Raphael

Called the ‘Prince of Painters’ during his lifetime, Raphael blazed a trail through Italy’s High Renaissance, picturing a sense of grace and harmony that supremely epitomised the era’s humanist philosophies. His technical mastery of sfumato, perspective and anatomical precision were matched by his ability at portraying extraordinary emotion. More versatile with a brush than Michelangelo and more prolific in paint than Leonardo, he died aged just 37 — but left behind a body of work that would dominate the academic tradition until the mid-19th century.

Born Raffaello Sanzio in Urbino in 1483, as a child Raphael initially trained alongside his father, a painter in the court of Duke Federico da Montefeltro, where he was likely exposed to the work of Piero della Francesca, Uccello and Mantegna. Following an apprenticeship with Perugino, by 1500 he was an independent master and winning commissions from local churches. In 1504 he arrived in Florence — the epicentre of the Renaissance. Noted as a painter of technically brilliant Madonnas, by 1508, aged only 25, he was called to the court of Pope Julius II.

Wildly popular in Rome thanks to a combination of his skills as an artist and charms as a man, Raphael’s work adopted a fresh sense of grandeur. He was commissioned to decorate a series of papal apartments with a cycle of frescos that would include his masterpiece of classicism, The School of Athens. This was followed by requests for a suite of tapestries to adorn the walls of the Sistine Chapel and, following Bramante’s death in 1514, to become lead architect of St Peter’s Basilica.

Shortly before his death following a brief illness in 1520, Raphael completed La Fornarina, an exquisite portrait of a baker’s daughter thought to be the love of his life. He also left behind his unfinished masterpiece The Transfiguration, a culmination of his oeuvre that paved the way for Mannerist and Baroque painting, which Vasari called the artist’s ‘most beautiful and most divine work.’ With the blessing of Pope Leo X it was displayed over Raphael’s tomb inside Rome’s Pantheon.