Raffaello Sanzio, or Santi, was the son of a painter attached to the Montefeltro court of Urbino, a culturally sophisticated center for the arts and humanist endeavor. The elder Santi died when Raphael was only eleven years old, though the son likely received some initial training in his workshop. Raphael later joined the studio of Perugino, whose influence is evident in the linear elegance, decorous gestures, and sweet expressions of Raphael’s early altarpieces, including the Marriage of the Virgin made for Città di Castello (1504, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan). Small finely finished paintings for the court at Urbino suggest other influences upon the precocious artist, namely that of imported Netherlandish oil paintings and of Antique sculpture.
Raphael arrived in Florence late in 1504 and lived there off and on until 1508. His careful study of the works of Michelangelo and Leonardo can be felt in his portraits and devotional paintings of this period, for example, the Madonna of the Meadow (1505, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), while their greater grandeur and gravity also drew inspiration from his friend Fra Bartolommeo. The priority given by Leonardo to the depiction of action and a variety of emotions in art is fully manifest in the Entombment (1507, Galleria Borghese, Rome), in which every figure, in a radical departure from Perugino, is in movement.
Raphael left Florence for Rome in 1508, summoned by Pope Julius II, and remained there until his death, continuously engaged in projects for decorations of the Vatican Palace for Julius II and from 1513 Leo X. Raphael’s first commission was for an intellectually complex cycle of frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, which included his iconic School of Athens, completed in 1512. Frescoes in the Stanza d’Eliodoro, the Stanza dell’Incendio, the private loggie of Leo X, and the Sala di Costantino followed, along with designs for tapestries for the Sistine Chapel. Visionary altarpieces, including the Sistine Madonna (ca. 1513, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden), date to Raphael’s years in Rome, as do splendid portraits, as well as his exuberant mythological scenes painted for Agostino Chigi’s villa on the Tiber. Ever in a flurry of industry, Raphael also undertook various architectural projects, while his designs for prints ensured ensured the wide dissemination of his singular artistic vision. When Raphael died, he was buried in the Pantheon at the pope’s behest.
