After Raphael

Votive Picture: Umbrian School
c. 1490-1500
Walker Art Gallery 

Preparatory drawing for After Raphael
pencil and gouache on paper
2010

Raphael Revisited
oil on canvas
2010

Another Green World
Island Records 1975
Brian Eno

In 1972 when helping to judge the John Moores competition I and the other jurors met in a room just outside of which hung a painting with the unexciting label, 'Umbrian School, c. 1490-1500. Votive Picture'. Looking at a lot of assertively 'modern' art all day (at a rate of four or five pictures a minute) can be hard on eye and soul alike, and it was after a particularly bruising session that I found myself gaining solace from this little picture. I later discovered that it had frequently been attributed to the young Raphael. By the time my judging duties were over I had become very fond of the picture and had decided to make a work based on it.

I had a canvas made the same size and started a copy. Wondering whether its fascination lay in some proportional system I subjected my photo of the original to a spider's web of geometrical analysis that revealed precisely nothing. It was a purely instinctive job on the part of the artist who made it. This very absence of order decided me to abandon the copy and work on a picture in which an imposed system would conflict with the compositional arrangement of the original, the visual elements of the putative Raphael having to fight for survival in a straitened space.

Four hundred and fifty years of rubbing, restoration, cracking and fading have only left hints of the original's evidently once rich colours. I tried not to be over cautious in guessing how bright these must have been.

The final version of the picture took the form of a diptych with one canvas showing all the constructional elements and the other the finished painting. A larger single version combines both these elements on one surface where the network of lines which guided every nuance and interval of its configuration can still be clearly discerned. This was also the case in a silkscreen print which bears the guarded title After Raphael (1972-73). It gave me a lot of pleasure when the diptych joined its source material in the collection of the Walker Art Gallery.

Adapted from Works and Texts (1992),  p. 217-218.

Editor's note: After Raphael was extensively reworked in 2010 and a new version was published in 2011 as a screenprint by CCA galleries.

Another Green World, one of Brian Eno's most influential albums, featured a detail from After Raphael and forms one of the more visible examples of Tom Phillips's sleeve art.