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• Born: 6 April 1483
• Birthplace: Urbino, Duchy of Urbino (Italy)
• Died: 6 April 1520
• Best Known As: High Renaissance painter of The School of Athens

Raphael, like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, is one of the most famous artists of Italy's High Renaissance and one of the greatest influences in the history of Western art. Immensely talented, he first studied with his father and then as an assistant to the great master Pietro Vannucci, known as Perugino. Raphael (also known as Raffaello Sanzio) worked in Florence (1504) and earned a reputation as a productive and much-admired painter before going to Rome sometime after 1508. In Rome he was commissioned by Pope Julius II to create the large-scale fresco The School of Athens, as well as other decorative work at the Vatican. Raphael also took over as architect of St. Peter's after the death of Donato Bramante (1514), contributed ten tapestries to the Sistine Chapel and painted some of the most prized and reproduced holy pictures of the era, including The Sistine Madonna and Transfiguration. His work is often cited for its harmony and balance of composition, and his early death (on his 37th birthday) is considered by many experts to be one of the great tragedies of art history.

The 19th century artists known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and including poet/painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, sought to advance the style of Italian art that preceded Raphael... Michelangelo was notoriously cranky and Raphael was famously amiable -- they did not associate with one another, even though they both worked in Rome at the same time... Raphael's famous signature, RVSM, stood for "Raphael Vrbinus Sua Mano" (Raphael of Urbino, His Hand).

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(b Urbino, 28 March or 6 April 1483; d Rome, 6 April 1520). Italian painter, draughtsman and architect. He has always been acknowledged as one of the greatest European artists. With Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Titian, he was one of the most famous painters working in Italy in the period from 1500 to 1520, often identified as the High Renaissance, and in this period he was perhaps the most important figure. His early altarpieces (of 1500-07) were made for Citt? di Castello and Perugia; in Florence between 1504 and 1508 he created some of his finest portraits and a series of devotional paintings of the Holy Family. In 1508 he moved to Rome, where he decorated in fresco the Stanze of the papal apartments in the Vatican Palace

See the Abbreviations for further details.

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The Italian painter and architect Raphael (1483-1520) was the supreme representative of Italian High Renaissance classicism.

Raffaello Sanzio, called Raphael, was born on April 6, 1483, in Urbino. His father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter and doubtless taught Raphael the rudiments of technique. Santi died when his son was 11 years old. Raphael's movements before 1500, when he joined the workshop of Perugino, are obscure, but he evidently fully absorbed the 15th-century classicism of Piero della Francesca's paintings and of the architecture of the Ducal Palace at Urbino and the humanist tradition of the court.

During his 4 years with Perugino, Raphael's eclectic disposition and remarkable ability to assimilate and adapt borrowed ideas within a very personal style were already apparent. Many works of this period, such as the Mond Crucifixion (1502/1503), are in stylistic detail almost indistinguishable from Perugino's gentle sweetness, but they have an inherent clarity and harmony lacking in Perugino's work. Raphael's last painting before moving to Florence, the Marriage of the Virgin (1504), is primarily modeled on Perugino's version of the same subject, but the compositional design is reinterpreted with greater spatial sensitivity, the figures are more accurately built, and the dramatic significance is transmitted without the artificiality of pose and gesture of the prototype.

Florentine Period

When Raphael arrived in Florence late in 1504, it must have been evident to him that his Peruginesque style was dated and provincial compared with the recent innovations of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. It was to the latter's work that he was temperamentally more attracted, and during the next 3 years he executed a series of Madonnas that adapted and elaborated compositions and ideas of Leonardo's, culminating in La Belle jardinie‧re (1507). Here Raphael's own artistic personality was somewhat submerged in his fervent examination of the principles of Leonardesque design, modeling, and expressive depth. Raphael adopted Leonardo's sfumato modeling and characteristic pyramidal composition, yet the essential sense of clarity deriving from his 15th-century classical background was not undermined.

It was principally, however, Michelangelo's Battle of Cascina rather than Leonardo's companion piece, the Battle of Anghiari, that provided the dramatic ideas used by Raphael in his most ambitious Florentine work, the Entombment (1507). But perhaps unable yet to understand entirely the imaginative power of Michelangelo's works from which he borrowed, Raphael here failed to combine the figures, expressions, and emotions with the unforced balance and harmony of his later narrative works.

