Summary of the impact

In summer 2007 the vice-director of the Museo Nacional del Prado asked Professor Joannides to co-curate The Late Raphael, a major international loan exhibition held at the Prado and the Musée du Louvre in 2012-13. Extensive research by Joannides and his co-curator, Professor Tom Henry (University of Kent), from 2008 onwards shaped the content and form of the exhibition, which was supported by a scholarly but accessibly-written catalogue setting-out their findings. The exhibition brought significant financial benefits for both museums through increased visitor numbers and sales of the catalogue — now reprinted by Thames and Hudson for commercial distribution. The exhibition has raised awareness of the work that Raphael and his two closest pupils produced between 1513 and 1524 to the exhibition's visitors, to scholars and to the public at large through extensive international media coverage.

Underpinning research

Paul Joannides has been employed in the Department of History of Art at Cambridge since 1974; he has been Professor of Art History since 2004.Throughout his Cambridge career he has collaborated with the University's Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages.

Joannides was appointed to co-curate the exhibition because of his four decades of research into the work of Raphael and his followers. His standard volume on The Drawings of Raphael of 1983 was followed by a pioneering study of Giulio Romano's early paintings in 1985 and, subsequently, by several long articles and review articles on the subject of Raphael and his immediate followers, plus numerous shorter studies and entries on individual works in exhibition catalogues (published between 1987 and 2008, with six being published between 1995 and 2008). In these he established much of the conceptual framework of the exhibition and effectively clarified for the first time the chronology of the work of Giulio Romano during Raphael's lifetime, thus helping to elucidate the relation between two artists of the greatest historical importance.

The aim of the exhibition was to display all moveable works available for loan and by their arrangement to provide a coherent account of Raphael's—and his associates'—work between 1513 and 1524, including Raphael's range of pictorial interests and his changes of style over that period. Although some aspects of the later work of Raphael and that of his collaborators had been discussed, the subject had not been treated globally. The exhibitions of the Raphael centenary year of 1983 were nation- or collection- based and loan exhibitions devoted to Raphael since 1983 concentrated on his pre-Roman work. All the major monographs on Raphael lose momentum when they arrive at consideration of his later years and his pictorial work has neither been analysed satisfactorily nor set effectively in the context of his vast expansion of other tasks. Chronology, oeuvre-definition and patterns of collaboration have alike remained under-studied.

Specific research for the exhibition began in 2008 and involved re-consideration of all the relevant published documentation and much field work in Europe and the United States in studying, examining and checking the works produced by Raphael and his immediate followers within and without the period 1513-1524. The exhibition and its catalogue synthesised existing knowledge and brought this new research to bear on the subject of work by Raphael and his two closest collaborators from 1513 to 1520 and that of those collaborators as they operated independently both before his unexpected death in 1520 and in the years immediately following, up until 1524; this included the presentation and analysis of previously unpublished or little-known paintings and drawings.

The writing of the exhibition's catalogue was undertaken during 2010-2011.The first version of the introduction and all but three of the catalogue entries were drafted by him. After critical evaluation by Professor Henry, the whole was revised again and finalised by Professor Joannides. Those few catalogue entries that are signed individually were also corrected and revised by both parties. In sum the conceptual structure of the exhibition was fundamentally the responsibility of Professor Joannides but Professor Henry played an important role.

Largely at Professors Joannides' and Henry's enthusiastic urging, the Prado, the Louvre and several other museums carried out new scientific examination of the works in their in their care. These examinations, some of whose results were incorporated in the catalogue, were made known at a conference at the Louvre — October 18-19, 2010 — in which Joannides and Henry were active participants. They were also instrumental in planning the arrangement of the exhibition in Madrid and Paris, in close and productive collaboration with colleagues in both institutions.

References to the research

All outputs can be supplied by the University of Cambridge on request.

