“HOW bountiful and benign heaven sometimes shows itself in showering upon one single person the infinite riches of its treasures, and all those graces and rarest gifts that it is wont to distribute among many individuals, over a long space of time...” wrote Giorgio Vasari on Raphael in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects in 1568.

Perhaps the best way to explore the lasting allure of the 16th-century painter Raphael – currently the subject of a blockbuster exhibition at the National Gallery in London – is to start with an explicit moment of rejection.

In 1848, a new group of painters who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood identified the art of Raphael as a watershed moment for western art. They adopted the name “Pre-Raphaelites” to signal their movement’s intention to uphold the qualities that characterised Italian quattrocento — 15th-century — art.