On Life, Art, Raphael

I don’t read personal writing, it bores me, why would I write it? This once, though, I’ll allow a self-insertion. The ideal way to have attended the Raphael show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which closes tomorrow, is as I’ve done—while pregnant. The artist’s way with rendering infants is apparent early on in the chronologically organized exhibition, from at least 1503, even before he began working in Florence around age twenty-one. A fair number of Raphael’s rightly venerated Madonna and Child paintings are in the show, but the revelation here, and the works that most demonstrate his sympathy with and mastery of the infant form, how babies reach and lounge, grasp and squirm, behaving and communicating through their whole body, are the drawings.