Raphael

Raphael
Presumed self-portrait of Raphael, 1504–06 1 Presumed self-portrait of Raphael, 1504–06 1
Born	Raffaello Santi (or Sanzio) 28 March or 6 April 1483 Urbino, Duchy of Urbino
Died	6 April 1520 (aged 37) Rome, Papal States
Resting place	Pantheon, Rome
Known for	Painting architecture
Notable work	Raphael Rooms Sistine Madonna The School of Athens Transfiguration
Movement	High Renaissance
Parents	Giovanni Santi Màgia Ciarla
Signature

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (Italian: [raffaˈɛllo ˈsantsjo da urˈbiːno]; March 28 or 6 April 1483 – 6 April 1520), now generally known in English as Raphael (UK: /ˈræfeɪ.əl/ RAF-ay-əl, US: /ˈræfi.əl, ˈreɪfi-, ˌrɑːfaɪˈɛl/ RAF-ee-əl, RAY-fee-, RAH-fy-EL), was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, and visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. Together with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period.

His father Giovanni Santi was court painter to the ruler of the small but highly cultured city of Urbino. He died when Raphael was eleven, and Raphael seems to have played a role in managing the family workshop from this point. He probably trained in the workshop of Pietro Perugino, and was described as a fully trained "master" by 1500. He worked in or for several cities in north Italy until in 1508 he moved to Rome at the invitation of Pope Julius II, to work on the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican. He was given a series of important commissions there and elsewhere in the city, and began to work as an architect. He was still at the height of his powers at his death in 1520.

Raphael was enormously productive, running an unusually large workshop and, despite his early death at 37, leaving a large body of work. His career falls naturally into three phases and three styles, first described by Giorgio Vasari: his early years in Umbria, then a period of about four years (1504–1508) absorbing the artistic traditions of Florence, followed by his last hectic and triumphant twelve years in Rome, working for two popes and their close associates. Many of his works are found in the Vatican Palace, where the frescoed Raphael Rooms were the central, and the largest, work of his career. The best known work is The School of Athens in the Vatican Stanza della Segnatura. After his early years in Rome, much of his work was executed by his workshop from his drawings, with considerable loss of quality. He was extremely influential in his lifetime, though outside Rome his work was mostly known from his collaborative printmaking.

After his death, the influence of his great rival Michelangelo exceeded his until the 18th and 19th centuries, when Raphael's more serene and harmonious qualities were again regarded as the highest models. Thanks to the influence of art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, his work became a formative influence on Neoclassical painting, but his techniques would later be explicitly and emphatically rejected by groups such as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Background

Raphael was born in the small but artistically significant central Italian city of Urbino in Marche region, where his father Giovanni Santi was court painter to the Duke. The reputation of the court had been established by Federico da Montefeltro, a highly successful condottiere who had been created Duke of Urbino by Pope Sixtus IV – Urbino formed part of the Papal States – and who died the year before Raphael was born. The emphasis of Federico's court was more literary than artistic, but Giovanni Santi was a poet of sorts as well as a painter, and had written a rhymed chronicle of the life of Federico, and both wrote the texts and produced the decor for masque-like court entertainments. His poem to Federico shows him as keen to demonstrate awareness of the most advanced North Italian painters, and Early Netherlandish artists as well. In the very small court of Urbino he was probably more integrated into the central circle of the ruling family than most court painters.

Federico was succeeded by his son Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, who married Elisabetta Gonzaga, daughter of the ruler of Mantua, the most brilliant of the smaller Italian courts for both music and the visual arts. Under them, the court continued as a centre for literary culture. Growing up in the circle of this small court gave Raphael the excellent manners and social skills stressed by Vasari. Court life in Urbino at just after this period was to become set as the model of the virtues of the Italian humanist court through Baldassare Castiglione's depiction of it in his classic work The Book of the Courtier, published in 1528. Castiglione moved to Urbino in 1504, when Raphael was no longer based there but frequently visited, and they became good friends. Raphael became close to other regular visitors to the court: Pietro Bibbiena and Pietro Bembo, both later cardinals, were already becoming well known as writers, and would later be in Rome during Raphael's period there. Raphael mixed easily in the highest circles throughout his life, one of the factors that tended to give a misleading impression of effortlessness to his career. He did not receive a full humanistic education however; it is unclear how easily he read Latin.

Early life and work

Raphael's mother Màgia died in 1491 when he was eight, followed on 1 August 1494 by his father, who had already remarried. Raphael was thus orphaned at eleven; his formal guardian became his only paternal uncle, Bartolomeo, a priest, who subsequently engaged in litigation with his stepmother. The boy probably continued to live with his stepmother when not staying as an apprentice with a master. He had already shown talent, according to Vasari, who says that Raphael had been "a great help to his father". A self-portrait drawing from his teenage years shows his precocity. His father's workshop continued and, probably together with his stepmother, Raphael evidently played a part in managing it from a very early age. In Urbino, he came into contact with the works of Paolo Uccello, previously the court painter (d. 1475), and Luca Signorelli, who until 1498 was based in nearby Città di Castello.

According to Vasari, Raphael's father placed him in the workshop of the Umbrian master Pietro Perugino as an apprentice "despite the tears of his mother". The evidence of an apprenticeship comes only from Vasari and another source, and has been disputed; eight was very early for an apprenticeship to begin. An alternative theory is that the boy received at least some training from Timoteo Viti, who acted as court painter in Urbino from 1495. Most modern historians agree that Raphael at least worked as an assistant to Perugino from around 1500; the influence of Perugino on Raphael's early work is very clear: "probably no other pupil of genius has ever absorbed so much of his master's teaching as Raphael did", according to Wölfflin. Vasari wrote that it was impossible to distinguish between their hands at this period, but many modern art historians claim to do better and detect his hand in specific areas of works by Perugino or his workshop. Apart from stylistic closeness, their techniques are very similar as well, for example having paint applied thickly, using an oil varnish medium, in shadows and darker garments, but very thinly on flesh areas. An excess of resin in the varnish often causes cracking of areas of paint in the works of both masters. The Perugino workshop was active in both Perugia and Florence, perhaps maintaining two permanent branches. Raphael is described as a "master", that is to say fully trained, in December 1500.

His first documented work was the Baronci Altarpiece for the church of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino in Città di Castello, a town halfway between Perugia and Urbino. Evangelista da Pian di Meleto, who had worked for his father, was also named in the commission. It was commissioned in 1500 and finished in 1501; now only some cut sections and a preparatory drawing remain. In the following years he painted works for other churches there, including the Mond Crucifixion (c. 1503) and the Brera The Marriage of the Virgin (1504), and for Perugia, such as the Oddi Altarpiece. He very probably also visited Florence in this period. These are large works, some in fresco, where Raphael confidently marshals his compositions in the somewhat static style of Perugino. He also painted many small and exquisite cabinet paintings in these years, probably mostly for the connoisseurs in the Urbino court, like the Three Graces and St. Michael, and he began to paint Madonnas and portraits. In 1502 he went to Siena at the invitation of another pupil of Perugino, Pinturicchio, "being a friend of Raphael and knowing him to be a draughtsman of the highest quality" to help with the cartoons, and very likely the designs, for a fresco series in the Piccolomini Library in Siena Cathedral. He was evidently already much in demand even at this early stage in his career.

Influence of Florence

Raphael led a "nomadic" life, working in various centres in Northern Italy, but spent a good deal of time in Florence, perhaps from about 1504. Although there is traditional reference to a "Florentine period" of about 1504–08, he was possibly never a continuous resident there. He may have needed to visit the city to secure materials in any case. There is a letter of recommendation of Raphael, dated October 1504, from the mother of the next Duke of Urbino to the Gonfaloniere of Florence: "The bearer of this will be found to be Raphael, painter of Urbino, who, being greatly gifted in his profession has determined to spend some time in Florence to study. And because his father was most worthy and I was very attached to him, and the son is a sensible and well-mannered young man, on both accounts, I bear him great love..."

As earlier with Perugino and others, Raphael was able to assimilate the influence of Florentine art, whilst keeping his own developing style. Frescos in Perugia of about 1505 show a new monumental quality in the figures which may represent the influence of Fra Bartolomeo, who Vasari says was a friend of Raphael. But the most striking influence in the work of these years is Leonardo da Vinci, who returned to the city from 1500 to 1506. Raphael's figures begin to take more dynamic and complex positions, and though as yet his painted subjects are still mostly tranquil, he made drawn studies of fighting nude men, one of the obsessions of the period in Florence. Another drawing is a portrait of a young woman that uses the three-quarter length pyramidal composition of the just-completed Mona Lisa, but still looks completely Raphaelesque. Another of Leonardo's compositional inventions, the pyramidal Holy Family, was repeated in a series of works that remain among his most famous easel paintings. There is a drawing by Raphael in the Royal Collection of Leonardo's lost Leda and the Swan, from which he adapted the contrapposto pose of his own Saint Catherine of Alexandria. He also perfects his own version of Leonardo's sfumato modelling, to give subtlety to his painting of flesh, and develops the interplay of glances between his groups, which are much less enigmatic than those of Leonardo. But he keeps the soft clear light of Perugino in his paintings.

