Raphael: A Private Life

1520, Rome.

I am thirty-seven years old and something is wrong with my body.

I have known this for six weeks, since the fever began and did not leave in the way that fevers leave, since the heat settled into me with a persistence that the doctors are managing around with language designed to be reassuring and that is not quite reassuring. I know the difference between a doctor who is telling me what he knows and a doctor who is managing me, and what I have had for six weeks are doctors who are managing me, and the managing tells me something that the managing is designed to conceal. Giacomo da Brescia came again this morning and examined me and told me what he has told me every morning for three weeks, which is that the constitution will respond and that I need rest and that the projects must wait, and when he said projects I could hear in the word the slight inflation that comes when a word is being used to carry more weight than it ordinarily carries, and the weight it was carrying was: you may not finish the projects, but I am not going to say that plainly.

The Loggia of Psyche at the Farnesina is not finished. The Vatican Loggia is not finished. The Transfiguration is on the stand in the workshop and the upper section is where I left it six weeks ago and the paint has dried in the way that paint dries when no one has touched it, a slight dulling of the surface that I will have to address when I return, if I return, which I am beginning to understand may be the wrong conditional. The cartoons for the tapestries are done and in Brussels. The portrait of Leo X is done. The portrait of Castiglione is done. There is more done than undone, and yet the undone sits with me in this room in a way that the done does not, because the done has left and the undone is here, present, making demands that I am no longer certain I can meet.

I am writing this because there is nothing else to do in the hours when I am not well enough to go to the workshop and not unwell enough to sleep, the hours that the fever produces in which the mind is alert and the body is not reliable and the combination is strange, a kind of clarity that comes at a cost I can feel. Giulio Romano has been running the workshop. He is capable and he is loyal and he is not me, and the Transfiguration will be finished by him or by someone else, and the finishing will be competent, and competent is not what I intended for the Transfiguration, and I write that without self-pity and with a specific grief that is different from the grief I have known before and that I do not have adequate language for, because I have not had occasion to develop the language for this particular grief before now.

I am thirty-seven years old. I want to write that again because the number does not reduce to anything recognisable. Thirty-seven. Raphael of Urbino, thirty-seven years old, master of the most productive workshop in Rome, architect to the papacy, superintendent of antiquities, painter of the Stanze and the Loggia and the Farnesina and the portraits that people are already describing as the best portraits they have seen, thirty-seven years old and something is wrong and Giacomo da Brescia is managing me, and I am writing this in the hours of strange clarity because the hours are here and I do not want to waste them.