Renaissance beauty strikes chord

St Catherine of Alexandria by Raphael, at the National Gallery in London.

Galleries in London have been extraordinarily crowded this month. People vote with their feet, and it has been interesting to see which shows have been most popular.

The biggest crowds have been at the National Gallery to see the exhibition of paintings by Raphael.

Among artists and art historians, Raphael is out of fashion. There wouldn't be a painter in the Western World who wants to paint like Raphael; though he is one of the three big names in Renaissance art, the 20th century did not find him as interesting as Leonardo or Michelangelo.

Yet there was a time when Raphael dominated European art. For 300 years everybody wanted to paint like him. It was the 20th century that did for his reputation. That disturbed century admired Leonardo for his experimentation and the gigantic, rebellious innovation of Michelangelo. Raphael wasn't the archetypal solitary genius. Writers pay tribute to the charm of his personality and he always had group of friends and assistants around him.

He loved women. Excessive exertion in that area was supposed to have killed him and he died young, in 1520, aged 37.

He still inspires love, hence the people packing the National Gallery. They come because of the human interest of his work.

They come too because this exhibition shows he completed and brought to perfection many of the things both Leonardo and Michelangelo had experimented with.

Their work is often incomplete and strange. His paintings are simply beautiful, and beauty was a word the 20th century shied away from.

The millions who go to the Vatican to gaze in awe at Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling are channelled through rooms decorated with Raphael's frescoes, his big wall paintings, but somehow they command less attention.

The show, buried in the awkward dungeons of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, has exerted an enormous appeal because the paintings are approachable and the meaning clear. The paintings are supported by Raphael's splendid drawings and material that shows how he carried to perfection ideas originating with Leonardo and Michelangelo.

The drawings and paintings show his extraordinary mastery of the medium. A number of works in the show are quite small, the tiniest of all the Madonna of the Pinks - a little picture of the Christ child offering flowers to Mary, an exquisite work, intimate and tender.

Britain recently raised £20 million ($53.5 million) to keep it in the country.

There are more of his famous Madonnas, not only composed beautifully to give them weight but also filled with a moving sense of the ultimate fate of the beautiful child and his protective mother.

Raphael was also a portrait painter of genius. He took hints from the Mona Lisa and added to them his own special grace, a quality evident everywhere in the show, from the first thing - an astonishingly precocious self-portrait drawing made when he was little more than a boy - to the last painting on loan from the Pitti Gallery in Florence.

It is a stunning portrait of a young woman with a veil. The face, like so many of the Madonnas, is utterly beautiful and painted with extraordinary insight.

The skill also extends to the rich puffed, embroidered and folded sleeve of her gown, which is a miracle of dextrous painting of fabric and gives shape and weight to the wonderful conception.

Equally crowded but completely different is an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in the East End. The gallery is a tube journey from the centre of London and you emerge from the station into an exotic market where the stall holders and customers are of many different races with varied styles of dress.

The human interest of this scene is continued in the exhibition, which is about city life. Part of the appeal of this exhibition, called Faces in the Crowd, was the way it splendidly combined fascinating painting with photography, film, video and DVD. The show began with painting from the late 19th century, with a superb canvas by Manet showing a masked ball and the erotic interaction between men and women.

The sense of sexuality which charges many other things in the show was further established by a fascinating painting by Munch called The Morning After - a compelling image of a beautiful young woman sprawling on a bed obviously exhausted by sex and alcohol.

Parallel with the sexual charge is the sense of neurosis. Several paintings by Bacon showed figures pushed into a corner by threatening forces.

The sense of threat was further emphasised by a big print of Car Crash by Andy Warhol.

But it was not all neurosis and threat. What the modern processes of photography, still and moving, produce is intense colour.

The colour was used to convey the exotic landscape of some cities, the intensity of some relationships and even extended to emphasise the costume of a clown trying desperately to be funny in the face of a threatening world.

Throughout the exhibition there was total concentration on people, and even the formal games of the Picasso painting in the show had wit and human interest.

Both this modern show and the traditional work of Raphael make it clear that while formal matters of composition give structure to an artist's work, it is human interest that draws the attention of the crowds.