Leonardo was more than thirty years older than Raphael, but Michelangelo, who was in Rome for this period, was just eight years his senior. Michelangelo already disliked Leonardo, and in Rome came to dislike Raphael even more, attributing conspiracies against him to the younger man. Raphael would have been aware of his works in Florence, but in his most original work of these years, he strikes out in a different direction. His Deposition of Christ draws on classical sarcophagi to spread the figures across the front of the picture space in a complex and not wholly successful arrangement. Wöllflin detects in the kneeling figure on the right the influence of the Madonna in Michelangelo's Doni Tondo, but the rest of the composition is far removed from his style, or that of Leonardo. Though highly regarded at the time, and much later forcibly removed from Perugia by the Borghese, it stands rather alone in Raphael's work. His classicism would later take a less literal direction.

Roman period

Vatican 'Raphael Rooms'

In 1508, Raphael moved to Rome, where he resided for the rest of his life. He was invited by the new pope, Julius II, perhaps at the suggestion of his architect Donato Bramante, then engaged on St. Peter's Basilica, who came from just outside Urbino and was distantly related to Raphael. Unlike Michelangelo, who had been kept lingering in Rome for several months after his first summons, Raphael was immediately commissioned by Julius to fresco what was intended to become the Pope's private library at the Vatican Palace. This was a much larger and more important commission than any he had received before; he had only painted one altarpiece in Florence itself. Several other artists and their teams of assistants were already at work on different rooms, many painting over recently completed paintings commissioned by Julius's loathed predecessor, Alexander VI, whose contributions, and arms, Julius was determined to efface from the palace. Michelangelo, meanwhile, had been commissioned to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

This first of the famous 'Raphael Rooms' (Stanze) to be painted, now known as the Stanza della Segnatura after its use in Vasari's time, was to make a stunning impact on Roman art, and remains generally regarded as his greatest masterpiece, containing The School of Athens, The Parnassus and the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament. Raphael was then given further rooms to paint, displacing other artists including Perugino and Signorelli. He completed a sequence of three rooms, each with paintings on each wall and often the ceilings too, increasingly leaving the work of painting from his detailed drawings to the large and skilled workshop team he had acquired, who added a fourth room, probably only including some elements designed by Raphael, after his early death in 1520. The death of Julius in 1513 did not interrupt the work at all, as he was succeeded by Raphael's last pope, the Medici Pope Leo X, with whom Raphael formed an even closer relationship, and who continued to commission him. Raphael's friend Cardinal Bibbiena was also one of Leo's old tutors, and a close friend and advisor.

In the course of painting the room, Raphael was clearly influenced by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling. Vasari said Bramante let him into the chapel secretly. Raphael completed the first section of his work in 1511 and the reaction of other artists to the daunting force of Michelangelo was the dominating question in Italian art for the following few decades. Raphael, who had already shown his gift for absorbing influences into his own personal style, rose to the challenge perhaps better than any other artist. One of the first and clearest instances was the portrait in The School of Athens of Michelangelo himself, as Heraclitus, which seems to draw clearly from the Sybils and ignudi of the Sistine ceiling. Other figures in that and later paintings in the room show the same influences, but as still cohesive with a development of Raphael's own style. Michelangelo accused Raphael of plagiarism and years after Raphael's death, complained in a letter that "everything he knew about art he got from me", although other quotations show more generous reactions.

These very large and complex compositions have been regarded ever since as among the supreme works of the grand manner of the High Renaissance, and the "classic art" of the post-antique West. They give a highly idealised depiction of the forms represented, and the compositions, though very carefully conceived in drawings, achieve "sprezzatura", a term invented by his friend Castiglione, who defined it as "a certain nonchalance which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does seem uncontrived and effortless...". According to Michael Levey, "Raphael gives his [figures] a superhuman clarity and grace in a universe of Euclidian certainties". The painting is nearly all of the highest quality in the first two rooms, but the later compositions in the Stanze, especially those involving dramatic action, are not entirely as successful either in conception or their execution by the workshop.

Architecture

After Bramante's death in 1514, Raphael was named architect of the new St Peter's. Most of his work there was altered or demolished after his death and the acceptance of Michelangelo's design, but a few drawings have survived. It appears his designs would have made the church a good deal gloomier than the final design, with massive piers all the way down the nave, "like an alley" according to a critical posthumous analysis by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. It would perhaps have resembled the temple in the background of The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple.

He designed several other buildings, and for a short time was the most important architect in Rome, working for a small circle around the Papacy. Julius had made changes to the street plan of Rome, creating several new thoroughfares, and he wanted them filled with splendid palaces.

An important building, the Palazzo Branconio dell'Aquila for Leo's Papal Chamberlain Giovanni Battista Branconio, was completely destroyed to make way for Bernini's piazza for St. Peter's, but drawings of the façade and courtyard remain. The façade was an unusually richly decorated one for the period, including both painted panels on the top story (of three), and much sculpture on the middle one.

The main designs for the Villa Farnesina were not by Raphael, but he did design, and decorate with mosaics, the Chigi Chapel for the same patron, Agostino Chigi, the Papal Treasurer. Another building, for Pope Leo's doctor, the Palazzo Jacopo da Brescia, was moved in the 1930s but survives; this was designed to complement a palace on the same street by Bramante, where Raphael himself lived for a time.

The Villa Madama, a lavish hillside retreat for Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, later Pope Clement VII, was never finished, and his full plans have to be reconstructed speculatively. He produced a design from which the final construction plans were completed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. Even incomplete, it was the most sophisticated villa design yet seen in Italy, and greatly influenced the later development of the genre; it appears to be the only modern building in Rome of which Palladio made a measured drawing.

Only some floor-plans remain for a large palace planned for himself on the new via Giulia in the rione of Regola, for which he was accumulating the land in his last years. It was on an irregular island block near the river Tiber. It seems all façades were to have a giant order of pilasters rising at least two storeys to the full height of the piano nobile, "a grandiloquent feature unprecedented in private palace design".

Raphael asked Marco Fabio Calvo to translate Vitruvius's Four Books of Architecture into Italian; this he received around the end of August 1514. It is preserved at the Library in Munich with handwritten margin notes by Raphael.

Antiquity

In about 1510, Raphael was asked by Bramante to judge contemporary copies of Laocoön and His Sons. In 1515, he was given powers as Prefect over all antiquities unearthed within, or a mile outside the city. Anyone excavating antiquities was required to inform Raphael within three days, and stonemasons were not allowed to destroy inscriptions without permission. Raphael wrote a letter to Pope Leo suggesting ways of halting the destruction of ancient monuments, and proposed a visual survey of the city to record all antiquities in an organised fashion. The pope intended to continue to re-use ancient masonry in the building of St Peter's, also wanting to ensure that all ancient inscriptions were recorded, and sculpture preserved, before allowing the stones to be reused.

According to Marino Sanuto the Younger's diary, in 1519 Raphael offered to transport an obelisk from the Mausoleum of August to St. Peter's Square for 90,000 ducats. According to Marcantonio Michiel, Raphael's "youthful death saddened men of letters because he was not able to furnish the description and the painting of ancient Rome that he was making, which was very beautiful". Raphael intended to make an archaeological map of ancient Rome but this was never executed. Four archaeological drawings by the artist are preserved.

Other painting projects

The Vatican projects took most of his time, although he painted several portraits, including those of his two main patrons, the popes Julius II and his successor Leo X, the former considered one of his finest. Other portraits were of his own friends, like Castiglione, or the immediate Papal circle. Other rulers pressed for work, and King Francis I of France was sent two paintings as diplomatic gifts from the Pope. For Agostino Chigi, the hugely rich banker and papal treasurer, he painted the Triumph of Galatea and designed further decorative frescoes for his Villa Farnesina, a chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Pace and mosaics in the funerary chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo. He also designed some of the decoration for the Villa Madama, the work in both villas being executed by his workshop.

One of his most important papal commissions was the Raphael Cartoons (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum), a series of 10 cartoons, of which seven survive, for tapestries with scenes of the lives of Saint Paul and Saint Peter, for the Sistine Chapel. The cartoons were sent to Brussels to be woven in the workshop of Pier van Aelst. It is possible that Raphael saw the finished series before his death—they were probably completed in 1520. He also designed and painted the Vatican loggias, a long thin gallery then open to a courtyard on one side, decorated with Roman-style grottesche. He produced a number of significant altarpieces, including The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia and the Sistine Madonna. His last work, on which he was working up to his death, was a large Transfiguration, which together with Christ Falling on the Way to Calvary shows the direction his art was taking in his final years—more proto-Baroque than Mannerist.

Painting materials

Raphael painted several of his works on wood support (Madonna of the Pinks) but he also used canvas (Sistine Madonna) and he was known to employ drying oils such as linseed or walnut oils. His palette was rich and he used almost all of the then available pigments such as ultramarine, lead-tin-yellow, carmine, vermilion, madder lake, verdigris and ochres. In several of his paintings (Ansidei Madonna) he even employed the rare brazilwood lake, metallic powdered gold and even less known metallic powdered bismuth.

