SUBJECT FILE NO. IJM-0046
CLASSIFICATION: HISTORICAL ARCHIVE
Raphael
Raphael
Painter & Architect
SECTION I -- SUBJECT PROFILE
| Name | Raphael |
|---|---|
| English | Raphael |
| Nationality | Italy |
| Lifespan | 1483–1520 |
| Gender | Male |
| Century | 16th–18th C. |
| Field | Art |
| Title | Painter & Architect |
SECTION II -- OVERVIEW
Raffaello Sanzio was born in 1483 in the hilltop city of Urbino, one of the most cultivated small courts in Renaissance Italy, where the dukes of Montefeltro had gathered painters, poets, and philosophers around them.His father Giovanni Santi was a court painter who gave the child his first lessons in drawing and color, but also, more fatefully, his first sense of what a humanist court could look like.
Tragedy marked his earliest years: his mother died when he was eight and his father when he was eleven, and the orphaned boy was raised by an uncle while continuing to work in his father's studio.The first turning point came around 1500, when the seventeen-year-old Raphael entered the Perugia workshop of Pietro Perugino, the most celebrated Umbrian master of the day.
Within a few years the pupil had absorbed and surpassed the teacher, producing serene, gracefully balanced altarpieces that already bore his unmistakable sweetness of feeling.In 1504 he moved to Florence, where the mature Leonardo da Vinci and the formidable Michelangelo were transforming painting before his eyes.
He studied them both intensely, softening Leonardo's smoky sfumato and absorbing Michelangelo's sculptural power without ever losing his own clarity.His second turning point came in 1508, when Pope Julius II summoned him to Rome on the recommendation of the architect Bramante.
Still in his mid-twenties, Raphael was given the task of decorating the papal apartments, the Stanze of the Vatican, and in the Stanza della Segnatura he produced the fresco known as the School of Athens, perhaps the single most perfect image of the Western intellectual tradition.The commissions poured in: the Sistine Madonna, the Transfiguration, a series of tapestry cartoons for the Sistine Chapel, and, in 1514, his appointment as chief architect of the new St.
Peter's Basilica.In his last years he presided over the largest workshop in Europe and lived the life of a prince of art, universally loved for his courtly gentleness.He died in Rome on Good Friday in 1520, his thirty-seventh birthday, after what Vasari called 'a night of excess,' and was buried, as he had requested, in the Pantheon, where his tomb can still be visited today.
SECTION III -- CHRONOLOGY
SECTION IV -- NOTABLE STATEMENTS
“When one is painting one does not think.”
“Everything I know I have learned from the ancients.”
SECTION V -- FIELD NOTES
[A]Buried in the Pantheon
Raphael died on Good Friday in 1520, on what was said to be his thirty-seventh birthday, after what Vasari described as a night of excess. At his own request he was buried in the Pantheon, where a Latin epitaph proclaims that nature herself feared to be outdone while he lived, and to die when he died.
SECTION VI -- LEGACY & IMPACT
Raphael defined the grace and harmony of the High Renaissance, and his School of Athens became the quintessential image of the Western intellectual tradition. Generations of painters from Ingres to the Pre-Raphaelites defined themselves in relation to him, and his compositions remain a touchstone of classical beauty.
SECTION VII -- MAJOR WORKS
- [01]School of Athens (1511)
- [02]Sistine Madonna (1512)
- [03]Transfiguration (1520)
- [04]Madonna of the Meadow (1506)
- [05]The Marriage of the Virgin (1504)
