The Dragon's Trail; The Biography... | Buy

Raphael's St. George and the Dragon is the work of a genius -- an exquisitely rendered vision of heroism and innocence by one of the greatest painters of all time. Yet the painting's creation is only the beginning of its fascinating story, which sp

Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Epilogue
Index
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1 One exhilarating spring day in 1506, a brilliant young Italian painter named Raffaello Santi was summoned to the grand ducal palace in his home town of Urbino. There, in the presence of Duke Guidobaldo and his simpering courtiers, the painter was to receive a commission that was to change his life. Raffaello was still very young, just twenty-three years old, living only for artistic advancement and ravenous for recognition and fame. Behind him stretched years of hard-bitten apprenticeship: ever since he had been old enough to handle a paintbrush, Raffaello had devoted himself to his art, gradually focusing his precocious talents on the possibilities of sublime creation. But now, unfurling in front of him like a great golden banner, lay honor, glory, and immortal fame. A recent self-portrait showed a pale, meek-looking youth, his pearly, opalescent skin licked with dark, damp curls, his full feminine lips troubled only by the slightest shadow of fuzz. But the portrait's vacuous beauty was a fiction. It betrayed none of the extraordinary energy and determination of Raffaello's paintings, no hint of the skillful manipulator of powerful patrons and the mercenary careerist that without doubt he had become even at this stage. Raffaello, now known to us as Raphael, reeked of ambition, certainly. He knew he would go far, perhaps to the top of his profession. But even he, in his most vainglorious moments, could never have imagined that he was poised on the brink of an artistic maturity that was to turn him into a mortal god of the Italian Renaissance. His name would be universally famous for the next five hundred years. Raphael reached the palace and was admitted through the decoratively carved stone entrance. A contingent of armored guards conducted him, clanking along in their steel, through the beautiful pillared courtyard, up the stone staircase, and on through a sequence of vaulted halls, chambers, and apartments. Ushered past noblemen and ambassadors waiting in attitudes of stiff formality, Raphael was propelled toward the seat of power itself. Finally he stood in front of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino and ruler of one of the most powerful courts in Italy. The duke had a high regard for Raphael, and his choice of the brilliant young painter had been a careful one. For on that spring morning, to the melodious sound of quills totting up ducats on parchment, the duke commissioned Raphael to paint a picture of St. George and the dragon. It was essential, Guidobaldo explained, that this should be his finest work yet. This jewel of a painting, he went on, this portrait of the great and romantic, chivalric hero was to be sent to England as a gift for King Henry VII. Five hundred years later, fascinated by the extraordinary life of the painting that Raphael created for the Duke of Urbino, I stood in the same piazza, looking up at the monumental facade of the ducal palace. I had been intrigued by this picture, by its travels, by the people who had wanted it, ever since stumbling on the outlines of its story a couple of years earlier. Across the sweep of half a millennium and spread out over the breadth of half the world, a string of rulers and rich men had gone out of their way to possess this gem. Several had clambered their way to power by devious means. Most had filled their purses and bank accounts dishonestly. All were rapacious consumers of art, obsessed with the glamour and power it conferred. But who were these people, and why had they wanted Raphael's painting so badly? I first saw the painting many years ago, hanging, where it is now, in the Raphael room at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. As I gazed at it, I had no inkling of what momentous events it had witnessed, the dangers it had survived, the passions it had engendered, and the mysteries it contained. In the intervening years, it continued to dance before my eyes. This