Raphael

Raphael was born Raffaello Sanzio in Urbino on April 6, 1483, the son of Giovanni Santi, a painter and poet attached to the ducal court. His mother died when he was eight, and his father followed five years later, leaving the boy in the care of an uncle. By then Raphael had already entered the workshop of Pietro Perugino, whose sweet, linear manner shaped his early panels.

Around 1504 he moved to Florence, where contact with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo sharpened his sense of anatomy and dramatic gesture. The real turning point came in 1508, when Pope Julius II called him to Rome to decorate the papal apartments. Over the next decade Raphael produced the fresco cycles known as the Raphael Rooms, including The School of Athens, a vast mural that sets Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient philosophers beneath Bramante-inspired vaults.

He also painted the intimate oil panel Madonna and Child with the Book around 1502–3, now at the Norton Simon Museum, and the sensuous portrait La Fornarina around 1518–19, widely identified as Margherita Luti, a baker’s daughter. An early Resurrection of Christ, dated circa 1499–1502 and now in São Paulo, shows the young artist experimenting with symmetrical composition and luminous color. In 1514, after Bramante’s death, Raphael was named chief architect of the new St. Peter’s Basilica. He died in Rome on April 6, 1520, his thirty-seventh birthday, and was interred in the Pantheon.