Raphael: The Painter Everyone Wanted to Be

Raphael was born in Urbino, in central Italy, on 6 April 1483. His father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter whom the biographer Giorgio Vasari judged “of no great merit,” but he was a cultivated man at one of the most brilliant courts of the time.¹

Under Duke Federico da Montefeltro, Urbino had drawn visits from Bramante, Piero della Francesca and Leon Battista Alberti. Giovanni gave his son his first lessons in painting. Raphael lost his mother in 1491 and his father in 1494, when he was 11.¹

The first document about Raphael as a painter is dated 10 December 1500. In it, the young artist, already called a “master,” is commissioned to help paint an altarpiece.¹

He trained in the circle of Pietro Perugino, the great painter of Umbria, and learned from him a calm, sweet style and a love of clear perspective. His first major work, The Marriage of the Virgin (1504), was inspired by a fresco Perugino had painted in the Sistine Chapel. Yet even there, the figures are freer and more alive than his teacher's.¹

By the autumn of 1504 Raphael was in Florence, drawn by what Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were doing there. He studied their work so closely that Britannica calls them his “principal teachers” in Florence.¹

From Leonardo he took the pyramid: figures grouped in a single, stable triangle, and the soft shading known as sfumato. You can see it in the Madonnas he painted between 1505 and 1507, such as the Madonna of the Goldfinch and La Belle Jardinière. From Michelangelo he learned what the human body could express.¹

But Raphael wanted something the two older men did not: a calmer, more open style that anyone could understand.¹

It is his most famous painting, and one of the great images of the Renaissance. Under vast arches, the philosophers of antiquity gather around two central figures: Plato, pointing to the sky, and Aristotle.^{1, 2}

The architecture was inspired by Bramante's plans for the new St. Peter's.² And Raphael hid real people among the ancient Greeks:

Heraclitus, the brooding man leaning on a block of marble in the foreground, is a portrait of Michelangelo, who was then painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in the same palace.^{1, 2}

At the far right edge, a young man in a black beret looks straight out at us. It is Raphael himself.²

In Rome, Raphael did far more than paint. In 1514 Pope Leo X put him to work on St. Peter's Basilica, and when Bramante died later that year, Raphael took charge of the building.¹

In 1515 he was asked to watch over ancient inscriptions; two years later he became commissioner of antiquities for Rome and drew up an archaeological map of the city.¹

He also became Rome's leading portrait painter, and designed ten huge tapestries for the walls of the Sistine Chapel. The tapestries were hung there by 1519.¹

His final great work was The Transfiguration, an enormous altarpiece commissioned in 1517. It was still unfinished when he died, a few days after catching a fever, on his 37th birthday.¹

The painting was placed at the head of his bier during the funeral. His assistant Giulio Romano finished it, and Raphael was buried in the Pantheon, the ancient temple in the heart of Rome.¹