Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known in English as Raphael, was a High Renaissance Italian painter and architect. His work is valued for its clear forms, balanced compositions, and its embodiment of the Neoplatonic ideal of human greatness. Alongside Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, he is considered one of the three great masters of the era.

Raphael was born in Urbino, a small but culturally rich city in the Marche region. His father, Giovanni Santi, served as court painter to the Duke. The court’s reputation had been built by Federico da Montefeltro, a successful condottiero made Duke by Pope Sixtus IV, who died the year before Raphael’s birth. Federico’s court valued literature over art, but Giovanni Santi was both a painter and a poet, writing a rhymed chronicle of Federico’s life and creating decor for court entertainments. In Urbino’s small court, he was likely closer to the ruling family than most court painters. Federico was succeeded by his son Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, who married Elisabetta Gonzaga of Mantua, a court known for music and visual arts. Under them, the court remained a literary center. Growing up in this environment gave Raphael the polished manners and social ease noted by Giorgio Vasari. Court life in Urbino later became the model for the ideal humanist court in Baldassare Castiglione’s *The Book of the Courtier*. Castiglione moved to Urbino in 1504, when Raphael was no longer living there but visited often, and they became close friends. Raphael also befriended other regular visitors, including Pietro Bibbiena and Pietro Bembo, both later cardinals and writers who would join him in Rome. He moved easily in the highest circles throughout his life, which made his career seem deceptively effortless. He did not receive a full humanist education, and it is unclear how well he read Latin.

Raphael’s mother, Màgia, died in 1491 when he was eight, and his father died on 1 August 1494, after remarrying. Orphaned at eleven, his formal guardian became his paternal uncle Bartolomeo, a priest, who later had legal disputes with Raphael’s stepmother. The boy likely lived with his stepmother when not apprenticed to a master. Vasari notes that Raphael had already shown talent and was “a great help to his father.” A teenage self-portrait drawing shows his early skill. His father’s workshop continued, and Raphael probably helped manage it from a young age. In Urbino, he encountered works by Paolo Uccello and Luca Signorelli. According to Vasari, his father placed him as an apprentice with the Umbrian master Pietro Perugino, “despite the tears of his mother.”

Raphael was described as a fully trained master by 1500. He worked in several northern Italian cities until 1508, when Pope Julius II invited him to Rome to work on the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican. There he received major commissions and began working as an architect. He died in 1520 at the height of his powers, at age 37.

Despite his early death, Raphael was enormously productive, running an unusually large workshop and leaving a substantial body of work. Vasari first described his career in three phases and styles: his early years in Umbria, a period of about four years (1504–1508) absorbing Florence’s artistic traditions, and his final twelve years in Rome working for two popes and their associates. Many of his works are in the Vatican Palace, where the frescoed Raphael Rooms were his largest and most central project. His best-known work is *The School of Athens* in the Vatican’s Stanza della Segnatura. After his early years in Rome, much of his work was executed by his workshop from his drawings, often with a noticeable drop in quality. He was highly influential during his lifetime, though outside Rome his work was mainly known through collaborative printmaking.

After his death, his rival Michelangelo’s influence surpassed his until the 18th and 19th centuries, when Raphael’s more serene and harmonious qualities were again seen as the highest models. Art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann helped make his work a formative influence on Neoclassical painting, though groups like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood later explicitly rejected his techniques.