Workshop

Vasari says that Raphael eventually had a workshop of fifty pupils and assistants, many of whom later became significant artists in their own right. This was arguably the largest workshop team assembled under any single old master painter, and much higher than the norm. They included established masters from other parts of Italy, probably working with their own teams as sub-contractors, as well as pupils and journeymen. We have very little evidence of the internal working arrangements of the workshop, apart from the works of art themselves, which are often very difficult to assign to a particular hand.

The most important figures were Giulio Romano, a young pupil from Rome (only about twenty-one at Raphael's death), and Gianfrancesco Penni, already a Florentine master. They were left many of Raphael's drawings and other possessions, and to some extent continued the workshop after Raphael's death. Penni did not achieve a personal reputation equal to Giulio's, as after Raphael's death he became Giulio's less-than-equal collaborator in turn for much of his subsequent career. Perino del Vaga, already a master, and Polidoro da Caravaggio, who was supposedly promoted from a labourer carrying building materials on the site, also became notable painters in their own right. Polidoro's partner, Maturino da Firenze, has, like Penni, been overshadowed in subsequent reputation by his partner. Giovanni da Udine had a more independent status, and was responsible for the decorative stucco work and grotesques surrounding the main frescoes. Most of the artists were later scattered, and some killed, by the violent Sack of Rome in 1527. This did however contribute to the diffusion of versions of Raphael's style around Italy and beyond.

Vasari emphasises that Raphael ran a very harmonious and efficient workshop, and had extraordinary skill in smoothing over troubles and arguments with both patrons and his assistants—a contrast with the stormy pattern of Michelangelo's relationships with both. However though both Penni and Giulio were sufficiently skilled that distinguishing between their hands and that of Raphael himself is still sometimes difficult, there is no doubt that many of Raphael's later wall-paintings, and probably some of his easel paintings, are more notable for their design than their execution. Many of his portraits, if in good condition, show his brilliance in the detailed handling of paint right up to the end of his life.

Other pupils or assistants include Raffaellino del Colle, Andrea Sabbatini, Bartolommeo Ramenghi, Pellegrino Aretusi, Vincenzo Tamagni, Battista Dossi, Tommaso Vincidor, Timoteo Viti (the Urbino painter), and the sculptor and architect Lorenzetto (Giulio's brother-in-law). The printmakers and architects in Raphael's circle are discussed below. It has been claimed the Flemish Bernard van Orley worked for Raphael for a time, and Luca Penni, brother of Gianfrancesco and later a member of the First School of Fontainebleau, may have been a member of the team.

Drawings

Raphael was one of the finest draftsmen in the history of Western art, and used drawings extensively to plan his compositions. According to a near-contemporary, when beginning to plan a composition, he would lay out a large number of stock drawings of his on the floor, and begin to draw "rapidly", borrowing figures from here and there. Over forty sketches survive for the Disputa in the Stanze, and there may well have been many more originally; over four hundred sheets survive altogether. He used different drawings to refine his poses and compositions, apparently to a greater extent than most other painters, to judge by the number of variants that survive: "... This is how Raphael himself, who was so rich in inventiveness, used to work, always coming up with four or six ways to show a narrative, each one different from the rest, and all of them full of grace and well done." wrote another writer after his death. For John Shearman, Raphael's art marks "a shift of resources away from production to research and development".

When a final composition was achieved, scaled-up full-size cartoons were often made, which were then pricked with a pin and "pounced" with a bag of soot to leave dotted lines on the surface as a guide. He also made unusually extensive use, on both paper and plaster, of a "blind stylus", scratching lines which leave only an indentation, but no mark. These can be seen on the wall in The School of Athens, and in the originals of many drawings. The "Raphael Cartoons", as tapestry designs, were fully coloured in a glue distemper medium, as they were sent to Brussels to be followed by the weavers.

In later works painted by the workshop, the drawings are often painfully more attractive than the paintings. Most Raphael drawings are rather precise—even initial sketches with naked outline figures are carefully drawn, and later working drawings often have a high degree of finish, with shading and sometimes highlights in white. They lack the freedom and energy of some of Leonardo's and Michelangelo's sketches, but are nearly always aesthetically very satisfying. He was one of the last artists to use metalpoint (literally a sharp pointed piece of silver or another metal) extensively, although he also made superb use of the freer medium of red or black chalk. In his final years he was one of the first artists to use female models for preparatory drawings—male pupils ("garzoni") were normally used for studies of both sexes.

Printmaking

Raphael made no prints himself, but entered into a collaboration with Marcantonio Raimondi to produce engravings to Raphael's designs, which created many of the most famous Italian prints of the century, and was important in the rise of the reproductive print. His interest was unusual in such a major artist; from his contemporaries it was only shared by Titian, who had worked much less successfully with Raimondi. A total of about fifty prints were made; some were copies of Raphael's paintings, but other designs were apparently created by Raphael purely to be turned into prints. Raphael made preparatory drawings, many of which survive, for Raimondi to translate into engraving.

The most famous original prints to result from the collaboration were Lucretia, the Judgement of Paris and The Massacre of the Innocents (of which two virtually identical versions were engraved). Among prints of the paintings The Parnassus (with considerable differences) and Galatea were also especially well known. Outside Italy, reproductive prints by Raimondi and others were the main way that Raphael's art was experienced until the twentieth century. Baviero Carocci, called "Il Baviera" by Vasari, an assistant who Raphael evidently trusted with his money, ended up in control of most of the copper plates after Raphael's death, and had a successful career in the new occupation of a publisher of prints.

Private life and death

From 1517 until his death, Raphael lived in the Palazzo Caprini, lying at the corner between piazza Scossacavalli and via Alessandrina in the Borgo, in rather grand style in a palace designed by Bramante. He never married, but in 1514 became engaged to Maria Bibbiena, Cardinal Bibbiena's niece; he seems to have been talked into this by his friend the cardinal, and his lack of enthusiasm seems to be shown by the marriage not having taken place before she died in 1520. He is said to have had many affairs, but a permanent fixture in his life in Rome was "La Fornarina", Margherita Luti, the daughter of a baker (fornaro) named Francesco Luti from Siena who lived at Via del Governo Vecchio.

He was made a "Groom of the Chamber" of the Pope, which gave him status at court and an additional income, and also a knight of the Papal Order of the Golden Spur. Vasari claims that he had toyed with the ambition of becoming a cardinal, perhaps after some encouragement from Leo, which also may account for his delaying his marriage.

Raphael died on Good Friday, 6 April 1520, which was possibly his 37th birthday. Vasari says that Raphael had also been born on a Good Friday, which in 1483 fell on 28 March and that the artist died from exhaustion brought on by unceasing romantic interests while he was working on the Loggia. Several other possibilities for his death have been raised by later historians and scientists, such as a combination of an infectious disease and bloodletting. In his acute illness, which lasted fifteen days, Raphael was composed enough to confess his sins, receive the last rites, and put his affairs in order. He dictated his will, in which he left sufficient funds for his mistress's care, entrusted to his loyal servant Baviera, and left most of his studio contents to Giulio Romano and Penni. At his request, Raphael was buried in the Pantheon.

Raphael's funeral was extremely grand, attended by large crowds. According to a journal by Paris de Grassis, four cardinals dressed in purple carried his body, the hand of which was kissed by the Pope. The inscription on Raphael's marble sarcophagus, an elegiac distich written by Pietro Bembo, reads: "Here lies that famous Raphael by whom Nature feared to be conquered while he lived, and when he was dying, feared herself to die."

Critical reception

Raphael was highly admired by his contemporaries, although his influence on artistic style in his own century was less than that of Michelangelo. Mannerism, beginning at the time of his death, and later the Baroque, took art "in a direction totally opposed" to Raphael's qualities; "with Raphael's death, classic art—the High Renaissance—subsided", as Walter Friedländer put it. He was soon seen as the ideal model by those disliking the excesses of Mannerism:

the opinion...was generally held in the middle of the sixteenth century that Raphael was the ideal balanced painter, universal in his talent, satisfying all the absolute standards, and obeying all the rules which were supposed to govern the arts, whereas Michelangelo was the eccentric genius, more brilliant than any other artists in his particular field, the drawing of the male nude, but unbalanced and lacking in certain qualities, such as grace and restraint, essential to the great artist. Those, like Dolce and Aretino, who held this view were usually the survivors of Renaissance Humanism, unable to follow Michelangelo as he moved on into Mannerism.

Vasari himself, despite his hero remaining Michelangelo, came to see his influence as harmful in some ways, and added passages to the second edition of the Lives expressing similar views.

Raphael's compositions were always admired and studied, and became the cornerstone of the training of the Academies of art. His period of greatest influence was from the late 17th to late 19th centuries, when his perfect decorum and balance were greatly admired. He was seen as the best model for the history painting, regarded as the highest in the hierarchy of genres. Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses praised his "simple, grave, and majestic dignity" and said he "stands in general foremost of the first [i.e., best] painters", especially for his frescoes (in which he included the "Raphael Cartoons"), whereas "Michael Angelo claims the next attention. He did not possess so many excellences as Raffaelle, but those he had were of the highest kind..." Echoing the sixteenth-century views above, Reynolds goes on to say of Raphael:

The excellency of this extraordinary man lay in the propriety, beauty, and majesty of his characters, his judicious contrivance of his composition, correctness of drawing, purity of taste, and the skilful accommodation of other men's conceptions to his own purpose. Nobody excelled him in that judgment, with which he united to his own observations on nature the energy of Michael Angelo, and the beauty and simplicity of the antique. To the question, therefore, which ought to hold the first rank, Raffaelle or Michael Angelo, it must be answered, that if it is to be given to him who possessed a greater combination of the higher qualities of the art than any other man, there is no doubt but Raffaelle is the first. But if, according to Longinus, the sublime, being the highest excellence that human composition can attain to, abundantly compensates the absence of every other beauty, and atones for all other deficiencies, then Michael Angelo demands the preference.

