Interesting Facts About Raphael
Raphael packed an astonishing life into 37 years. He was a child prodigy who lost both parents early, ran a workshop of about fifty people, painted his rivals into his masterpieces, helped design the new St Peter's, and ended up buried in the Pantheon.
Quick facts first
Born in Urbino in 1483, orphaned by age 11.
Called a master while still a teenager.
Ran the largest art workshop in Rome.
Made chief architect of St Peter's at about 31.
Died on his birthday and was buried among emperors.
He was orphaned before he was a teenager
His mother died when he was eight, his father, the court painter Giovanni Santi, when he was eleven. He grew up fast inside a working studio, and his hometown story is in where Raphael was born.
He hid his rivals inside the School of Athens
In his Vatican fresco he turned philosophers into portraits. Plato is widely read as Leonardo da Vinci, and the brooding loner slumped on the steps is thought to be Michelangelo.
That figure was added late, after Raphael got a look at the Sistine ceiling next door. It was half tribute, half answer to his great rival.
Michelangelo could not stand him
The two men avoided each other. Michelangelo grumbled that everything Raphael knew about art he had learned from him, and accused him of trailing around Rome like a crowd pleaser.
Raphael, charming and surrounded by admirers, was everything the solitary Michelangelo was not.
He was an early media brand
Raphael ran his career like a business. He had the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi turn his designs into prints that sold across Europe, spreading his images far beyond the people who could ever see the originals.
Few artists before him understood reproduction as a way to build fame. He treated his studio like a business and his style like a product.
The pope made him guardian of ancient Rome
Pope Leo X put him in charge of the city's antiquities. Raphael drew up plans to record and protect the crumbling ruins, an early act of what we would now call archaeology and heritage protection.
He loved one woman and was engaged to another
He spent years engaged to Maria Bibbiena, a cardinal's niece, and kept delaying the wedding until she died. His heart belonged to La Fornarina, a baker's daughter who modeled for some of his most personal paintings.
Quick questions about Raphael
Was Raphael a real Ninja Turtle?
The cartoon turtle is named after him. The painter came first, by about five hundred years.
How many works did he leave?
Hundreds of paintings and drawings, many finished with his workshop, in only two decades of work.
How did he die?
Of a fever in 1520 at 37. The full story is in how Raphael died.
The fact that says it all
Three centuries after his death, a group of rebel painters in 1848 named themselves the Pre Raphaelites, the brotherhood from before Raphael, because his perfection still ruled the art schools. The whole life is in the complete story of Raphael, and the case for his greatness in is Raphael the greatest painter ever.