Stanza della Segnatura

Raphael left for Rome in 1508 and seems to have been at work in the Vatican Stanze by early 1509. Pope Julius II's enlightened patronage stimulated the simultaneous creation of the two greatest High Renaissance fresco cycles: Michel-angelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling and Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura. Whereas Michelangelo's frescoes are a masterpiece of titanic creative imagination, Raphael's are the epitome of classical grandeur and harmony, disciplined in overall conception, artistic thought, and clarity of individual compositions and figures.

The theme of the Stanza della Segnatura (completed in 1511), eminently suited to Raphael's thoughtful humanism, is divinely inspired human intellect in four spheres: theology, poetry, philosophy, and law. The earliest of the principal scenes to be painted, the Disputa‧ (representing Theology), shows Raphael still developing from his Florentine style in the light of the enormous challenge of the stanza: never before had he undertaken a decorative scheme on this scale. It is not until the so-called School of Athens (representing Philosophy), the zenith of pure High Renaissance culture, that Raphael reaches complete, independent artistic maturity.

The disposition of each figure in this great fresco is so precisely calculated as, paradoxically, to achieve the impression of absolute freedom. The ingenuity with which the grand, harmonious space is mapped out by the figures, emphasized by the superbly rich Bramantesque architecture behind, is concealed by the overall compositional balance and the monumentally calm atmosphere. The compositional lines and the distant arch focus attention on the two central figures, which set the tone of the painting in their expressive contrast: the idealist Plato points heavenward, while Aristotle, the realist, gestures flatly toward the ground. Around them are grouped many other classical philosophers and scientists, each indicating clearly by expression and gesture the character of his intellect - yet never obtrusively, for detail is throughout subordinated to the total balanced grandeur of effect.

Stanza d'Eliodoro

Divine intervention on behalf of the Church was the theme of the Stanza d'Eliodoro (decorated between 1511 and 1514). This subject gave Raphael greater scope for dynamic composition and movement, and the influence of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, completed in 1512, is noticeable. Compositional unity is achieved in Raphael's Expulsion of Heliodorus by the balance of emotional and expressive contrasts. This fresco and the Liberation of St. Peter, a brilliant display of the dramatic possibilities of unusual light sources, witness the beginnings in Raphael's work of expansion away from the dignity and purity of the School of Athens.

During the progress of the second stanza Julius II died. He was succeeded in 1513 by Leo X, who appears in the Repulsion of Attila, the last of the Stanza d'Eliodoro frescoes, executed primarily by Raphael's pupils. At this stage Raphael's assistants began to play an increasingly important role in the production of work to his designs, partly because Leo X's dispatch of Michelangelo to work on a Medici project in Florence left Raphael undisputedly the major artist in Rome.

Late Paintings

Commissions of all sorts poured into Raphael's workshop during the last 6 years of his life. The frescoes in the Stanza dell'Incendio (1514-1517) were based on his design but executed almost entirely by assistants, as was the fresco and stucco decoration of the Vatican loggias (1517-1519).

The monumental cartoons (in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London) depicting the lives of Saints Peter and Paul, the decoration (begun 1519) of the Villa Farnesina in Rome, and Raphael's largest canvas, the Transfiguration (commissioned in 1517 but incomplete at his death), all show a new dynamism and expressiveness. The cartoons were sent to Flanders to be worked into tapestries for the Sistine Chapel and were partly responsible for the dissemination of Raphael's late style, with its emphasis on gesture and movement, throughout Europe.

His Portraits

In portraiture Raphael's development follows the same pattern. His earliest portraits closely resemble those of Perugino, whereas in Florence Leonardo's Mona Lisa was a basic influence, as can be seen in the portraits of Agnolo and Maddalena Doni (1505). Raphael adapted Leonardo's majestic design as late as 1517 in the portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, which, like most of his finest portraits, is of a close friend. Castiglione is portrayed with great psychological subtlety, a gentle, scholarly face perfectly suited to the man, who in The Courtier defined the qualities of the ideal gentleman. Descriptions of Raphael's urbane good humor and courteous behavior in fact recall the very qualities that Castiglione wished to find in his perfect courtier.

His Architecture

So Bramantesque is the architecture of the School of Athens that it seems probable that Raphael was working with Donato Bramante as early as 1509, perhaps in preparation for his succession to the post of capomastro of the rebuilding of St. Peter's after Bramante's death in 1514. During the next 6 years, however, progress on St. Peter's was very slow, and his only contribution seems to have been the projected addition of a nave to Bramante's centrally planned design.

