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Raphael (painter) (1483-1520) (properly, Raffaelo Sanzio), Italian painter who was one of the leading artists of the Italian Renaissance. He created many of the most significant paintings of the early 16th century and his art was extremely influential for centuries after his death.
Raphael was born in Urbino on March 28 or April 6, 1483. His father, the artist Giovanni di Santi, worked mainly for Francesco Gonzaga in Mantua, and Raphael spent his youth in a courtly environment. In 1500, so Vasari records, Raphael was apprenticed to Perugino, a highly respected artist who was one of the first in Italy to paint extensively in oil. He employed pure strong colours for his figures, which were imbued with a particularly sweet air of piety, often setting them in landscapes infused with pale, shimmering light.
Raphael's early paintings include large altarpieces as well as smaller works, both devotional and secular, many of them made for the court at Urbino. One such is a small panel painting, St George Slaying the Dragon (c. 1505, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); it seems to be connected with Guidobaldo da Montefeltro's election to the Order of the Garter in 1504 and is remarkable for its miniature precision and the knowledge of the work of the Flemish painter Han Memling that it displays. Raphael's earliest large-scale paintings were executed in Città di Castello, which was a day's ride from Urbino. Works such as the Sposalizio (or Marriage of the Virgin) (1504, Brera, Milan) and the Coronation of the Virgin (c. 1503, Vatican Museum, Rome) demonstrate Perugino's influence in their static composition and sweet figure style. Although intentionally similar in composition to earlier works by Perugino, Raphael's paintings already possessed a dynamic spatial quality that is lacking in the former's work, and his consummate technical mastery and idealizing imagination led to his working in competition with his former master on altarpieces in Perugia, for instance the Ansidei Altarpiece (1505, National Gallery, London) made for Bernardino Ansidei for the chapel of St Nicholas of Bari in the Servite church of San Fiorenzo.
Raphael's visit to Florence in about 1504 seems to have been motivated by his desire to see the work of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps in order to improve his skills in areas such as anatomy and perspective, where he was still inexpert. He did not settle there but visited frequently between 1504 and 1508. His work during these years was extremely varied in nature and scale, ranging from the series of madonnas he painted for individuals, such as the Small Cowper Madonna (c. 1505, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) to the large-scale religious works commissioned for churches, such as The Entombment (1507, Borghese Gallery, Rome).
Raphael's style developed fully during the years 1504-1508. He lost Perugino's air of sweetness and developed a bolder, more monumental manner that was partly inspired by the works of Fra Bartolommeo. While his madonnas were idealized portraits of tranquil women, he also painted real sitters; in La Muta (c. 1507, Ducal Palace, Urbino), the subject's finger extends to press against the picture frame, creating an arresting and original pictorial device that reinforces the analogy that a painting is akin to a window.
During his period in Florence, Raphael was influenced by the pyramidal compositions of Leonardo, as can be seen in La Belle Jardinière (c. 1507, Musée du Louvre, Paris). This is one of a series of paintings of the Virgin and Child, often with St John the Baptist, in an outdoor setting. Leonardo's influence is also apparent in the Bridgewater Madonna (c. 1507, Duke of Sutherland Collection, on loan to National Gallery of Scotland); here, the Virgin's sweetly smiling expression and contraposto (twisted) pose are derived from Leonardo, while the pose of the Infant Jesus is derived from Michelangelo.
In 1508 Raphael was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II in order to decorate a suite of offical rooms in the Vatican known as the Stanze. He started with the Stanza della Segnatura, the office in which documents were sealed, producing a series of frescos concerned with different aspects of the human intellect. The most famous of these, the School of Athens (1509-1511), represents groups of Greek philosophers in a monumental Classical setting. Despite the great number and variety of figures, the painting has a remarkably balanced, unified composition, dominated by the eloquently gesturing figures of Plato and Aristotle in the centre. The other frescos in the Stanza, representing theology, poetry, and law, have a similarly harmonious quality, which also characterizes the Stanza dell'Eliodoro (1511-1514). This was followed by two further rooms, which were mostly executed by Raphael's assistants, in particular Giulio Romano, who were also responsible for painting the Vatican Loggie, completed in 1519. During this period Raphael also produced a series of cartoons (1515-1516, Royal Collection, on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London) for tapestries that were to be hung in the Sistine Chapel. These memorable compositions, representing scenes from the lives of St Peter and St Paul, were to be enormously influential on later artists.