Raphael Art Prints

He was born in Urbino in 1483, the son of Giovanni Santi, court painter to the Duke, and grew up around one of Italy's most cultured small courts. Orphaned at eleven, he seems to have helped run his father's workshop, and by around 1500 he was working with Pietro Perugino, whose style he absorbed so fully that Vasari said their hands could not be told apart. The courtly polish stayed with him: his friend Baldassare Castiglione, author of The Book of the Courtier, sat for one of his best-known portraits.

Time in Florence from about 1504 brought him into Leonardo's orbit, and he took up Leonardo's pyramid-shaped Holy Family groupings. You can see it in the Madonna of the Meadow, painted at twenty-three: Mary, Jesus and the young John the Baptist form a pyramid on the grass, linked by their gazes, with a red poppy for the Passion.

In 1508 Pope Julius II called him to Rome to fresco rooms in the Vatican, including the room that holds The School of Athens and The Parnassus. His portrait of Julius broke with custom by showing a pope lost in thought, and it set the pattern for papal portraits for about two centuries. For Julius he also painted the Sistine Madonna, where two winged cherubs lean on their elbows at the bottom edge.

Success brought a workshop that Vasari put at fifty pupils and assistants, and after his first Roman years much was painted by them from his drawings. The Fire in the Borgo is a case in point: Raphael is assumed to have designed it, but his assistant Giulio Romano may have painted it. He also worked as an architect, named to lead the new St Peter's after Bramante died in 1514, and in 1515 he was made prefect over antiquities dug up in and around the city. He died in Rome in 1520, still at the height of his powers.