As early as the Marriage of the Virgin (1504), Raphael's painted architecture shows the pure classical spirit epitomized in Bramante's Tempietto at St. Pietro in Montorio, Rome (1502). This same unadorned structural clarity characterizes Raphael's first architectural work, the chapellike St. Eligio degli Orefici, Rome, designed in collaboration with Bramante (1509). The Chigi Chapel in St. Maria del Popolo, Rome (ca. 1512-1513), however, shows a much more ornate decorative idiom, although structurally it is almost identical with S. Eligio. A similar development in richness of texture and detailing can be seen between Raphael's two Roman palaces. The Palazzo Vidoni-Caffarelli is directly dependent on Bramante's so-called House of Raphael, but the richly ornamented facade decoration of the Palazzo Branconio dell'Aquila (ca. 1520; destroyed) is essentially unstructural. As in Raphael's last paintings, the tendency in these late architectural projects is toward a form of mannerism and away from the serene classicism of Bramante.

At the time of his death in Rome on Good Friday, 1520, at the age of 37, Raphael's art was developing in new directions, paralleled in his own very different way by Michelangelo in his Medici Chapel sculptures. The zenith of classical harmony and grandeur, reached about 1510, had passed, and it was left to Raphael's pupils to interpret and exploit the trends toward mannerism in the last works of their great master.

Further Reading

Studies of Raphael in English are limited. An important monograph in English is Oskar Fischel, Raphael (1948). John Pope-Hennessy, Raphael (1970), an excellent introduction to Raphael's art, concentrates on his working methods and reproduces many drawings and large details. See also Ettore Camesasca, All the Paintings of Raphael (1963). A fine specialized study is John Shearman, Raphael's Cartoons in the Royal Collection and the Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel (1972). Sydney Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence (1961), is a very useful survey of the period in general.

For more information on Raphael, visit Britannica.com.

or Raphael Sanzio, Ital. Raffaello Santi or Raffaello Sanzio (räf'fäĕl'lō sän'tē, sän'tsyō), 1483–1520, major Italian Renaissance painter, b. Urbino. In Raphael's work is the clearest expression of the exquisite harmony and balance of High Renaissance composition.

Early Training, Influence, and Work

Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi, painter at the court of Federigo Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, first taught him the elements of art. About six years after the death of his father (1494) he entered the workshop of Perugino, whose influence is seen in The Crucifixion and The Knight's Dream (both: National Gall., London); Coronation of the Virgin (Vatican); The Three Graces (Chantilly); and the Sposalizio (Brera, Milan). The Colonna altarpiece, representing the Madonna and Saints (Metropolitan Mus.), marks the end of the Perugian period of his work.

The five predella scenes, Agony in the Garden (Metropolitan Mus.), St. Anthony of Padua and St. Francis (both: Dulwich), Procession to Calvary (National Gall., London), and Pietà (Gardner Mus., Boston), give evidence of the new influences of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Masaccio, and, especially, Fra Bartolomeo. Studying the intricacies of anatomy, perspective, and coloring, he achieved a freer, more able, and deeper interpretation than was seen in his earlier work. In Florence (1504–8) he produced numerous Madonnas that are renowned for their sweetness of expression. His self-portrait (Uffizi) and the penetrating portraits of Angelo and Maddalena Doni (Pitti Palace) are also from this period.

Mature Work

At Rome his style matured, benefiting from Michelangelo's influence. In the Vatican, Raphael was wholly responsible for the Stanza della Segnatura (finished 1511); the two largest walls represent, respectively, the School of Athens, portraying the Greek philosophers, and the Triumph of Religion, also called Disputà. On the vault are The Flaying of Marsyas and The Temptation of Eve. The ceiling is devoted to the allegorical figures Law, Philosophy, Poetry, and Theology. Two large lunettes over the windows represent Parnassus and Jurisprudence.

In the Stanza d'Eliodoro Raphael painted (1511–14) The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple, The Miracle of Bolsena, The Repulse of Attila from Rome by Leo I, and The Deliverance of St. Peter. He also designed the Incendio del Borgo and painted part of it. Other designs for the Vatican include The Battle of Ostia, The Oath of Leo III before Charlemagne, and The Victory of Constantine over Maxentius; the 52 religious subjects covering one ceiling and known as “Raphael's Bible” were executed by his pupils after his design.