Details of the impact

The public impact of the exhibition was immense both in Spain and France and was registered by the high attendance figures — much higher than anticipated — and by reviewers in virtually the entire spectrum of the Spanish and French press. The exhibition provoked a good deal of discussion both about the relevance of the old masters, in this case Raphael, to modern life; and this was particularly pronounced in the religious press since Raphael is one of the most strongly influential of all painters of Christian themes. The exhibition also attracted the attention of the international press (e.g. The Financial Times (20 Oct 2012), The Wall Street Journal (23 Jun 2012) and the New York Review of Books (13 Jan 2013)) and the professional press (e.g. The Burlington Magazine, Vol. CLIV, Nov 2012, pp. 811-813 and Apollo: D. Ekserdjian, 'Raphael Revised', August 2012, pp. 109-11).

In Madrid the exhibition was accompanied by a two-day conference, held in June 2012, at which papers were given by a group of international scholars; it was attended by a wide public and considerable discussion ensued. Professor Joannides was also asked to a give talk: Afterthoughts on the Late Raphael Exhibition to the National Gallery's research seminar on 28th January, 2013.

With the general public, the exhibition was extremely successful: the total number of visitors who saw the exhibition in Madrid between 12 June and 16 September totalled just over 307,095, that is 3,031 visitors per day, about 41 % of the daily total of visitors to the Prado. The economic consequences for the Prado are not easy to calculate, because the Museum's policy is not separately to price exhibition-admission but to open exhibitions to all visitors who pay for general entrance. However, the Prado's exhibition service has calculated that 80% of the visitors to Late Raphael came to the Prado specifically to see it; that is about 33% of the daily total of visitors to the Prado as a whole would not have come there had the exhibition not been on. Thus the Prado's income from entrance charges was raised by about 50% during the period of the exhibition. The English and Spanish editions of the catalogue were reprinted during the run in Madrid and according to the Prado, some 9,000 copies were sold, 5,500 from the first printing and 3,500 from the second.

The daily attendance at the Louvre during the exhibition's run was rather higher, averaging 4,317, one of the highest on record and exceeding by several hundred visitors per day the numbers reached by the recent exhibition devoted to Leonardo da Vinci's St Anne and surpassing the projected total by 20%. The final total of visitors was 358,000. By the 25^th November, 6,304 copies of the catalogue (priced at 35 euros paperback and 45 euros hardback) had been sold. An introductory album was published to coincide with the exhibition and this sold 16,284 copies.

One of the items in the exhibition, but shown only in the Prado, an auxiliary cartoon of a head for the Transfiguration, was sold on December 7^th 2012 by the Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement and made over 30 million pounds, a world record price for an Old Master drawing. The exhibition catalogue and other publications by Professor Joannides were quoted extensively in the sale catalogue and thus did contribute to one significant economic consequence, even if this was unforeseen and unintended

The exhibition also had the knock-on effect in the Louvre of inspiring a small parallel exhibition devoted to later paintings and drawings by Giulio Romano in the Museum's collection, which was mounted specifically to complement our exhibition and by a second exhibition, which also ran concurrently, devoted to Gian Francesco's Penni's younger brother Luca. There was also a subsidiary exhibition in the Narodni Museum in Warsaw, at which the version of Gianfrancesco Penni's Holy Family with St Catherine privately owned in the United States was exhibited beside Warsaw's version of the painting, which could not be included in the Madrid-Paris exhibition. A well-researched wall-display, making use of new technical information, was created by the curators at Warsaw, and Professor Joannides and Professor Jozef Grabski, one of the leading Polish Art Historians, were invited to speak about the relation between the two at the Narodni Museum on 4th February 2013. The confrontation between the two paintings was effectively publicised by the Museum and the talk was very well-attended.

Sources to corroborate the impact

French and Spanish Media

[1] A pdf file containing selection of reviews from the Spanish Press

[2] A further pdf file containing a further selection of reviews from the Spanish Press

[3] A pdf file containing links to reviews in the French press

Musée du Louvre

[4] Person 1, Service culturelle (Impact on public, attendance, etc.)

[5] Person 2, conservateur in the Departement des Peintures specialising in Italian Renaissance painting

Museo Nacional del Prado

[6] Person 3, Exhibition service (Impact on public, attendance etc)

[7] Person 4, Conservator of Italian paintings (collaboration etc)

[8] Person 5, Director (success and significance of exhibition)