Reynolds was less enthusiastic about Raphael's panel paintings, but the slight sentimentality of these made them enormously popular in the 19th century: "We have been familiar with them from childhood onwards, through a far greater mass of reproductions than any other artist in the world has ever had..." wrote Heinrich Wölfflin, who was born in 1862, of Raphael's Madonnas.

In Germany, Raphael had an immense influence on religious art of the Nazarene movement and Düsseldorf school of painting in the 19th century. In contrast, in England the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood explicitly reacted against his influence (and that of his admirers such as Joshua Reynolds), seeking to return to styles that pre-dated what they saw as his baneful influence. According to a critic whose ideas greatly influenced them, John Ruskin:

The doom of the arts of Europe went forth from that chamber [the Stanza della Segnatura], and it was brought about in great part by the very excellencies of the man who had thus marked the commencement of decline. The perfection of execution and the beauty of feature which were attained in his works, and in those of his great contemporaries, rendered finish of execution and beauty of form the chief objects of all artists; and thenceforward execution was looked for rather than thought, and beauty rather than veracity.

And as I told you, these are the two secondary causes of the decline of art; the first being the loss of moral purpose. Pray note them clearly. In mediæval art, thought is the first thing, execution the second; in modern art execution is the first thing, and thought the second. And again, in mediæval art, truth is first, beauty second; in modern art, beauty is first, truth second. The mediæval principles led up to Raphael, and the modern principles lead down from him.

By 1900, Raphael's popularity was surpassed by Michelangelo and Leonardo, perhaps as a reaction against the etiolated Raphaelism of 19th-century academic artists such as Bouguereau. Although art historian Bernard Berenson in 1952 termed Raphael the "most famous and most loved" master of the High Renaissance, art historians Leopold and Helen Ettlinger say that Raphael's lesser popularity in the 20th century is made obvious by "the contents of art library shelves... In contrast to volume upon volume that reproduce yet again detailed photographs of the Sistine Ceiling or Leonardo's drawings, the literature on Raphael, particularly in English, is limited to only a few books". They conclude, nonetheless, that "of all the great Renaissance masters, Raphael's influence is the most continuous."

See also

• Domenico Alfani, a close friend of Raphael whose paintings have often been mistaken for those of the better-known artist
• List of paintings by Raphael
• Renaissance in Urbino
• Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

From the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia

The most famous name in the history of painting, b. at Urbino, 6 April (or 28 March), 1483; d. at Rome, 6 April, 1520. He belongs to the Umbrian School. Raphael is only a Christian name, the full name being Raphael (Raffaele) Santi (Sanzio is an absolutely incorrect form). His father, Giovanni Santi, held an important but indefinite post at the Court of Urbino. He was the artistic factotum of Duke Frederick, one of the most intellectual princes and most enlightened art-lovers of his age. The best painters, Piero della Francesca, Melozzo, and Justus of Ghent, were in his service and had made Urbino one of the most prominent art centres of the time. The ducal palace is still one of the wonders of Italy. Nor was the social and worldly life less advanced; at this Court was written the "Cortegiano" of Baldassare Castiglione, the complete handbook of the man of the world, according to the ideal of the Renaissance. The relations which Raphael formed in these early surroundings (especially about 1506), the serene and pure moral atmosphere which he breathed and which is characteristic of his genius, followed him throughout his life.

Giovanni Santi died on 1 August, 1494. The orphan, placed under the guardianship of his maternal uncle, entered the studio of a charming painter, Timoteo Viti, a pupil of Francia, who had just returned to take up his residence in the country. Probably to the beginning of this apprenticeship, perhaps somewhat previous to it, belongs Raphael's famous sketch-book of the Academy of Venice. This book was discovered in 1803 by Bossi and purchased by Cicognara for the City of Venice. It is a small portfolio, now mutilated, consisting of a hundred pen-and-ink drawings; the author copied, in particular, the "Savants" and the "Philosophers" attributed to Justus of Ghent, which were then in the palace of Urbino (half of them are now at the Louvre and the other half at the Barberini Palace). Morelli (Lermolieff) thinks he recognizes in these drawings the hand of Pintoricchio, but the old opinion has prevailed over his criticism. These are rather the first studies and attempts of Raphael between his twelfth and fifteenth years. Though childish, they already reveal the masterly genius of the artist, his singular, divine sentiment of beauty. In Timoteo's studio and under his influence were painted the earliest pictures of his illustrious pupil which have reached us, four small exquisite pictures, of the shape and value of miniatures, the "Dream of the Knight" (National Gallery), "St. George and St. Michael" (Louvre), and the most charming of the four, the "Three Graces" of the Tribune of Chantilly.

In June, 1499, Raphael had not yet left Urbino. In May, 1500, he must have been at Perugia, but could not have entered Perugino's studio prior to that date, for the latter, who had been away for twelve years, returned then to paint the Cambio frescoes. Therefore, Vasari's story of Raphael's education by Perugino is not to be believed, being pure fable. Perugino's influence was important to a young man of eighteen, and, in fact, with his wonderful faculty of assimilation, Raphael had soon succeeded in mastering the suggestions and methods of the older painter, his poetic sense of light and space, his harmoniously symmetrical system of composition. He shortly became a sort of foreman, or head of the studio, supervising the making of those countless Madonnas for which Perugino's "workshop" was the best patronized in Italy. This period of somewhat commercial production is the least interesting of Raphael's life. The "Virgin of the Book" at the Hermitage and the "Virgin between St. Jerome and St. Francis" (Berlin) are among his most insignificant works. The "Crucifixion" of 1502 (National Gallery) shows an archaic and "primitive" dryness. But his genius soon threw off its half slumber. The "Coronation of the Virgin", painted in 1503 for the Franciscans of Perugia (Pinacoteca of the Vatican), shows qualities apparently borrowed from Perugino, but vivified by new imagination and youth, the three panels of the predella especially displaying great progress. A very important work, unfortunately lost since the Revolution, seems to have been the "Triumph of St. Nicholas of Tolentino". But the pearl of this period is the "Espousal of the Virgin", preserved at Milan (1504). A similar picture in the Museum of Caen is not the model wrongly ascribed to Perugino, but a copy of Raphael's picture, the work of the mediocre Spagna. This masterpiece worthily ends the period of Raphael's youth. The final word of Umbrian art of the fifteenth century was spoken in this page of youth and divine modesty.

Florentine Period (1504-08)

After a short visit in the summer at Urbino, Raphael went to live at Florence towards the end of 1504. The four years he spent there were a new and decisive stage in his career. At that date Florence was the most intense and active centre of the Renaissance (and the period was pregnant with artistic development). Leonardo da Vinci and the young Michelangelo, the two leaders of the movement, revealed (1506) in their rival "cartoons" (now lost) of the Signory perfect models of historical composition. In the stimulating atmosphere of a perpetual contest dominated by an impassioned love of beauty and fame Raphael found fresh incentive. The knowledge and skill of the least of the Florentine painters were calculated to amaze the young provincial and sharpen his ideas, which proved most profitable to his talent. At Florence he began his education over again; he resumed his studies and in a few years learned more about form than he had acquired from Timoteo and Perugino. His earnings were still modest. During his stay in Florence Raphael was a young, unknown artist with a good future. He had few acquaintances and not many commissions. He was only given small pictures to paint, portraits of middle-class people, such as Angelo and Maddalena Doni (Uffizi, 1506) and the "Donna Gravida" (pregnant woman) of the Pitti Palace, and an especially large number of Madonnas which he executed for private oratories. But nothing could show more advantageously the progress he had made since his Umbrian period. He had found a model of a more regular type, a fuller oval and a richer form than was Perugino's usual model. His sense of life became more natural without losing any of its poetry. Raphael's Madonnas are all his own; they have not the melancholy affectation of those of Botticelli, nor the mysterious smile of those of Leonardo. They are all near to us, material and human. Their familiarity, of a thoroughly Franciscan grace, is expressed with the greatest tact. They retain the easy good-humour, sometimes excessive, indulged in by the painters of the North. They are not intended to be "edifying", properly speaking, but in these matters degree is a matter of taste. As Burckhardt has said, for the first time since Phidias, art reached those heights where human beauty by its nobility and perfection of form undertakes to call forth the divine.