Among the other paintings of his Roman period are the Madonna with the Fish (Prado); Madonna of the Chair (Pitti Palace); the Sistine Madonna (Dresden); Galatea (Farnesina); the Alba Madonna (National Gall. of Art, Washington, D.C.); and the unfinished Transfiguration, completed by Giulio Romano. Portraits of that period include Julius II, long his patron; Baldassare Castiglione (Louvre); Tommaso Inghirami (Gardner Mus., Boston); and Pope Leo X with Two Cardinals.

Other Works and Accomplishments

Having been named (1514) successor to Bramante as chief architect of the Vatican, Raphael also designed a number of churches, palaces, and mansions. For his patron, Leo X, he undertook (1518) a survey of ancient Rome showing the chief monuments. He also designed ten tapestries with themes from the Acts of the Apostles for the Sistine Chapel; seven of the designs are in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Raphael was deeply indebted to the sculpture of antiquity for his mythological and biblical figures, and in his interpretation of classical art he achieved a harmony and monumentality emulated far into the 19th cent.

Bibliography

See his complete paintings, introd. by R. Cocke (1966); complete works by M. Salmi et al. (1969); biography by L. Berti (tr. 1961); studies by A. P. Oppé (rev. ed. 1970), J. Pope-Hennessy (1970), and L. Dussler (tr. 1971).

Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio; 1483–1520), Italian painter and architect. The importance of the sixteenth-century artist Raffaello Sanzio to the subsequent development of European culture can be gauged by the fact that only three Italian artists were ever glorified by receiving anglicized versions of their names: Raphael, Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), and "Michael Angelo" Buonarroti. Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi, worked as a court painter to the duke of Urbino; his colorful style owed a great deal to the area's lush, hilly landscape and to the spiritual legacy of St. Francis, whose native Assisi bordered Urbino. Giovanni Santi also nourished literary ambitions (expressed in a long history written in vernacular verse) as did his talented relative Donato Bramante (1444–1514), a painter, architect, and musician who eventually moved to Milan. Raphael himself would one day try his hand at writing vernacular sonnets.

Raphael's mother supposedly cared for her infant son herself rather than sending him out to a wet nurse, and the close relationship with his parents was invoked by contemporaries as the reason for his sweet disposition. Sweet he may have been, but he was also talented to an extraordinary extent, with ambitions to match. He learned the elements of painting from his father and the local painter Timoteo Viti, but was soon apprenticed in Florence to Italy's most successful painter of the time, Pietro di Vannucci, nicknamed Perugino (c. 1450–1523), "the man from Perugia."

The Florence in which Raphael served his apprenticeship was a republican city (the Medici had been expelled in 1494) that celebrated its cultivation of ancient Roman virtues in diplomacy, in rhetoric, and in public works of art. The most famous of these is Michelangelo's David of 1504. Among painters, Perugino stood at the height of a long, successful career, his soft, colorful Umbrian style underpinned by a stately grandeur that lent his paintings some of the authority of ancient Roman monuments. Perugino's soft contours and bright primary colors had introduced what proved to be a popular contrast with the more linear "dry" style of Florentine painters like Botticelli and Pollaiuolo, and Raphael's earliest work shows the strong influence of his master. In 1503 Raphael worked in Siena with another popular Umbrian painter, Bernardino Pinturicchio (c. 1454–1513), on the frescoed walls of the Piccolomini Library of Siena's Duomo.

Already, however, the young painter stood out among these two established masters for his sheer dexterity: his brushwork was finer, his textures more meticulous, and his ability to suggest depth by layering different colors of paint was comparable only to the treasured oil paintings imported from northern Europe. Once again, the talented young painter contemplated a change of venue. This time the opportunity came from Rome, through the good offices of Bramante.

Roman Commissions and Michelangelo

In 1507, Pope Julius II Della Rovere (reigned 1503–1513) decided to move the papal apartments upstairs and to commission a new decorative scheme for their walls; this was the commission for which Bramante procured Raphael's participation as part of a team of painters drawn from all over Italy to work in competition with one another. Quickly, however, Raphael's ability to put the pope's ambitions into powerful imagery earned him the entire commission. This suite of rooms, now called the Vatican Stanze, would occupy him for the next several years. At the same time, Raphael made several important contacts among the people who comprised the intimate circle of Julius II: his brilliant, eccentric librarian, Tommaso Fedro Inghirami, his banker, Agostino Chigi, and his favorite theologian, Egidio da Viterbo. Despite their widely differing roles in the Julian court, each of these men shared the pope's deep commitment to an ideal view of Rome as a renewed capital city for a renewed Catholic Church, and they worked with remarkable zeal to see that ideal made concrete. Raphael's own work reflects his contacts with each of them; Chigi soon became his most important private patron.

