Raphael

(Italian, 1483–1520)

Raphael was a seminal Italian painter of the High Renaissance period. Admired for his ability to organize forms and color into clear and graceful compositions, Raphael portrayed scenes with delicate lines and subtle shading, evoking a Platonic ideal of serenity and beauty. In perhaps his best-known work, The Sistine Madonna (1513-1514), the artist conveyed an elaborate scene in which wistful cherubs gaze up at the Virgin Mary, two saints, and her son. Born Raffaello Sanzio on April 6, 1483 in Urbino, Italy, his father was the painter Giovanni Santi who became the young artist’s first instructor. By the age of 17, Raphael was already considered a precocious talent, producing paintings influenced by the work Piero della Francesca. Around the year 1500, he apprenticed with Pietro Perugino, helping the elder artist to produce an important fresco commission in Perugia, an experience that had a profound influence on the young Raphael. Moving to Florence in 1504, he was immersed in the milieu of the one the great epochs of art history, while in the city he studied the works of both Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Called by Pope Julius II to Rome in 1508, Rapahel was hired to complete a cycle of frescoes in the papal apartments inside the Vatican, he would live in the city the next 12 years. The artist died on his 37th birthday on April 6, 1520 in Rome, Italy. According to his biographer Giorgio Vasari, Raphael’s premature death was caused by a fever brought on by excessive lovemaking with his mistress Luti. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Louvre Museum in Paris, the National Gallery in London, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among others.