# RAFFAELLO Sanzio [View the canonical artist record]() ## Artist - Lifespan: 1483–1520 - Profession: painter - School: Italian ## Biography Raffaello Sanzio \(or Santi, Raphael in English\) was an Italian Renaissance painter, architect and designer. His work along with that of his older contemporaries Leonardo and Michelangelo defined the High Renaissance style in central Italy. His father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter at the court of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, and doubtless taught Raphael the rudiments of technique. Giovanni was an educated man of letters and was well aware of the contemporary artists of the day. His preferences seem to have been Mantegna, Leonardo, Signorelli, Giovanni Bellini and Pietro Perugino, but he was also impressed by the Flemish artists Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. He died when his son was 11 years old. Raphael's mother supposedly cared for her infant son herself rather than sending him out to a wet nurse, and the close relationship with his parents was invoked by contemporaries as the reason for his sweet disposition. Sweet he may have been, but he was also talented to an extraordinary extent, with ambitions to match. Early career in Umbria In his early career Raphael worked in various places in Umbria and Tuscany. From 1504 to 1508 he worked much in Florence, and this is usually referred to as his Florentine period, although he never took up permanent residence in the city. Although Vasari 's account of Raphael becoming a pupil of Perugino before his father's death is probably a fiction, he unquestionably worked in some capacity in the older artist's studio during his youth. Perugino was at this period one of the most admired and influential painters working in Italy, and Raphael's familiarity with Perugino's manner, both in style and technique, is evident from the altarpieces he painted for churches in his native Umbria, such as the Crucifixion \(c. 1503; National Gallery, London\), the Coronation of the Virgin \(c. 1503; Pinacoteca, Vatican\). The early paintings include many of Perugino's characteristic mannerisms — the slender physique of the figures whose grace is exaggerated by their often balletic poses; the sweetness of the facial expressions; and the formalized landscape backgrounds populated by trees with impossibly slender trunks. That he soon completely outstripped Perugino is best seen by comparing Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin \(1504; Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan\) with Perugino's painting of the same subject \(Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen\). The two compositions are closely similar in many ways, but Raphael far surpasses Perugino in lucidity and grace. Raphael was clearly a prodigy, as is shown by the request by Pinturicchio, then one of the leading artists in Italy, for Raphael to supply detailed compositional drawings, of which two survive \(1502-03; Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; Pierpont Morgan Library, New York\), for frescoes in the Piccolomini Library in Siena. Florentine period Despite his success as a painter of altarpieces and of smaller courtly paintings, such as the Knight's Dream \(c. 1504; National Gallery, London\) and the St Michael and the Dragon \(c. 1504; Musée du Louvre, Paris\), Raphael clearly felt the need to leave Umbria in order to widen his experience of contemporary painting. Armed with a letter of recommendation dated October 1504 from the Duke's sister-in-law Giovanna della Rovere to Piero Soderini, the ruler of Florence, he probably arrived in the city soon afterwards. To the Florentine period belong many of his most celebrated depictions of the Virgin and Child. In these and his paintings of the Holy Family he showed his developing mastery of composition and expression. In the paintings of the Virgin and Child he experimented with new compositional forms and figural motifs. In the Madonna del Prato \(1506; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna\) and La Belle Jardinière \(c. 1507; Musée du Louvre, Paris\) Raphael employs a pyramidal structure derived from Leonardo, while in the Bridgewater Madonna \(c. 1507; on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh\) the diagonal movement of … ## Related artworks - [A Group of Nude Men]() - [A Group of Warriors]() - [A nude man advancing to the right \(verso\)]() - [A Soldier before the Cell of St Peter]() - [A Youthful Warrior \(recto\)]() - [Adam and Eve \(ceiling panel\)]() - [Aerial view]() - [Aldobrandini Madonna \(Garvagh Madonna\)]() - [Allegory \(The Knight's Dream\)]() - [Amorini at play \(verso\)]() - [An Angel]() - [Angel \(fragment of the Baronci Altarpiece\)]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()