Raphael also confronted, for the first time, a serious rival to his skill. When Raphael arrived in 1508 to join the team of painters assigned to the Stanze, Pope Julius had entrusted the greatest painting commission in the city, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, to a sculptor, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564). By 1510, when Bramante procured Raphael entrance into the unfinished chapel, the young painter from Urbino took in all of Michelangelo's epic grandeur and strange, luminous color. Michelangelo would later claim that he himself had taught Raphael all he knew about painting. Still, when Michelangelo finished the chapel in 1512, the older painter hurried back to Florence, leaving Raphael as Rome's undisputed master painter, just as Bramante had become the city's supreme architect.

By this time, however, Raphael had begun to diversify his operations. He became an early proponent of engraving as a new medium with potentially wide appeal, and he also began to work as an architect under Bramante's expert tutelage. The press of his commissions compelled him to assemble a workshop of variously talented assistants; he ran his artistic business with a good deal of the acumen gleaned from his patron Agostino Chigi.

The deaths of Julius II in 1513 and Bramante in 1514 led Raphael into ever closer collaboration with Julius's successor, Pope Leo X (reigned 1513–1521). Together with the venerable architect Fra Giovanni Giocondo (c. 1433–1515) and Bramante's young assistant Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, Raphael took over the post of architect for St. Peter's. Raphael and many of his associates, among them Tommaso Inghirami, Egidio da Viterbo, and Agostino Chigi, survived the transition from one papacy to the next and continued to exert their influence on their artistic friends and on the papal court. Raphael's circle of acquaintances widened to include Leo's private secretary, the Venetian writer Pietro Bembo, and the papal functionary Angelo Colocci, an antiquarian and book collector of deep learning. Raphael's most inspired work in this period was done not for the pope but for Chigi, whose fiscal genius was accompanied by a bold, innovative taste in art.

Unable to build a new Rome to rival the old, Leo instead commissioned Raphael to draw a reconstruction of the ancient city, which the artist undertook together with an investigation of the work of the Roman architectural writer Vitruvius. In this undertaking Fra Giocondo and Angelo Colocci would exert profound influence on the depth of Raphael's architectural insight, already refined by his long association with Bramante, who had been a remarkably insightful interpreter of ancient architecture.

With the spread of his own reputation, Raphael began to cultivate international connections, taking orders from the king of France and other heads of state. His death of a sudden fever on 11 April 1520, his thirty-seventh birthday, came as a surprise to everyone. Four days later, Agostino Chigi followed him to the grave. Both men were mourned extravagantly in Rome.

Raphael's many unfinished projects were carried out by his efficiently diversified workshop; but not even the artist's most gifted associates could provide either Raphael's inventiveness or his painterly technique. Furthermore, they lacked their master's fierce dedication; their humor was more flippant, their monsters more monstrous, their conceits more conceited, their erotica more pornographic. As painters, engravers, and architects, Giulio Romano, Gianfrancesco Penni, and Marcantonio Raimondi owed an immense debt to Raphael, but the harmonious order of his style gave way to more extreme effects, presented most powerfully in the art of the elderly Michelangelo.

Already in their own day, Raphael and Michelangelo had acquired the personae by which they are still known today: Raphael as the angel called too early back to heaven, Michelangelo as the rugged, struggling hero. Their relative fortunes have varied somewhat with changing tastes, but their stature has never been seriously called into question. Each, however, partakes of the other: Michelangelo's Pietà is as intimately moving as a Raphael Madonna, and some of Raphael's frescoes show the muscular monumentality of Michelangelo.

Bibliography

De Vecchi, Pierluigi. Raphael. New York, 2002.

Hall, Marcia, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Raphael. Cambridge, U.K., and New York. Forthcoming.

Jones, Roger, and Nicholas Penny. Raphael. New Haven and London, 1983.

—INGRID ROWLAND

(raf-ee-uhl, ray-fee-uhl, rah-fee-el)

A sixteenth-century Italian painter. A contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, he is known for his beautiful and gracious Madonnas and The School of Athens (see Plato's Academy).