Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520)

Painter and architect born in Urbino and eventually settled in Rome. He painted portraits and mythological and religious works, noted for their harmony of colour and composition. He was active in Perugia, Florence, and (from 1508) Rome, where he painted frescoes in the Vatican. Among his best‐known works are The Marriage of the Virgin (1504; Brera, Milan) and the fresco The School of Athens (1509–11; Vatican, Rome).

Raphael was the son of Giovanni Santi (died 1494), a painter at the court of Urbino. In 1499 he went to Perugia, where he worked with Perugino, whose graceful style is reflected in Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin. This work also shows his early concern for harmonious disposition of figures in the pictorial space.

In Florence 1504–08 he studied the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Masaccio, and Fra Bartolommeo. His paintings of this period include the Ansidei Madonna. Pope Julius II commissioned him to decorate the papal apartments (the Stanze della Segnatura) in the Vatican. Raphael's first fresco series there, The School of Athens, is a complex but classically composed grouping of Greek philosophers and mathematicians, centred on the figures of Plato and Aristotle. A second series of frescoes 1511–14 includes the dramatic and richly coloured Mass of Bolsena.

Raphael received many commissions and within the next few years he produced mythological frescoes in the Villa Farnesina in Rome 1511–12; cartoons for tapestries for the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican; the Sistine Madonna (c. 1512); and portraits, for example of Baldassare Castiglione (c. 1515).

He inspired many of his contemporaries and later the Caracci, Rubens, Poussin, and Rembrandt, the neoclassicists and the Romantics.

When he was eight years old Raphael's mother died, and two years later his father. He may have begun his apprenticeship as a painter with his father, and later possibly continued with Timoteo Viti in Urbino, and subsequently Perugino in Perugia, where he also came under the influence of Pintoricchio. Perugino's art influenced Raphael at an early age as the early Crucifixion in the National Gallery, London, demonstrates. Raphael's Vision of a Knight (National Gallery, London), St Michael and St George (Louvre, Paris), and The Three Graces (Chantilly) were all painted during his early days in Urbino.

During his years in Florence he was influenced not only by Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, but also by Fra Bartolommeo. With an extraordinary power of assimilation, he profited from the individual attributes of many masters, though never becoming an imitator of any one. He combined a mastery of workmanship with a personal conception of design and form. Some of the chief paintings of this period are La Madonna del Granduca (Pitti, Florence), Madonna del Giardino, Holy Family with the Lamb, the Ansidei Madonna, The Entombment of Christ, and St Catherine (all National Gallery, London).

About 1508 Raphael went to Rome and by 1509 was working for Pope Julius II on the decoration of apartments in the Vatican, the whole of the fresco work soon being entrusted to him. His work in the Stanza della Segnatura included The Dispute of the Sacrament and the School of Athens: those in the Stanza di Eliodoro, the Deliverance of St Peter from Prison and The Miracle of the Mass of Bolsena. The frescoes also reflect the influence of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling (unveiled in 1512).

During the last six years of his life in Rome he produced many celebrated works, including St Cecilia, the Madonna di S Sisto, and The Transfiguration (unfinished at his death).

The large number of commissions Raphael received resulted in the organization of a large workshop, in the charge of Giulio Romano. His versatility and powers of assimilation are further proved by the impressive development of his portraiture, from the early Leonardesque Doni portraits, to the Roman style of La Donna Velata (Pitti, Florence) and Beazzano and Navagero (Doria Gallery, Rome).

In 1514 he succeeded Bramante as the chief architect of St Peter's, and produced an entirely new plan, which was never carried out. Among other buildings he designed in Rome were the Palazzo Bronconio del Aquila, S Eligio degli Orefici, the Chigi Chapel in Sta Maria del Popolo, the Villa Madama, and Palazzo Vidoni.