In 1833, when the mania for Raphael was at its height, the Renaissance artist’s tomb was opened on the orders of the pope, to establish if his skull, long rumoured to be elsewhere, was inside. (It was!) For a while afterwards, Raphael’s skeleton was laid out in the Pantheon in Rome for public devotion. But, according to the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, who witnessed its reburial, when the coffin was tilted so that it would slot back in, Raphael’s bones – to that point, treated so reverentially – slid down into the tomb, rattling noisily. Oops.

Something similar, I’d argue, has happened to his reputation. It used to be self-evident that Raphael was the gold standard of Western art. But now? For more than a century, we’ve been schooled on modernism’s subversive provocations, which overturned the tradition of naturalistic painting he pioneered. Today, in the wake of two world wars, and with a third threatening to erupt, the polished perfection of Raphael’s paintings is almost suspiciously virtuosic: Western art’s great harmoniser, as Kenneth Clark called him, is too melodious for our jangling times. Certainly, his graceful, tender depictions of the Virgin and Child have none of the anguished terribilità which we associate with, and celebrate in, the art of his rival Michelangelo.

Of course, Raphael still draws a crowd, as the National Gallery’s new, Covid-delayed blockbuster – conceived to mark the 500th anniversary of his death in 1520, now due to open next month – will no doubt demonstrate. Yet, many of us, I suspect, admire Raphael’s art rather than adore it.

For anyone, though, who wishes to rekindle, or at least understand, the passionate reverence people once felt for Raphael, I have a suggestion: take a look at his portraiture. In the National Gallery’s show, there will be around nine painted portraits, as well as several drawings – and not one feels distant or remote. Rather, they’re charged with a remarkably modern sense of intimacy and immediacy – especially the later portraits of Raphael’s close friends, which, according to the exhibition’s co-curator Tom Henry (who, on the anniversary of Raphael’s death, likes to lay flowers at his tomb), represent the artist “in his purest form”. This is because, despite being busier than ever towards the end of his short life (he was only 37 when he died), Raphael didn’t delegate portraits to assistants in his large, productive workshop. Evidently, for him, they held great personal and artistic significance until the end.

To begin with, as an artist, Raphael – who was born in Urbino, where his father, Giovanni, was a prominent painter and poet – shuttled between various places, undertaking commissions in Città di Castello, Perugia and Florence, where he went, a source tells us, per imparare (to learn). Almost “as soon as he set down his suitcase” in Florence, as Henry’s co-curator Matthias Wivel puts it, in late 1504 or early 1505, Raphael, who was forever absorbing and transforming others’ innovations (he’d already, for instance, mastered the Italian painter Perugino’s sweet, angelic style), headed off to see Leonardo da Vinci. What he saw inside the older artist’s workshop, where he studied the unfinished Mona Lisa, transformed his approach to portraiture, because it taught him that conveying someone’s inner life was as important as capturing how they looked.