Raphael worked well with others, more so than many Renaissance artists. In this long-awaited book, Lisa Pon reassesses Raphael's collaborations in painting and many other media, thereby re-evaluating period and current attitudes towards originality, authorship, artistic practice and value. In the process, readers will see not the familiar painter in "pursuit of perfection," but an unruly Raphael who exceeds our expectations, a Renaissance artist who experiments with artistic techniques, considers polyphonic music and humanist debates, and plans a virtual Rome to explore through new means of visualization.

This book is about the ampersand: &. Just as an anti-novel may look like a novel in form, this book may resemble a conventional artist's monograph in its attention to Raphael and some of his major paintings. But I subvert the classic monograph's basic premise by emphasizing not an isolated, singular artist but rather the many social and working relationships with which Raphael was emmeshed and the many media into which he delved. This book is fundamentally about how we write about art and artists, what we want to know and can know historically, and what sustains our visual interest and intellectual curiosity, especially after five hundred years.