Raphael

• 1. Introduction

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  Raphael died on the 6th of April 1520, which was, by some accounts, his 37th birthday. Four cardinals dressed in purple carried his body through Rome. The Pope kissed his hand. The inscription placed on his marble sarcophagus in the Pantheon, written by his friend Pietro Bembo, declared that Nature herself had feared to be conquered while Raphael lived, and feared to die when he did.

  Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino was born on either the 28th of March or the 6th of April 1483, in the small central Italian city of Urbino. He was the son of a court painter, orphaned by eleven, and described as a fully trained master by the age of seventeen. In a career that barely spanned two decades, he became one of the most celebrated artists in Europe, painted rooms that reshaped Western art, managed what may have been the largest workshop ever assembled under a single old master, and took on the role of Rome's chief architect. He was still at the height of his powers when he died.

  How did a boy from a modest court city rise to paint for popes? What made his work so admired, then so contested, then so enduring? And why, five centuries later, does his name still carry the weight it does?

• 2. Urbino and Early Formation

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  Urbino was a small city, but it was not a provincial one. Federico da Montefeltro, the duke who shaped its culture, had been one of Italy's most celebrated military commanders before Pope Sixtus IV made him Duke of Urbino. He died the year before Raphael was born, but his imprint on the court persisted. Federico's successor, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, married Elisabetta Gonzaga, daughter of the ruler of Mantua, and the court continued as a centre of literary life. Baldassare Castiglione, who would later write The Book of the Courtier, moved to Urbino in 1504 and became a close friend of Raphael's. Two other regular visitors, Pietro Bibbiena and Pietro Bembo, both later became cardinals and both later figured in Raphael's Roman years.

  Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi, was not only the court painter but a poet who wrote a rhymed chronicle of Federico's life and produced the texts and decor for court entertainments. His poem to Federico shows him closely aware of the most advanced North Italian and Early Netherlandish painters of his day. Giovanni died on the 1st of August 1494, when Raphael was eleven. Raphael's mother Màgia had already died in 1491. The boy's formal guardian became his paternal uncle Bartolomeo, a priest, who then became entangled in litigation with the stepmother. Raphael evidently helped manage his father's workshop from a very early age.

  In Urbino he encountered the work of Paolo Uccello, previously the court painter, and of Luca Signorelli, who was based nearby in Città di Castello until 1498. Vasari says that Giovanni placed his son with the Umbrian master Pietro Perugino as an apprentice, though the evidence for a formal apprenticeship is contested, and an alternative theory holds that some early training came from Timoteo Viti, who served as court painter in Urbino from 1495. What is not disputed is that by around 1500, Raphael was working as Perugino's assistant, and that the influence was profound. The scholar Wölfflin wrote that probably no other pupil of genius had ever absorbed so much of a master's teaching. Vasari went further, claiming it was sometimes impossible to distinguish their hands at all.

• 3. The Florentine Crucible

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  A letter dated October 1504, from the mother of the next Duke of Urbino to the Gonfaloniere of Florence, describes Raphael as a sensible and well-mannered young man, greatly gifted in his profession, who had determined to spend time in the city to study. That letter of recommendation marks the beginning of what art historians call his Florentine period, roughly 1504 to 1508, though he was probably never a continuous resident and may have needed to visit the city simply to secure materials.

  Florence at that moment held Leonardo da Vinci, who had returned to the city from 1500 to 1506. The influence on Raphael was immediate and unmistakable. His figures began taking more dynamic and complex positions. He made drawn studies of fighting nude men. A drawing in the Royal Collection shows him working from Leonardo's lost Leda and the Swan to develop the contrapposto pose for his own Saint Catherine of Alexandria. He adapted Leonardo's compositional invention of the pyramidal Holy Family, producing a series of works that remain among his most famous easel paintings. A portrait drawing from these years uses the three-quarter-length pyramidal composition of the newly completed Mona Lisa, yet the result is entirely Raphaelesque. He also perfected his own version of Leonardo's sfumato technique for painting flesh.