The Madonnas of the Florentine period may be divided into three groups according to the nature of the motif and the composition. The oldest and most simple are those which represent the Madonna with the features of a young Italian woman, standing and at half length, holding the Christ Child in her arms. The masterpiece of this class is the "Madonna of the Grand Duke" (Florence, Pitti Palace, 1505). Despite a trace of timidity in the arrangement the Virgin is so charming that one cannot prefer even the more perfect Madonnas of the next period. This simple composition has given rise to many variations, such as the little "Cowper Madonna" (Panshanger), so tenderly pensive, and the charmingly spirited, sweet, and impassioned "Madonna Casa Tempi" (Munich). The second group does little more than modify the first by the introduction of new elements, such as interior decoration or landscape, for example the "Virgin of Orleans" (Chantilly), the "Bridgewater Madonna", the "Colonna Madonna" (Berlin), and the great "Cowper Madonna" (Panshanger), the two last-named being contemporaries (1506 or 1507) and to a certain extent twins. The third group, however, shows a new stage, a superior type of composition and style. Raphael was then under the influence of the great Dominican painter, Fra Bartolommeo, one of those who did most in the sixteenth century to organize the truly Florentine pictorial tradition. This learned painter who was gifted to a high degree with a sense of balance and beautiful composition, greatly influenced the young Umbrian, the influence becoming apparent as early as 1505, when Raphael executed at San Severino, Perugia, a fresco of which he painted only the upper part (it was completed in 1521 by the aged Perugino). This fresco, which was important inasmuch as it contained the germ of the "Disputa", merely reproduces the arrangement of Fra Bartolommeo's "Last Judgment". To him Raphael owes the methods by which he produced the Virgins of the third group, in which the Madonna appears at full length in a landscape with the Infant and the young St. John. The sublime trio in such compositions as "La Belle Jardinière" (Louvre, 1507), the "Madonna of the Meadow" (Vienna), or the "Madonna of the Goldfinch" (Uffizi, Florence) is an idea directly derived from the teachings of the artist-monk. Here Raphael detaches himself from the external symmetry of Perugino's art, attaining a harmony at once more complex, intimate, and living.

From this period date several more important works in which the young man practised painting in the "noble" style. He began to receive orders and to gain a reputation. On setting out for Rome he left unfinished the "Madonna of the Baldacchino" (Pitti Palace, 1508), and it is not known when it was completed, but it is without originality and might pass for a picture by Fra Bartolommeo. Preferable to it is his "Madonna Ansidei" (National Gallery, 1507), less "modern" and more "Peruginesque", but one of the loveliest things conceivable in this traditional style. From 1508 dates the "Entombment" of the Casino Borghese. This work, ordered by Atalanta Baglioni for the chapel of her son Griffonetto at Perugia, is Raphael's first attempt in the historic manner. His client was important and he had an opportunity to gain distinction; it is evident that he spared no pains. Prepared for by an extraordinary number of drawings, the work is nevertheless one of the artist's least fortunate ventures. It is spoiled by excessive labour. Raphael wished to display all his knowledge and resources, uniting on the same canvas the qualities of the two masters of the "cartoons" of the Signory, the men whom he most admired and who tantalized him most, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Too many contradictory ambitions injured the result and the great attempt ended in failure. But his contemporaries judged otherwise, and the "Entombment" ranked Raphael among the foremost of the Florentine painters. Thenceforth all eyes were on him. The period of beginnings and attempts was over. In the summer of 1508 the young man went to Urbino. Julius II had just ascended the papal throne. Duke Guidobaldo recommended Raphael to the pope who was having the Vatican repainted and redecorated. In October, 1508, Raphael reached Rome.

Roman Period (1508-20)

The twelve years of Raphael's life in Rome are unparalleled. In this short space of time the young master multiplied masterpieces and left behind him the most complete, serene, and harmonious expression of the Renaissance. The painter of the Madonnas and of the little pictures of the Florentine period underwent the most surprising transformation, becoming all at once a most productive decorative painter on a vast scale. His genius set itself to the most exalted as well as the most diverse tasks, his inexhaustible resources permitting him to conceive of and complete within a few years the Stanze or Chambers of the Vatican, the "Acts of the Apostles", the Farnesina, and the Loggie, not to mention other undertakings as architect, archæologist, and sculptor, and fifty pictures or portraits, nearly all of which are masterpieces. It is a metamorphosis without precedent or explanation. When we consider that his vast and immortal work was accomplished in less than twelve years by a young man who was twenty-six when he began and who died at thirty-seven, we must question whether the world has twice beheld the wonder of such a genius.

Julius II, the reigning pope, was one to whom modern speech willingly accords the title "superman" or "hero". He was one of the first to conceive of and pursue the policy of Italian unity. Beyond doubt this warrior pontiff, who entered the citadel of Mirandola through the breach, had a somewhat temporal idea of his power, but through art he endowed the Church with an intellectual importance which it seemed to have lost since the Great Schism. In his powerful hands Rome became what it only recently ceased to be, the capital of the civilized world. Space does not permit adequate treatment of this point; but when face to face with the chief problems of the sixteenth century; when the question arose as to whether the Church would absorb or reject and condemn progress, whether or not it would associate itself with the humanistic spirit, Julius II deserves the credit for having taken sides with the Renaissance and prepared the stage for the moral triumph of the Church. The great creations of Julius II, Bramante's St. Peter's and Raphael's Vatican, are inseparable from the great ideas of humanity and culture represented by the Catholic Church. Here art surpasses itself, becoming the language of something higher, the symbol of one of the noblest harmonies ever realized by human nature. At the will of this extraordinary man Rome became at the end of the sixteenth century the meeting place and centre of all that was great in art and thought. With the infallible sense and discernment of great judges of men, the pope had immediately called to his service those who would do most honour to his reign. He did not make a mistake, and posterity can only ratify his choice. But his infallible divination is best shown in his selection of Raphael. There was nothing in the young man's work to presage the wholly new genius he was to display nor the unequalled powers of composition, nobility, and beauty which slumbered in that privileged soul. It is probable that Bramante who, like Raphael, was a native of Urbino, actively furthered his young townsman's interest with the pope, and caused him to be received among the inner circle of artists whom Julius II had engaged for the works in his palace. It must have been chiefly to the great architect, whose magnificent frescoes were at the Castle of Milan, to the conversations, the example, and familiar intercourse with this powerful genius, that Raphael owed the sudden broadening of his ideas and the unforeseen maturity of his style; the young Umbrian became worthy of the grandeur of Rome. But nothing completely explains this singular metamorphosis; it remains the miracle of Raphael's existence.

The pope, weary of dwelling in the apartments of his predecessor (the famous Appartamento Borgia, decorated by Pinturicchio), decided to remodel the lower chambers which had already been used by Nicholas V. A whole colony of painters, including the aged Signorelli and the aged Perugino, Sodoma and Bramantino, Peruzzi, Lotto and the Fleming Ruysch, in 1502 took up their residence in the Vatican and once more Raphael worked beside his former master. But his first attempts showed such mastery that the pope dismissed all the others and unhesitatingly confided to the youngest and the latest comer (1509) the vast task of decorating the Chambers. The first of these was called the Stanza della Segnatura, it being that of a tribunal of the Roman Curia. It is a somewhat irregularly vaulted hall with two windows on each side which are not on the same axis. These unfavourable conditions (which were repeated in the other chambers) the young artist turned to his advantage. This hall contains a plenitude of art and an intellectual harmony which will never be surpassed. On the four triangles of the ceiling he painted four large circular medallions representing, in the guise of young women crowned and surrounded by genii, Theology, Law, Science, and Poetry. In the spaces between these four circles he painted as many bas-reliefs representing a scene or "story" typical of the four disciplines: Original Sin (Theology), The Judgment of Solomon (Law), Apollo and Marsyas (Poetry). Unable to find a similar subject for Science, he gracefully depicted Astronomy in the form of a beautiful young woman leaning over the celestial sphere and by a gesture signifying the discovery of the stars. These figures on the ceiling sound the keynote of the paintings on the walls, which have always been regarded as the most perfect expression of the genius of the Renaissance, the harmonious agreement of all the human faculties, reason, and faith, justice and poetry, the balancing of all the forces and needs of our nature, and the joy resulting from the peaceful and happy exercise of all our activities. It is difficult to believe that Raphael himself conceived so extensive and complicated a design. The theme was certainly set by a cleric, a Humanist, or man of letters, such as Phædrus Inghirani or Sigismondo de' Conti (for whom Raphael painted the "Foligno Madonna" as a thank-offering). Furthermore, the ideas which he had to represent were not new in art. To go back no further than the fourteenth century painting had been endeavouring to express ideas. The frescoes at the Spanish Chapel of Andrew of Florence (c. 1355), that of Giusto at Padua, Traini's picture at St. Catherine's of Pisa, or the fresco of Filippino Lippi at the Minerva representing the "Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas" are well-known examples of what may be called philosophic painting. Raphael was largely inspired by these models. His work, novel in the style and spirit of its forms, merely takes up again on a larger scale, and with consummate art brings to perfection ideas which had been a national tradition in Italy since the Middle Ages.

