Rafael
The master of harmony.
Raphael combined Leonardo’s softness with Michelangelo’s power and created clear, balanced compositions. He died at only 37.
Raphael, in Italian Raffaello Sanzio, was born in Urbino in 1483. His father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter and poet at the duke’s court, one of the most cultivated in Italy. Raphael lost both parents as a child. Early on he worked in Perugino’s circle, and his first works resemble Perugino’s so closely that they have sometimes been confused. One example is The Marriage of the Virgin of 1504, now in the Brera in Milan.
From 1504 to 1508 he lived in Florence. There he studied Leonardo and Michelangelo and painted a series of Madonnas, such as the Madonna of the Goldfinch in the Uffizi and La Belle Jardinière in the Louvre. He learned from Leonardo’s soft modelling and pyramidal compositions, but made them lighter and more harmonious.
In 1508 he was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II to paint the rooms of the papal apartments in the Vatican. In the first room he painted The School of Athens, in which the philosophers of antiquity gather in a vast vaulted hall with Plato and Aristotle at the centre. He gave some of the philosophers the features of contemporary artists, and he painted himself at the edge. A great many commissions followed: the Sistine Madonna in Dresden, the portrait of Baldassare Castiglione in the Louvre, frescoes in the Villa Farnesina and cartoons for woven tapestries for the Sistine Chapel. After Bramante’s death in 1514 he also became architect of St Peter’s.
Raphael was known for his kindness and sociability. He ran a large workshop with many assistants. He was engaged to a cardinal’s niece but never married. He died suddenly on 6 April 1520, aged 37, and was buried in the Pantheon in Rome. His last great work, The Transfiguration, is in the Vatican Pinacoteca.
For several hundred years Raphael was the foremost model for the academies, and his harmony and clarity became a yardstick for perfect painting. In the mid-19th century a group of English artists called themselves the Pre-Raphaelites because they wanted to return to the art before him. That too shows how central he was.