Raffaello Sanzio

Raphael was the third of the great High Renaissance masters and died at thirty-seven at the height of his career. Born in Urbino in 1483, the son of a court painter to the Montefeltro dukes, he grew up around one of the most cultivated courts in Italy and was orphaned by eleven. He trained under Perugino, whose sweetness and clear symmetrical compositions he absorbed and then surpassed. The Marriage of the Virgin of 1504 is essentially a corrected version of his master's picture of the same subject. He moved to Florence around 1504 and spent four years studying Leonardo and Michelangelo. The series of Madonnas he painted there — pyramidal, tender, and worked out through dozens of drawings — established his reputation. Julius II summoned him to Rome in 1508, aged twenty-five, to fresco the papal apartments. The Stanza della Segnatura contains the School of Athens, in which the philosophers of antiquity are assembled in a vast vaulted hall, Plato pointing upward and Aristotle outward, with Michelangelo added late as Heraclitus brooding on the steps. He ran a large and efficient workshop with some fifty assistants, and took on the Villa Farnesina frescoes, tapestry cartoons for the Sistine Chapel, portraits, and altarpieces including the Sistine Madonna and the Transfiguration. He was made architect of St Peter's after Bramante's death in 1514 and Commissioner of Antiquities in 1515, producing a survey of ancient Rome and a letter to Leo X protesting at the quarrying of its ruins. He was sociable and popular where Michelangelo was not. He died on Good Friday 1520 after a short fever, and was buried in the Pantheon.

• Lived: 1483 CE – 1520 CE
• Nationality: Italian
• Roles: painter, architect