  Michelangelo, who was in Rome during much of this period, was just eight years older than Raphael. He had already grown to dislike Leonardo, and in time came to dislike Raphael even more, attributing conspiracies against him to the younger man. Yet in his most original work of the Florentine years, Raphael struck out in his own direction. His Deposition of Christ drew on classical sarcophagi to spread figures across the front of the picture space in a way that stood apart from both Leonardo and Michelangelo. It was much admired at the time and later forcibly removed from Perugia by the Borghese family. In 1502, the painter Pinturicchio had already called Raphael to Siena, describing him as a draughtsman of the highest quality, to help with cartoons for a fresco series in the Piccolomini Library of Siena Cathedral.

• 4. The Raphael Rooms

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  Pope Julius II invited Raphael to Rome in 1508, possibly at the suggestion of the architect Donato Bramante, who came from just outside Urbino and was distantly related to Raphael. Unlike Michelangelo, who had been kept waiting in Rome for several months after his first summons, Raphael was commissioned immediately to fresco what Julius intended as his private library in the Vatican Palace. Other artists and their assistants were already at work on different rooms, many painting over recently completed works commissioned by Julius's predecessor Alexander VI, whose arms and contributions Julius was determined to remove entirely.

  The first of the rooms, now called the Stanza della Segnatura, contains three works that would go on to define the High Renaissance: The School of Athens, The Parnassus, and the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament. Raphael was then given further rooms to paint, displacing other artists including Perugino and Signorelli. He completed a sequence of three rooms, each with paintings on the walls and often the ceilings as well. A fourth room was added after his death in 1520, probably including some elements he had designed.

  While painting the Stanza della Segnatura, Raphael gained access, reportedly through Bramante, to Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling. The Sistine ceiling had been completed in 1511. Raphael's response was swift and visible: the figure of Michelangelo himself appears in The School of Athens, depicted as Heraclitus, in a pose that clearly draws from the Sibyls and ignudi of the Sistine ceiling. Michelangelo later accused Raphael of plagiarism and complained in a letter, years after Raphael's death, that everything Raphael knew about art he had gotten from him. The rooms Raphael produced are still regarded as among the supreme expressions of what has been called the classic art of the post-antique West. His friend Castiglione coined a term for their quality: sprezzatura, a nonchalance that conceals all artistry and makes everything seem uncontrived.

  The death of Julius in 1513 did not interrupt the work. His successor, the Medici Pope Leo X, formed an even closer relationship with Raphael and continued the commissions.

• 5. Architect and Antiquarian

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  After Bramante died in 1514, Raphael was named architect of the new St. Peter's Basilica, making him for a short time the most important architect in Rome. Most of what he designed there was later altered or demolished once Michelangelo's design was accepted. A posthumous analysis by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger said Raphael's plan would have made the church considerably gloomier, with massive piers running the length of the nave like an alley.

  He designed several other buildings for the small circle around the papacy. The Palazzo Branconio dell'Aquila, built for Leo's Papal Chamberlain Giovanni Battista Branconio, was destroyed to make way for Bernini's piazza for St. Peter's, though drawings of its unusually richly decorated facade survive. The Villa Madama, a hillside retreat designed for Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, later Pope Clement VII, was never finished; even incomplete, it was described as the most sophisticated villa design yet seen in Italy, and it is apparently the only modern building in Rome of which Palladio made a measured drawing. Raphael also designed the Chigi Chapel for the banker Agostino Chigi and the Palazzo Jacopo da Brescia, which was physically moved in the 1930s but survives today.

  In 1515, Raphael was given formal powers as Prefect over all antiquities unearthed within Rome or within a mile outside the city. Anyone excavating antiquities was required to inform him within three days. Stonemasons could not destroy inscriptions without permission. He wrote to Pope Leo proposing ways to halt the destruction of ancient monuments and outlined a visual survey of the city to record all antiquities systematically. He asked Marco Fabio Calvo to translate Vitruvius's Four Books of Architecture into Italian; the translation, received around the end of August 1514, survives in Munich with handwritten margin notes by Raphael.

