Greek on the chalkboard. And all I wanted is to find out what Dikaio Sunate was. And then he said, I dig in the Athenian agora, and if you call it agora, I'm going to throw you out of this room. And he was so genial, and you knew he wouldn't really do it. He'd be very patient with. Then I just thought teaching was a way that you could make the good aspects of culture and that dead—so everybody says it's dead white males, and of course, it's not just dead white male, since they were brown. In the first place, there's a wonderful medieval mosaic where it's perfectly clear—it's Jesus freeing captives, one's black and one's white, and he's brown. And so most of... Finger waggling is misplaced because Vitruvius says Romans are perfect, they're smart like Egyptians, but they're brave as Germans. The Germans are very brave, but they're very stupid. And Egyptians are very smart, but they're not very brave. And so it's great because it's complete paradigm shift where The Aryan male is the dumbest thing going, and the black man is the smartest thing going. And so all of our racism is a later thing. And so for a long time, I could talk about things like racism as well with a kind of liberty because it was so far in the past.

Jarrett Earnest: And you could historicize the way that it was functioning at a particular moment. I have a question for you about the School of Athens, because something happens in that painting that I think is structural to what makes paintings such an amazing technology, almost like memory technology or storytelling technology, which is you've got all these people who lived at different times and places, and they did different things, but here they are, present in front of you together. Collaborating through time and space through an image. And the same thing, you know, in the paintings, the altarpieces where you have the different saints brought together with the Holy Family, there's this kind of time travel that happens through the image that we get to commune with by looking at it. Like even today, we were both at the Met looking at Raphael and trying to access the mind of this man from the Renaissance. And to some degree, we can penetrate beyond the boundaries of our own thought through looking at this art. And I think that's what art.

Ingrid Rowland: Takes us places we wouldn't be otherwise, and it makes us see our own world better. So when Antonello da Messina paints the shadow along the jawline of the Madonna, it tells you something about how light acts as well as the Madonna. And it just makes you look more carefully at your own world. I suspect with the School of Athens, it's also each of those figures is standing for a book. In the private library of Julius II. So it's the library talking to you in the voices of all the people in the texts. And that gets really exciting. And one of the things I most love doing in my life is going to the Vatican Library. So you can look at Raphael, and that's actually how I got into what I ended up in getting into. I wanted it to be a place where I could see Boramini and Raphael. Read in the Vatican Library and eat Italian food. You're living the dream. And it was a specific ambition. Tailored for me, it was not an ambition for anybody else. And I've always had extremely specific ambitions. One I haven't fulfilled that I probably won't is I wanted to write something for the classic series Religionsgeschichtlicher Versuche und Vorarbeiten. And I won't do that as my PhD was on Greek religion about seven years before it became fashionable. And so women writing about the theology of consecration of Greek heroes was not going to go very far. And cocktail parties, forget it. And so I latched onto Agostino, Kiji and Raphael. And so instead, I'd say... I'm working on a guy who died in his bed after working with Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia. And everybody's, tell me more, tell me more because everybody loves hearing about the Borgias. And so it was also just following, I guess, Vasari-like looking for where you can get good conversations going.

Jarrett Earnest: What did looking at this intellectual and artistic world through the lens of Kijii give you? Like as a writer, as a thinker, because it's like a different lens. He writes...

Ingrid Rowland: Absolutely without style, but very straightforwardly. And so he was my fantasy hero because he was everything a graduate student was not. So look in his bank book and it says excommunication for our creditors. And so, he'd get Julius II to excommunicate both his creditors and his debtors and he'll write to his brother. This guy's not paying up. I think we've got to go the way of excommunication. I'm so mad. This was such wish fulfillment. You'd love to excommunicate all your professors. And then looking in the Kiji Chapel and seeing that God looks an awful lot like Julius II, bringing Agostino's soul up into heaven. And I think the back of that church has both Kiji and Julius II posing as shepherds in the adoration of the shepherd. So you've got the richest man in the world and the pope, both offering lambs and humbling themselves. And that just is so wild and crazy. But I think Kiji, because he's like Raphael, inventing a place in the world for himself. There were no global bankers until Jakob Fugger and Agustino Kiji. And so he's transcending any kind of social role that his father was a good Sienese banker. And that meant if somebody went bankrupt in your group, you helped them. Kijis partner goes bankrupt and he buys him out and gets a monopoly and this guy rides back and said, that's really dirty. He's laughing all the way to the bank and so he's not scared of anything which means Raphael can work for him in a much more liberated way and so it's no accident that Raphael makes a pyramid that pierces up through a cornice and he's doing Baroque moves in art for Julius II but then of attempt to succeed in Julie. Has no fear, Agostino has no fear. The two of them in the head of the Augustinian order met in a smoke-filled room outside Viterbo and planned the salt war of Ferrara with a theological basis about why you could go and attack Ferrara for selling salt cheaper than Agostinokigi stuff. And it's all about the universal church where you can make it such. And so, for good and evil, these convolutions of intellect and interpretation of history fascinated me. And I think if you're a graduate student, realizing you can go blow people away. And that was the first time that they were using a lot of field artillery. And I found in graduate school and as an assistant professor that studying ballistics gave great satisfaction. And Kiji was an innovator in ballistics. I'd be the only person without a crew cut in the library picking up these books. It's everybody else with some mar-

Jarrett Earnest: Well, I guess the mystery of Raphael in that context is the incredible gentleness and no drama aspect of his life, as far as we know.