Lack of space forbids a detailed description of these celebrated frescoes, permitting only a general outline of the principal ones. One of their most remarkable characteristics is the incomparable clearness of the composition, the faculty of adapting it to one order of ideas and so placing the spectator, previous to any analysis on his part, in a mood appropriate to each scene represented. That is, a spectator standing before the "Disputa" or the "School of Athens", even though he did not know the names of the persons and the meaning of the subject, would nevertheless immediately receive from the combination of forms and the general arrangement, an informing impression of the things represented. With its two and even three planes, its hierarchical aspect, its regular movement descending from the Father to the Holy Ghost, from the Son to the Host placed vertically below Him, to rebound in concentric waves through the two parallel hemicycles of the celestial and the terrestrial Church, the "Disputa" is stamped with theological majesty. In contrast to this presentment of august solemnity, in which everything follows an emphatically Scholastic method—the deduction from principles of a rigorous chain of reasoning like that of ontology—the "School of Athens" displays the most varied action, effervescence, scattered groups, and the agitation of a scientific congress. Ideas, methods, everything is changed; we pass from one world to another. No other painter could sensibly express the most delicate nuances by the pure language of forms. On the other hand, in such subjects it was allowable for the artist to make abundant use of allegory. There existed for the personification of abstract ideas a whole body of figures characterized by complicated attributes; often long inscriptions, streamers, phylacteries, completed the explanation. Pinturicchio proceeded in this manner in the Borgia apartments, as did also the author of the magnificent tapestries of Madrid. With better taste Raphael forbore this confusion of kinds, the mingling of fiction with reality, of personifications with persons. For the representation of ideas he made use only of real and historical persons, philosophy being represented by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus.

Thus this chamber of the Vatican became a sort of mirror of the tendencies of the human mind, a summary of all its ideal history, a sort of pantheon of spiritual grandeurs. Thereby the representation of ideas acquired a dramatic value, being no longer, as in the Middle Ages, the immovable exposition of an unchangeable truth, but the impassioned search for knowledge in all its branches, the moral life of humanity. Finally these historic figures conceived of as portraits for which the artist made use of all the documents possessed by the iconography of his time, blended in heroic familiarity with contemporary persons, the very circle of Julius II and Raphael. There are found Bramante, the Duke of Urbino, Raphael, Sodoma, and twenty others named by Vasari. Thus abstract ideas became animated, and we are afforded the magnificent spectacle of the world of the spirit, the society formed of the harmonious concert of the highest intelligences. Nevertheless these frescoes, which are so full of life, are perhaps the most highly decorative ever imagined. It is wonderful to see how the artist's thought adapts itself to the law of architecture, readily inventing simple and monumental motifs which endow his ideas with imperishable grandeur. Berenson is perhaps mistaken in reducing Raphael's genius to the incomparable mastery of the language of extent which he calls "composition in space". This is to cheapen his unique and enchanting qualities as designer and painter, plastic gifts which no other mortal ever possessed in the same degree. It is none the less true that the ease with which Raphael moves about in space, the aerial, spacious qualities which characterize his frescoes, is one of the essential parts of his particular magic. He is the greatest decorator who ever lived.

[It is worthy of note that the titles of these two famous frescoes are a later and incorrect invention of the eighteenth-century engravers. The "Disputa" is really a picture of the life of the Church and an affirmation of the dogma of the Real Presence. The title of the "School of Athens" is due to mistaking the figures of Aristotle and Plato, although they are designated, by the titles of their writings, for those of St. Paul and Dionysius the Areopagite. Moreover, the whole of this second scene is but a new illustration of the traditional theme of the seven liberal arts or the seven disciplines of the trivium and quadrivium].

The paintings on the other two walls were, as has been said, obstructed by a window. Raphael easily found a most ingenious solution of the difficulty. The painting of "Law" was divided into three parts: on the lintel he painted the three theological virtues (they are among his most exquisite creations), to left and right of the window he depicted in two symmetrical scenes "Civil Law" (Justinian bestowing the Pandects; this scene is imitated in Mellozo's fresco in the Vatican Library) and "Canon Law" (Gregory IX, with the features of Julius II, publishing the Decretals). These two frescoes are unfortunately much damaged. On the opposite wall Raphael painted Parnassus. This shows a mountain-top crowned with laurel where Apollo, surrounded by the Muses, his divine daughters, plays on the lyre; Homer sings, and about the inspired blind man is gathered his ideal family: Virgil leading Dante, Petrarch conversing below with Anacreon, Alcæus, and the wonderful Sappho. Thus on the poetic mount beside the source of Helicon the dream of Humanism is fulfilled in the joy of living and intellectual pleasures. The whole code of classic art is formulated in these unrivalled pictures. In them beauty, nobility of posture, purity and grace of form, the sense of rhythm and life—all combine to form one joyous whole. The serenity of Greek art is recovered without effort, and the noblest harmony is the result. It is the most complete expression of the magnificent ideal which for a time was believed realizable in the Church and which was called Humanism.

The decoration of the second Chamber or Stanza of Heliodorus is quite different. The pope was not one to be satisfied for long with impersonal allegories. He was eager for glory and greatness and his own apotheosis or rather the papacy personified by Julius II, forms the subject of the new chamber. His portrait was to appear on all sides, and in fact it is found in two out of every four of these frescoes. They were begun in 1511 and completed in 1514 under Leo X, whose countenance appears in the last fresco, "St. Leo halting Attila". This picture, which was done by pupils, shows, despite the beauty of the picturesque idea, inferior execution. The "Deliverance of St. Peter", with its night effects, its various lights (the moon, torches, and the nimbus or radiance of the angel) is one of the most famous but not the most beautiful or purest of the artist's works. But the frescoes of the other two walls, "The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple" and the "Mass of Bolsena" are among his finest creations. The "Heliodorus" (an obvious allusion to the despoilers of the Papal States and the war-cry of Julius II, Fuori i barbari!) is a splendid work of dramatic art wherein everything is simultaneously composed and expressed with startling clearness and energy. The "Mass of Bolsena" is perhaps still more beautiful. Raphael never produced a richer or more profound composition; never was he more picturesque and noble, more dramatic and strong. Furthermore, as regards colouring, it is impossible to imagine anything more beautiful than the portrait of the pope or the Swiss Guard grouped kneeling at his feet. In this instance the always-impressionable artist was influenced by the Venetian, Sebastiano del Piombo. With his usual genius and rapidity of assimilation he added the Venetian palette to his art.

Julius II died on 21 Feb., 1513. His successor, Leo X, lost no time in restoring or assuring to Raphael all his commissions and duties. But the work in the Chambers was almost neglected. In the third in point of time Raphael painted only one fresco, the "Incendio del Borgo" (1514). The other three are all by his pupils and are very poor. The "Incendio" itself is one of his least happy and personal works. Michelangelo had just uncovered the ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel, and this masterpiece was obviously in Raphael's thoughts. He sought only to assemble nude bodies in sculptural attitudes. Though it displayed more skill and beauty in detail, it repeated the mistake made six years previous in the "Entombment". The entire fourth Chamber, that of Constantine, was painted after the death of Raphael, under the direction of Giulio Romano, and it is very difficult to state precisely what remains of the spirit and original ideas of Raphael.

The frescoes of the Hall of Constantine were painted to convey the impression of immense tapestries. Tapestries were the fashion, after Raphael, by command of Leo X, had painted the cartoons for the "Acts of the Apostles" which were to be copied in the studio of Pieter van Aelst at Brussels. Ordered in 1514, the hanging, composed of ten pieces, was suspended on the walls of the Vatican in 1519. Stolen in 1527 during the sack of Rome, these tapestries were not restored to the Vatican till 1808, and then in a ruined condition. Seven of the original cartoons, discovered by Rubens at Brussels in 1630, are now preserved at the South Kensington Museum in London. This work de luxe, woven of threads of silk and gold, is the most robust and easily intelligible of all Raphael's productions. In it is found after an interval of a century the epic inspiration of Masaccio. Many of the details are textual reminiscences of the frescoes of the Carmine. At the same time Raphael's genius rarely manifested itself so freely or with such happiness in so beautiful a story. This happiness, the joy of creating, ease, and fertility are the beneficent characteristics of all the later works of Raphael's life. It is evident that the artist profoundly enjoyed the beauty of his inventions and the feeling is communicated to the spectator, lifting him above himself. Once more antiquity and Christianity, the profane and the sacred, were mingled but in a new and properly "historic" form. To revive the Temple with its twisted columns (two of which are preserved at St. Peter's and which Bernini imitated in the baldacchino in the following century), to reproduce according to a bas-relief a scene of sacrifice (Sacrifice of Lystra) to imagine an agora, a sort of Athenian forum, surrounded by porticoes and temples in which all antiquity lived again, and to set in this scene the "Preaching of St. Paul" was to Raphael an uninterrupted pleasure.

Such works have remained the unsurpassable models of historic composition, each of them begetting for more than two centuries a lengthy posterity and stirring many echoes in art. The "Death of Ananias" inaugurated the series of lurid miracles. Without such examples as the "Sacrifice of Lystra" and the "Preaching of St. Paul" Poussin's art would hardly be understood. The "Conversion of St. Paul" is a marvel of noble and luminous composition in a subject which seventeenth-century art often treated with vulgarity. But the finest examples of this splendid series are the first two scenes which form the evangelical prelude or prologue to the "Acts"; the "Calling of the Apostles" and the "Pasce Oves" are works in which the Umbrian soul, the serene and poetic sensibility of Raphael could not be surpassed. Here the artist has given us the true colour of things, the pastoral charm and original atmosphere of the preaching of Christ. The idyllic and confident sense of life as it is expressed in the catacombs or on the tomb of Galla Placidia, in the type of the Good Shepherd, the moral perfume so long vanished or evaporated were successfully revived by the wonderful divination and tact of a great artist. Raphael's genius would seem to have been bestowed by Providence to restore lost feelings to Christianity.