  In 1519, according to Marino Sanuto the Younger's diary, Raphael offered to transport an obelisk from the Mausoleum of Augustus to St. Peter's Square for 90,000 ducats. He also intended to produce an archaeological map of ancient Rome. That map was never made.

• 6. Workshop and Printmaking

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  Vasari recorded that Raphael eventually ran a workshop of fifty pupils and assistants, many of whom later became significant artists in their own right. This was arguably the largest workshop assembled under any single old master painter. It included established masters from other parts of Italy, probably working with their own teams as sub-contractors, alongside pupils and journeymen.

  The two most important figures were Giulio Romano, a young Roman pupil who was only about twenty-one at Raphael's death, and Gianfrancesco Penni, already a Florentine master. Both were left many of Raphael's drawings and other possessions and continued the workshop to some degree after his death. Perino del Vaga, Polidoro da Caravaggio, who was supposedly promoted from a labourer carrying building materials on the site, and Giovanni da Udine, who was responsible for the decorative stucco work and grotesques surrounding the main frescoes, all became notable painters. Most of these artists were later scattered by the violent Sack of Rome in 1527, which contributed to the spread of Raphael's style across Italy and beyond.

  Raphael made no prints himself, but he formed a close working collaboration with the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi. Together they produced around fifty prints; some were reproductions of existing paintings, but others were designs Raphael created specifically to be engraved. His interest in printmaking was unusual for a major artist of his standing, shared among his contemporaries only by Titian, who had worked far less successfully with Raimondi. Outside Italy, these reproductive prints were the primary way that Raphael's art reached the wider world until the twentieth century. After Raphael's death, his assistant Baviero Carocci, known as Il Baviera, ended up in control of most of the copper plates and built a successful career as a print publisher.

  For planning his own compositions, Raphael made drawings at every stage of a project. Over forty preparatory sketches survive for the Disputa alone, and more than four hundred sheets survive overall. A near-contemporary described him laying out a large number of stock drawings on the floor and beginning to draw rapidly, borrowing figures from here and there. He was one of the last artists to use metalpoint extensively, and in his final years became one of the first to use female models for preparatory studies, where male pupils had traditionally been used for figures of both sexes.

• 7. Reception and Legacy

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  In the decades after his death, the influence of his great rival Michelangelo exceeded his. Mannerism, which was already beginning at the time of Raphael's death, and later the Baroque, took art in a direction that moved away from his qualities entirely. Walter Friedländer wrote that with Raphael's death, classic art, meaning the High Renaissance, subsided.

  His period of greatest influence ran from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries. During those years his compositions became the cornerstone of training in the European academies of art. Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his Discourses, placed Raphael foremost among the first painters, especially for his frescoes, and praised what he called the simple, grave, and majestic dignity of Raphael's figures. Reynolds argued that if the highest excellence is to be given to the painter who combined the greatest number of superior qualities, then Raphael must be placed first. He was more cautious about Raphael's panel paintings, but those same works became enormously popular in the nineteenth century. Heinrich Wölfflin, born in 1862, wrote that Raphael's Madonnas had been reproduced more than those of any other artist in the world.

  In Germany, Raphael exercised a strong influence on the Nazarene movement and the Dusseldorf school of religious painting. In England, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood explicitly and emphatically rejected his influence, seeking to return to styles predating what the critic John Ruskin described as the doom of European art that went forth from the Stanza della Segnatura. Ruskin held that Raphael had made execution and beauty the chief objects of art, at the expense of thought and truth.

  Art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann had earlier made Raphael's work a formative influence on Neoclassical painting. By 1900 his popularity among the general public had been surpassed by Michelangelo and Leonardo. Bernard Berenson, writing in 1952, still called him the most famous and most loved master of the High Renaissance. The scholars Leopold and Helen Ettlinger noted that despite relatively limited critical literature on Raphael compared to the shelves devoted to the Sistine ceiling or to Leonardo's drawings, of all the great Renaissance masters, Raphael's influence has been the most continuous.