I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say, “I love Raphael.” Everyone knows the great Renaissance painter’s name. Most people, forced to look at one of his supremely graceful religious paintings, would declare themselves impressed by the sheer skill. Yet in our age of cultural fragmentation when ideas such as “finish” and “perfection” seem by their very nature suspect, Raphael’s all too immaculately rendered saints and Madonnas seem hard to relate to, let alone get excited about. Where his great rivals impress with their modernity – Michelangelo’s passionate megalomania and Leonardo’s quasi-scientific curiosity seem to propel them into the future – Raphael, the 16th-century boy wonder, who was for centuries more revered than any of them, feels a figure frozen in time.

This exhibition, like every self-respecting modern blockbuster, wants to tell us a new story about its subject, recasting Raphael as a figure relevant to our own age, the multidisciplinary entrepreneur, a sort of Jeff Koons of the Renaissance, who was as much a designer of prints, tapestries, mosaics and sculpture, and an innovative architect and pioneering archaeologist, as a painter of “apparently effortless beauty, purity and harmony”. And Raphael could certainly have taught today’s businessman-artists a thing or two about overweening ambition.

Born into a dynasty of painters in 1483, he was orphaned at an early age, and running the family studio when he was barely into his teens. He earned the hatred of the slightly older Michelangelo with his competitive drive for commissions among the great and the good of Florence and Rome, at a time when the ideal was to hit on a bankable model of beauty and keep hammering it. Raphael’s Saint Sebastian – who at first glance you’d take for a woman – has near identical features to Saint James in another small work, who in turn strongly resembles the kneeling figure of Mary Magdalene in the large Mond Crucifixion (1502); think a slightly plumper and smaller-featured Princess Diana.