Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance, the short period around 1500 when Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and he brought Italian art to its height.
He was born in Urbino in 1483 and died in Rome on April 6, 1520, at thirty-seven. His frescoes in the Vatican, The School of Athens first among them, and his portraits of popes made him famous.
People still ask how he died. The answer most of them know, a fever caught after a night of love, comes from a biography printed thirty years later. A letter sent to the Duke of Ferrara the day after his death describes something else.
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That biography begins in Urbino, a small hill city in central Italy whose duke kept one of the most refined courts of the day. Its author, Giorgio Vasari, a painter who wrote the first lives of the Italian artists, says the child was born on Good Friday, which is why March 28 is the date usually given.
His father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter and poet at the duke's court and ran a busy workshop. That workshop is almost certainly where the boy first learned to paint.
The family did not stay whole for long. His mother, Magia, died in 1491, when he was about eight, and his father died on August 1, 1494. An uncle, Bartolomeo, became the guardian of a boy of eleven.
An orphan who wanted to paint still needed a master. Vasari wrote that Raphael was placed with the painter Perugino, then famous all over Italy, at about eight, "despite the tears of his mother." That would put the move before her death, and the early date is disputed. From around 1500 the young man was working as Perugino's assistant.
He soon worked on his own. In December 1500, at seventeen, the contract for his first documented work already calls him a master, a painter entitled to take commissions in his own name. It was an altarpiece for the Baronci family, for a church in Città di Castello, a small town of the region, finished in 1501.
Older painters began to ask for his help. In 1502 Pinturicchio, a painter from Perugia who had worked beside Perugino in the Sistine Chapel, called him to Siena. There Raphael helped design the frescoes of the Piccolomini Library, a room of the cathedral built to hold the books of a pope.
Florence and the Madonnas
In 1504 Raphael moved to Florence, then the busiest art city in Italy, and stayed on and off until 1508. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were both at work there, and the young man from a provincial court set out to learn what they knew…
What You'll Discover
What Florence taught an outsider from Urbino.
Who is hiding in the Vatican fresco.
What Michelangelo said about him.
The wedding he postponed for six years.
Why nobody agrees on what killed him.
What happened when his tomb was opened.