Raphael Sanzio
1483–1520 — Roman / Umbrian Renaissance painter
The Renaissance ideal made visible.
The painter of the The School of Athens and one of the defining figures of the High Renaissance.
Life
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino — known in the anglophone world as Raphael — was born on the sixth of April, 1483, in Urbino, the son of Giovanni Santi, a painter and court poet in service to the Duke of Urbino. He trained under Pietro Perugino in Perugia, absorbed the lessons of Florentine High Renaissance painting — Leonardo's sfumato, Michelangelo's sculptural figure — with extraordinary speed, and arrived in Rome in 1508 to begin his greatest works.
In Rome, working for Pope Julius II and his successor Leo X, Raphael produced the Stanze della Segnatura — a suite of four rooms in the Vatican Palace whose frescoes include The School of Athens — as well as a body of portraits, altarpieces, tapestry designs, and architectural projects that established him as the most comprehensive creative intelligence of the High Renaissance. He died on the sixth of April, 1520 — his thirty-seventh birthday — leaving the Transfiguration, his last great painting, incomplete.
Raphael's greatness lies not in dramatic invention but in the perfection of formal clarity: the organisation of multiple figures in comprehensible and harmonious compositions, the integration of Leonardo's atmospheric subtlety with Michelangelo's sculptural power, and the creation of an image of the world that is simultaneously ideally beautiful and fully legible.
Major paintings
The major paintings of Raphael span the full range of High Renaissance art — from early works in the Roman / Umbrian tradition to the mature style that defined his period.