A particularity of today's societies is that anything is likely to become contemporary and arouse the sudden interest of large audiences. It may be the latest technological novelty - a new iPhone, let's say - but also something that comes from the remote past and that is renewed through campaigns of advertising expectation .

Remember: at the beginning of each year we are announced what events will mark the calendar, who will be the revelation writer (one has already been notified by 2020), what premieres and exhibitions should not be missed, and it works. Moreover, when one of those dates is reached on which a relevant anniversary is celebrated, the year of little or little is started.

2019 was the year of Leonardo da Vinci and 2020 will be the year of Rafael Sanzio. And due to the relevance of characters like these and important institutions planning conferences, exhibitions and tributes, a Renaissance painter who died 500 years ago is once again news and circulates with total freshness among the contemporary cultural references.

Rafael Sanzio, or Rafael de Urbino, or simply Rafael, died five centuries ago, and according to the myth that Vasari planted he would have made him happy, "dedicated to his loves in a hidden way and giving himself without measure to pleasures . " Although he was only 37 years old, time was enough to become one of the unquestionable masters of the High Renaissance. His exceptional talent for composing great scenes in motion, and the images of madonas and cherubs that the cultural centrifuge of the twentieth century made jumping from classical museums to t-shirts, posters, puzzles and album covers, would guarantee a strange form of current affairs. Also, mass tourism, without a doubt, whose circuits make more than 20,000 people march daily through the Vatican Museum, where Rafael has a leading role only surpassed by Michelangelo's.

This phenomenon, mass tourism, has that particular ability to homogenize everything. Anything we see today becomes contemporary because it comes to us through the same exhibition and promotion processes. Cheap flights and rental apartments allow hordes of tourists to conquer any European city in a weekend, and in the middle of their hedonic looting they take everything. The past and the present are part of the same loot. In cities like London, Madrid or Paris, where there are important museums of classical art and contemporary art, on the same day you can see a sample of Goya and an exhibition of Jörg Immendorff, an exhibition about Troy and a retrospective of Olafur Eliasson: the latest outbreak and the remote origins of western civilization.

And as if nothing. The present and the past matched by the same process: early purchase of tickets and a human flock traveling through preset routes in which art is seen, yes, but above all people are seen looking at art or taking photos in front of works of art. The consumption of experiences that satisfy leisure time, and even the almost superior pleasure of letting others know that they have had valuable experiences, is marked by these standardized rituals.

This is something new. In the 60s, says Robert Hughes, the Sistine Chapel was visited in the company of thirty people. And 200 years ago, in Goethe's time, he entered it to take refuge from the heat. All this is unthinkable today. Cultural industries and the very conscious instrumentalization of cultural heritage to extract economic or diplomatic benefits - the happy country brand - have turned these places and these samples into massive spectacles. Everything that is exhibited becomes contemporary, and everyone who sees it, mass, tourist mass.

Now, it would be absurd and even immoral if these tributes were not paid to creators who left unique and inexhaustible works. The restatement of the story offers a pretext to direct the public's competing attention towards an author or an artist who bequeathed an important work, and any opportunity to learn or enjoy with masterpieces, whether recent or distant in time, is helpful. It remains a puzzle to know what brings today's viewer to the masterpieces of the past.

Is it the fame of the artist or a particular painting, as it would seem to happen with Leonardo's Mona Lisa? Is it the need to recognize talent, something like the virtues of a Messi from another time who did not score goals but also stole his breath with inconceivable deeds for the rest of humanity? Or perhaps cultural interests prevail, the question of the previous steps in civilization that have brought us to where we are? Maybe it's a bit of everything, and also the need to fill the present, even with the past. And something else: the urgency of not missing the most current event of the year, what will be discussed in 2020, no matter if it is five centuries old.

Raffaello, 1520-2020

Scuderie de Quirinale (Rome). Since March 11.

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