Ingrid Rowland: Now, and he must have worked so hard, and I think that's one of his crowning achievements, and we haven't really appreciated it until we're now living in the kind of chaos where suddenly this means something desirable again. It took this to make us realize what a titanic achievement that order is because it's in the face of plague. Invasions and plagues syphilis, which comes in 1494. You've got France, the Holy Roman Empire, and Spain all beginning to look at the Italian peninsula as a safe place for them to battle out their quarrels with each other. And that's where Raphael's finding this peace in the middle of war and turmoil.

Jarrett Earnest: How do you think about it? I mean, you've also written a number of times on Caravaggio, partly I imagine because of the incredible number of occasions that have existed in terms of just unbelievable publications and blockbuster exhibitions. There's this ravenous obsession with Caravaggio, which I also share. And, but I think like, to shift from a moment from talking about the appeal of Caravaggio in a moment of tumult, I mean, the appeal of Raphael in a movement of tumul, to what it is about the recognition we have right now, or the need that we have right now for Caravaggio.

Ingrid Rowland: Yeah, I think it's really what my friend Terence Ward says in his book about Caravaggio, that there's a compassion there. And so he's showing terrible things. He had a tumultuous life, but he's got the same kind of kindness that Raphael does. And so you see it was recently, I went to the Prado to see their new painting. That they decided was a caravaggio. And I went with my artist friend, and we just looked at it, and first thing, you've got Pontius Pilate changing his mind. How many artists can make a man change his mind, or paint a man who's changing his own mind? And the early 17th century, one comes to mind more immediately, and the other thing is that it's the ecce homo, so it's this showing of the beaten up Christ to the public. And normally the thug who's showing Christ is one of the people who's beaten him up. And what you've got is this young boy unveiling Christ and opening his mouth in wonder because this kid has figured out who it is and Pontius Pilate's figuring it out. And so you have a completely anomalous portrayal and it just breaks your heart because you realize these two people. Both know what's just happened and what's going to happen because of what they're doing. And might as well just have, and that's a signature, only Caravaggio would just plunge down into your soul. And he always just.

Jarrett Earnest: There was a note in one of your essays on Caravaggio that I wanted to bring up where you said, his paintings provide boldly independent readings of the Bible and the lives of the saints, readings that emphasize both the human tragedies and the human hopes distilled into these old, old stories. His implicit readings may feel fresh and independent, but they nonetheless adhere to a strictly orthodox idea of Catholic Christianity. Caravaggio does not upset the Bible. An apostle in his own right, he makes the Bible upset us. What do you think that operation is? Is it, is it, is it re-situating the stories in human terms?

Ingrid Rowland: Yeah, I think so. He obviously is reading these stories, and he has this kind of higher vision of them. And what he does so often is he'll take the hand of Christ and the hand of maybe one of the apostles, and they'll be almost touching. And between those two hands is everything. There's divinity on one side, there's humanity on the other, and you're so close and sometimes. They seem to be touching. And sometimes there's this great gulf fixed and he's playing with that margin, the whole point of which in Christianity is to try to make a bridge from humanity to divinity. And actually, when I think about it, my PhD thesis was about people crossing that border.

Jarrett Earnest: You saying that and something in this beautiful essay on Caravaggio that you had published in the review reminded me of the last time I was at the Louver with a friend and we saw the Caravaggio there that's the death of the Virgin and it kind of we both burst into tears and it was like this waterfall of of grief and you had an aside in this essay that I want to know more about just because I don't know the story, that... That Caravaggio based the study of the dead virgin off of a woman that was pulled out of the Tiber? Is that true?

Ingrid Rowland: They say in the Lives of Caravaggio, it says that, and this was for the church right down the street from where I live, and the church rejected it and they said, this is the Madonna and you've used a corpse from the Tiber to portray her. And what he's really saying is she's not the body. Right. And so, get it straight, and neither this dead prostitute is a luminous soul. So- start looking at your fellow humanity in a different way. And of course, then he's going off and skewering Ranuccio Tomazzoni in real life. But what he's really saying is look at these poor people and realize that in the eyes of God, they are no different from you.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, exactly what you were talking about, that bridge between the divine and the human, there's something about knowing that that painting of the Virgin, first of all, it's already a weird idea to make a painting of that scene. The completely dead-looking Virgin Mary on a corpse on a bed. And to say that this is the mother of God who's normally like flying up to heaven, right? Like immaculately. Um, it, it's just... It so illustrates exactly what you were saying, the way he forces that boundary so close together, so much pressure on that relationship between the mortal and the divine.

Ingrid Rowland: And then he can't quite pull it off in his own life and he sees it and I think that's his tragedy is that he sees but he can quite live it except through art.

Jarrett Earnest: Next week's episode will be a reading of Ingrid Rowland's 2010 essay, “Radiant, Angry Caravaggio,” by the painter Lisa Yaskavich. You can read that essay now, and many others by Ingrid Rowland, with a subscription to the New York Review of Books, which, in addition to 20 issues a year, gives access to our complete archives since 1963, all searchable on our website. Subscribe for a discount at nybooks.com slash pl sub That's nyboks.com slash plsub. Private Life is hosted and produced by me, Jarrett Ernest, along with associate producer Luna Hayes-Dean. The audio is edited and produced by Tyler Hill. The music is by Matthew O'Coyne, and it is a production of the New York Review.