Raphael Sanzio

Painter and architect born in Urbino and eventually settled in Rome. He painted portraits and mythological and religious works, noted for their harmony of colour and composition. He was active in Perugia, Florence, and (from 1508) Rome, where he painted frescoes in the Vatican. Among his best-known works are The Marriage of the Virgin (1504; Brera, Milan) and the fresco The School of Athens (1509–11; Vatican, Rome).

Raphael was the son of Giovanni Santi (died 1494), a painter at the court of Urbino. In 1499 he went to Perugia, where he worked with Perugino, whose graceful style is reflected in Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin. This work also shows his early concern for harmonious disposition of figures in the pictorial space.

In Florence 1504–08 he studied the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Masaccio, and Fra Bartolommeo. His paintings of this period include the Ansidei Madonna. Pope Julius II commissioned him to decorate the papal apartments (the Stanze della Segnatura) in the Vatican. Raphael's first fresco series there, The School of Athens, is a complex but classically composed grouping of Greek philosophers and mathematicians, centred on the figures of Plato and Aristotle. A second series of frescoes 1511–14 includes the dramatic and richly coloured Mass of Bolsena.

Raphael received many commissions and within the next few years he produced mythological frescoes in the Villa Farnesina in Rome 1511–12; cartoons for tapestries for the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican; the Sistine Madonna (c. 1512); and portraits, for example of Baldassare Castiglione (c. 1515).

He inspired many of his contemporaries and later the Caracci, Rubens, Poussin, and Rembrandt, the neoclassicists and the Romantics.