This same poetry as of a higher kind of eclogue characterizes the second of the great works undertaken by Raphael at the command of Leo X, the decoration of the Loggie, known as the Loggie of the Vatican. This was a story added by Raphael to the two stories of the façade built by Bramante. It comprised three arcades and as many little cupolas, each of which received four small pictures. In the decoration of this gallery Raphael's idea was to rival the Thermæ of Titus, the recent discovery of which had stirred artistic and literary Rome. The walls were covered with charming stuccoes by John of Udine; trellises painted so as to deceive the eye framed the pictures on the vaulted ceilings. Nothing equals the gaiety and grace of this aerial portico, flooded with sunlight and completed by the horizon of the Roman Campagna. The ceiling was painted from 1513 to 1519, but Raphael had not time to make it his own handiwork, executing only the designs, and those of the last three cupolas are not at all worthy of him. Here he delineates sacred history from the Creation to the Last Supper. The first "scenes" illustrate the same subject from Genesis which Michelangelo had just painted on the ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel. But Raphael does not outshine his rival, being only spirituel and charming where the latter is magnificent. In the succeeding compositions often occurs a reflection of the lovely pictures which Pietro Cavallini had painted about 1280 in the basilica of S. Lorenzo, reproduced in a MS. of the Vatican still extant. But the pastoral scenes are wholly original with Raphael, especially those in which landscape figures largely. Nothing could be more nobly graceful than the "Angels received by Abraham", the "Meeting of Jacob and Rachel", or "Moses saved from the waters". "Raphael's Bible", as it is often called, is a series of epic miniatures, the clearness of interpretation of which rivals their simplicity, perfect equilibrium of arrangement, charm of motifs, and grace of style.

But the service of Leo X did not stop here. The artist had to respond to the most unforeseen whims; now it was the decoration of the theatre which he had to plan, again his holiness desired the life-size portrait or an elephant and again there were the baths of Cardinal Bibbiena to be decorated. But neither these nor many other tasks exhausted the activity of Raphael. In 1512 the desire to compete with Michelangelo caused him to consent to paint at S. Agostino for the Luxemburger John Göritz a figure of Isaias which is almost a plagiarism, and in 1514 for the Sienese banker, Agostino Chigi, the four celebrated "Sibyls" of S. Maria della Pace. By their divine elegance the latter recall the sublime qualities of the Camera della Segnatura. For Chigi were also painted in 1516 the cartoons for the mosaics which were to adorn Santa Maria della Popolo, his funeral chapel, but only the figures of God the Father and the planets were finished. Finally this Mæcenas conceived the ostentatious idea of having the pope's favourite painter decorate the villa which he was building in the Trastevere and which in the seventeenth century was called the Farnesina. This delightful summer palace, one of Peruzzi's most charming creations, is a perfect type of country house, a patrician dwelling of the Renaissance period, and was decorated by the most popular masters of of the age. Sodoma decorated the first story with subjects from the "Marriage of Alexander" which form an heroic and voluptuous epithalamium. Raphael had to decorate the large gallery on the ground floor. The first fresco was the "Triumph of Galatea". Raphael took as his theme the celebrated verses from Politian's "Giostra" which had already inspired Botticelli. But what is the mythology of this charming artist beside the resurrection of an immortal and chaste paganism? Zeuxis and Apelles did not do otherwise. It is curious that Raphael made the purest profession of faith in idealism with regard to this figure of a woman which arouses all the veneres cupidinesque of painting. "With regard to the "Galatea" he writes to his friend Castiglione, "I should consider myself a great master if it had only half the merits of which you write. I know that to paint a beautiful woman I should see several and should have you also to assist me in my choice. But as I have few good judges or good models I work according to a certain idea which presents itself to my mind. If this idea possesses any perfection I do not know it, though this is what I endeavour to attain." Plato might recognize himself in these exquisite lines, or they might be a recovered fragment of the "Ion" or "Phædrus".

The "History of Psyche" on the ceiling of the large gallery was painted in 1518 when Raphael, overburdened with work, had no leisure and confided to his pupils, chiefly to Giulio Romano, the task of executing his sketches and designs. His original sketches are marvels, and the composition of the frescoes, despite their rather heavy and vulgar colouring, is calculated to charm an artist's eye. With his spiritually inclined imagination Raphael feigns that the loggia opening on the garden is a large trellis, an arched and vine-covered pergola through which appear in mid-heaven the winged whiteness of the goddesses. Two or three figures fill these azure triangles. These ideal and floating figures are a very festival. But the middle of the pergola is covered with a velum formed by a double tapestry which depicts in two scenes the "Entrance of Psyche to Olympus" and the "Marriage of Psyche". Giulio Romano's coarse execution and the still more regrettable retouching of Maratta could not wholly dishonour these incomparable works.

Pictures and portraits of the Roman period

Together with these vast decorative works Raphael continued to produce as though for pastime works of small size but great importance, for they are the sole means whereby his art could be known outside of Italy, and Raphael become more than a name to the great European public. Moreover, there are many masterpieces among these works of small compass. The Madonnas of the beginning of the Roman period still retain somewhat of the relative timidity of the preceding period. The lovely little "Virgin of the Casa Alba" (St. Petersburg, 1510), the Leonardo-like "Madonna Aldobrandini" (National Gallery), the charming "Madonna of the Veil" of the Louvre (1510), still preserve a remnant of the Florentine grace and simplicity. The "Foligno Madonna", painted in 1511 for Sigismundo Conti after the Camera della Segnatura, marks the transition to a new manner. The graceful figure of the Virgin seated amid clouds on a sunlit throne with her Child in her arms recalls the celestial figures of the "Disputa"; the three saints and the donor kneeling below on the earth before the beautiful landscape, the Child with a cartel on which was formerly written the ex-voto, show brilliant and scholarly painting, but perhaps too evident symmetry. The "Virgin of the Fish" (Madrid, 1513), the "Virgin of the Candlesticks" (London, 1514), the "Virgin of the Curtain" (Madonna della Impannata, Pitti, 1514) are unfortunately among his pupils' works. There is a coldness, a lack of the artist's personal qualities and peculiar sensibility, which chills works otherwise charming in conception. Execution is a part of art which seems material but which is in reality quite spiritual; through it the artist betrays his emotion, gives us his confidence, and communicates his impressions. The work of another hand always lacks the most valuable qualities of style. Raphael was therefore not sufficiently careful of his reputation when he confided his most original inspirations to his pupils, for they lost in being expressed by others. The division of labour which has but few inconveniences in decorative works becomes fatal in works of a "lyric" or familiar nature, and which are only valuable in so far as the artist endows them with his personality. It is this which injures or spoils irreparably some of his most famous works, such as the "Spasimo" of Madrid, the "Madonna of the Rose" (or "La Perla") of the same museum, the "St. Michael" of the Louvre, and the "Holy Family" known as that of Francis I (all these belong to the years 1516-18). A thought of Raphael's translated even by such a master as Giulio Romano or Francesco Penni has nevertheless only the value of a shadow or a copy. Translation in such a case too often means betrayal.

Some works of this period are nevertheless by the artist himself and are rightly numbered among his most popular works. The "Madonna of the Chair" (Pitti Palace) is perhaps the best liked by women. No other links so happily the familiar charm of the Florentine period with the maturity of the Roman period. She is only a peasant in the costume of a contadina with the national kerchief on her hair, but Raphael never found in such simple materials a more profound and natural combination of forms, such curving lines, such an expressive, enfolding arabesque. The whole of maternal love seems to be enclosed within the perfect circle of this picture. It is the perfection of genre pictures, wherein the most ordinary human life reaches its noblest expression, a universal beauty. Art has lived for four centuries on this sublime idea. Though from Giulio Romano to Ingres it has been imitated a thousand times, no one has discovered the secret of its perfection. Among tableaux de grace must be mentioned together with the little "Vision of Ezechiel" of the Pitti Palace, the splendid picture of St. Cecilia of Bologna (1515). This canvas, as well as its contemporaries the "Madonna of the Chair" and the "Sistine Madonna", coincides with the appearance of a new model whose portrait we have in the famous "Donna Velata" of the Pitti Palace. It was she who posed for the St. Cecilia as for the Dresden picture. These two pictures, especially the second, occupy a place apart in Raphael's works. Here the artist directly attempts the expression of the supernatural. The Dresden picture is the most beautiful devotional picture in existence. The impression is obtained not only by the idealism of its form, but by the vision-like representation of space, by the scheme of clouds on which the Virgin is upheld, and the solemnity of the drapery. An almost forbidding mystery fills this majestic canvas, truly unequalled in Raphael's work. It would perhaps have had a companion had not death interrupted the "Transfiguration" (Vatican Gallery, 1520). The upper part, which is all Raphael had time to complete, is one of his highest inspirations. In uniting this "glory" with the earthly and agitated scene below, he was confronted with a problem which it required all his genius to solve. The devotion of his pupils, who assumed the task of completing this well-nigh unrealizable task, produced only a cold and confused work.

