Raphael

Raphael was one of the most talented painters of the Italian Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. He was also a popular architect during his lifetime.

Raphael is probably most famous for his paintings, including Madonna in the Meadow (1505/06), School of Athens (c. 1508–11), Sistine Madonna (1512/13), The Transfiguration (1516–20), and Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (c. 1514–15).

Raphael was born to Giovanni Santi, a painter, and Magia di Battista Ciarla, both of whom died when Raphael was a child. Biographer Giorgio Vasari indicated that Raphael was later engaged to a niece of a friend who was a cardinal, but Raphael continuously put off the wedding.

Raphael’s father, a painter, offered his son his first lessons. Raphael later joined Perugino’s workshop about the 1490s, but scholars debate whether it was as a pupil or as an assistant. By age 17 Raphael was called a “master,” yet he continued to study the work of his contemporaries, notably Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

Raphael died of a fever at the age of 37. Biographer Giorgio Vasari mentions Raphael’s love of women and alleges that the fever was caused by a night of excess passion, a tale that mythologized Raphael as an indulgent lothario.