This is why we often prefer Raphael's portraits, which the taste of those days neglected, to his most talked-of works, his most famous Virgins. It is now the fashion to praise the portrait painter at the expense of the painter of the Madonnas and even of the decorator. It is truly said that in the first two Chambers the beauty of the portraits adds much to the life of the whole. Later, starting with the Chamber of the Incendio, Raphael, doubtless following Michelangelo's example, ceased to introduce portraits into his historical works; he no longer represented individuals, but only the general species. Nevertheless he continued to paint portraits and even here, though he has equals, no one excels him. The half-dozen portraits he has left, the Julius II of the Uffizi, the Leo X of the Pitti Palace, the portrait of Phædrus Inghirami (Boston, Fenway Court), and that of Castiglione (Louvre) are rivals of the most perfect work of Titian, Velasquez, and Rembrandt. There is no doubt that the original of the splendid "Donna Velata" of the Pitti Palace, who so often inspired him, played a part in his life, but she keeps her secret and no one has ever succeeded in piercing her incognito. It is only certain that she was not the Fornarina, who seems to be an invention of a romance dating only from the end of the eighteenth century. The rather indecent portrait of a woman in the Barberini Palace, which bears on a bracelet the name of Raphael, is the work of Giulio Romano, and the signature is a forgery of the seventeenth century.

Raphael's fame, after three centuries of unclouded splendour, has been violently attacked during the last century. The progress of historical criticism and the discovery of the "Primitives" were the beginning of a reaction as violent as it was unjust. It was asserted that the Renaissance, instead of furthering the progress of art, was a source of decadence. A school was founded bearing the standard of the Pre-Raphaelites. This school, whose herald was John Ruskin, did much good, but without denying it its due, it is time to reject some of its narrow and prejudiced judgments. There is no doubt that Raphael, like other men of genius, had no pupils worthy of him. It would be strange to reproach him with the fact that his art was quite personal to himself. It may be that compared with Leonardo and especially with Michelangelo, Raphael seems less great or less original. He made no discoveries in nature like those of his great rivals, he added nothing to our knowledge of anatomy, of modelling, or construction; he is not a colourist like Titian, nor even a draughtsman in the absolute sense of the word, such as was Dërer or Pollaiuolo. It is probable that Raphael will never recover the singular position ascribed to him in the schools as the faultless master and the professor whose instructions are always to be consulted. On the other hand, he appears more and more the most exquisite and perfect expression of an age and a society which will never return. Nevertheless the fact remains that if there have been rarer or more learned painters than he, he excels them all in his incomparable sense of beauty. No other has shown us so much nobility in nature, no one ever had or led us to form a better opinion of human nature. No other painter handled so completely all the resources of his art. He has never been equalled as a portrait painter and decorator. No one has known so well how to invest the highest and most precious ideas with plastic forms. He has given form to our dreams.

The most comprehensive source of information is the work of MÜNTZ, Les biographes et les critiques de Raphaël (Paris, 1883); VASARI, Le vite, ed. Milanesi, IV (Florence, 1879); PUNGILEONI, Elogio storico di Giovanni Santi (Urbino, 1822); IDEM, Elogio storico di Giovanni Santi (Urbino, 1829); PASSAVANT, Raffael von Urbino u. sein Vater Giov. Santi, I, II (Leipzig, 1839); III (1858), French tr. LACROIX (Paris, 1860); BURCKHARDT, Der Cicerone (Basle, 1855); ed. BODE (Leipzig, 1879); French tr., GERARD (Paris, 1894); GRUYER, Raphaël et l'antiquité (Paris, 1864); IDEM, Essai sur les fresques de Raphaël; IDEM, Les vièrges de Raphaël (Paris, 1869); IDEM, Raphaël, peintre de portraits (Paris, 1887); TAINE,Voyage en Italie (Paris, 1866); IDEM, Philosophie de l'art en Italie (Paris, 1868); SPRINGER, Raphael u. Michelangelo (Leipzig, 1878); MORELLI, Italian Painters (London, 1893); MÜNTZ, Raphaël, sa vie, son ¦uvre et son temps (Paris, 1887); new ed., 1900); MINGHETTI, Raffaello (Bologna, 1885); WICKHOFF, Die Bibliothek Julius II in Jahrbuch für Kunstwiss., XIV (Berlin, 1893); CARTWRIGHT, Raphael (London, 1895); KNACKFUSS, Raffael (Bielefeld, 1897); KLACZKO, Jules II, Rome et la Renaissance (Paris, 1898); BERENSON,Central Italian Painters (New York, 1900); IDEM, The Study and Criticism of Italian Art (2nd series, London, 1902); BERTAUX, Rome (Paris, 1902); CAROTTI, Le opere di Leonardo, Bramante et Raffaello (Milan, 1906); GILLET, Raphaël (Paris, 1907).

Bibliography

• Blunt, Anthony, Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1660, 1940 (refs to 1985 edn), OUP, ISBN 0-19-881050-4
• Gould, Cecil, The Sixteenth Century Italian Schools, National Gallery Catalogues, London 1975, ISBN 0-947645-22-5
• Ettlinger, Leopold D., and Helen S. Ettlinger, Raphael, Oxford: Phaidon, 1987, ISBN 0714823031
• Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael, Yale, 1983, ISBN 0-300-03061-4
• Landau, David in:David Landau & Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print, Yale, 1996, ISBN 0-300-06883-2
• Pon, Lisa, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi, Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print, 2004, Yale UP, ISBN 978-0-300-09680-4
• Salmi, Mario; Becherucci, Luisa; Marabottini, Alessandro; Tempesti, Anna Forlani; Marchini, Giuseppe; Becatti, Giovanni; Castagnoli, Ferdinando; Golzio, Vincenzo (1969). The Complete Work of Raphael. New York: Reynal and Co., William Morrow and Company.
• Shearman, John; Raphael in Early Modern Sources 1483–1602, 2003, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-09918-5
• Vasari, Life of Raphael from the Lives of the Artists, edition used: Artists of the Renaissance selected & ed Malcolm Bull, Penguin 1965 (page nos from BCA edn, 1979)
• Wölfflin, Heinrich; Classic Art; An Introduction to the Renaissance, 1952 in English (1968 edition), Phaidon, New York.

Further reading

• The standard source of biographical information is now: V. Golzio, Raffaello nei documenti nelle testimonianze dei contemporanei e nella letturatura del suo secolo, Vatican City and Westmead, 1971
• The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, Marcia B. Hall, Cambridge University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-521-80809-X
• New catalogue raisonné in several volumes, still being published, Jürg Meyer zur Capellen, Stefan B. Polter, Arcos, 2001–2008
• Raphael. James H. Beck, Harry N. Abrams, 1976. LCCN 73-12198, ISBN 0-8109-0432-2
• Raphael and His Circle: Drawings from Windsor Castle, Martin Clayton. London: Royal Collection, 1999. ISBN 978-1-858-94076-2
• Raphael, Pier Luigi De Vecchi, Abbeville Press, 2003. ISBN 0789207702
• Raphael, Bette Talvacchia, Phaidon Press, 2007. ISBN 9780714847863
• Raphael, John Pope-Hennessy, New York University Press, 1970, ISBN 0-8147-0476-X
• Raphael: From Urbino to Rome; Hugo Chapman, Tom Henry, Carol Plazzotta, Arnold Nesselrath, Nicholas Penny, National Gallery Publications Limited, 2004, ISBN 1-85709-999-0 (exhibition catalogue)
• The Raphael Trail: The Secret History of One of the World's Most Precious Works of Art; Joanna Pitman, 2006. ISBN 0091901715
• Raphael: A Critical Catalogue of his Pictures, Wall-Paintings and Tapestries, catalogue raisonné by Luitpold Dussler published in the United States by Phaidon Publishers, Inc., 1971, ISBN 0-7148-1469-5 (out of print, but an online version is here )
• Raphael at the Metropolitan: The Colonna Altarpiece, Wolk-Simon, Linda. (2006). New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 978-1588391889.
• Raphael and the Antique, Claudia La Malfa, Reaktion Books, 2020. ISBN 9781789141504

External links

• 120 artworks by or after Raphael at the Art UK site
• Raphael Research Resource from the National Gallery, London
• V&A London online feature on the Raphael Cartoons
• Ten drawings and three paintings from the Royal Collection
• Web Gallery of Art
• Birthplace Museum of Raphael, Urbino, on the Artist's Studio Museum Network website
• Raphael Santi at ColourLex.
• Raphael at the National Gallery of Art Washington
• Raphael and His Circle: Drawings from Windsor Castle 2000 exhibition organised by the Royal Library, Windsor Castle and the National Gallery of Art Washington (exhibited 14 May–23 July 2000). The exhibition was also shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario (6 August–15 October 2000) and the J. Paul Getty Museum (31 October 2000–7 January 2001).
• Middleton, John Henry (1911). "Raphael Sanzio". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 22 (11th ed.). pp. 900–908.
• Raphael: Sublime Poetry Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 29 March–28 June 2026; the catalogue was written by Carmen C. Bambach (ISBN 978-1-588-39811-6).