Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio, known in English as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. In a career of barely twenty years, cut short by his death at 37, he painted the frescoes of the papal apartments in the Vatican, including the School of Athens, along with some of the best-loved Madonnas and portraits in European art. For more than three centuries academies treated his balanced, graceful style as the model of perfect painting.

Raphael was born in Urbino, in central Italy, in 1483, probably on 6 April, though some scholars prefer 28 March. Urbino was then one of the most refined courts in Italy, ruled by the Montefeltro dukes, and his father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter and poet in their service. His mother died in 1491 and his father in 1494, leaving him an orphan at eleven, but he had already learned the basics of painting in his father's workshop.

By about 1500 he was working with Pietro Perugino, the leading painter of Umbria, whose soft, symmetrical style he absorbed so completely that early works by the two can be hard to tell apart. His Marriage of the Virgin of 1504, now in Milan, follows a composition by Perugino but already surpasses it in its sense of space, with a round temple at its centre that recalls the architecture of Bramante.

From 1504 to 1508 Raphael was based mainly in Florence, where he studied the newest work of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. From Leonardo he learned to group figures in pyramids and to model faces with gentle shadow; from Michelangelo, a stronger sense of the body in action. He produced a series of small devotional pictures of the Virgin and Child in landscapes, such as the Madonna of the Meadow and La Belle Jardinière, and portraits of Florentine patrons. The Entombment painted for a Perugia noblewoman in 1507 shows him reaching for the drama of Michelangelo.

In late 1508 Raphael was called to Rome by Pope Julius II, possibly at the suggestion of Bramante, a fellow native of the Urbino region. He was given the task of painting a suite of rooms in the Vatican palace, the stanze, and he and his workshop spent the rest of his life on them. The first, the Stanza della Segnatura, was probably the pope's library. On its walls Raphael set out the branches of learning: theology in the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament, poetry in the Parnassus, law, and philosophy in the fresco now called the School of Athens.

The School of Athens gathers the thinkers of the ancient world under the arches of an imaginary classical hall. At its centre walk Plato, pointing upwards to the realm of ideas, and Aristotle, holding his hand flat towards the earth. Around them are figures usually identified as Socrates, Pythagoras, Euclid, Diogenes and others, though few identifications are certain. Plato is traditionally thought to have Leonardo's features, and the brooding figure in the foreground, often identified as Heraclitus, may be a tribute to Michelangelo, then painting the Sistine ceiling nearby. The fresco is the most famous image of the Renaissance belief that Christian faith and ancient learning could be reconciled, a theme central to Renaissance philosophy.

The later rooms grew more dramatic. The Stanza di Eliodoro shows divine interventions protecting the Church, including the Liberation of Saint Peter with its night lighting, and the Stanza dell'Incendio was largely painted by assistants to his designs.

When Leo X, a son of Lorenzo de' Medici, became pope in 1513, Raphael's career reached its height. On Bramante's death in 1514 he was made architect of the new St Peter's Basilica, and he was also put in charge of recording and preserving the ancient remains of the city. A letter to the pope, written with his friend Baldassare Castiglione, laments the destruction of ancient Rome and proposes a systematic survey of its monuments. He designed palaces and the chapel of the banker Agostino Chigi in Santa Maria del Popolo, and painted the Triumph of Galatea in Chigi's villa, now the Villa Farnesina.

He also designed ten large tapestries of the lives of Saints Peter and Paul for the Sistine Chapel; seven of the full-size cartoons survive in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. In portraits such as those of Julius II, of Castiglione and of Leo X with two cardinals, he combined grandeur with a sense of the sitter's inner life. The Sistine Madonna, painted for a church in Piacenza and now in Dresden, became one of the most reproduced pictures in the world, not least for the two bored cherubs at its foot.

To meet this volume of work, Raphael ran the largest workshop of any painter of his day, with pupils such as Giulio Romano and Gianfrancesco Penni carrying out many of his designs. He also worked with the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi, whose prints spread his compositions across Europe. Charming and sociable, he moved easily among cardinals and courtiers, and was engaged for years, without marrying, to a niece of Cardinal Bibbiena. Vasari wrote that he had many love affairs; a later tradition links him to a baker's daughter, the supposed sitter of the portrait known as La Fornarina.

Raphael died in Rome on 6 April 1520, after a short fever, probably on his 37th birthday. His last great altarpiece, the Transfiguration, was displayed beside his body. At his own wish he was buried in the Pantheon, the ancient temple turned church, where his tomb is still visited.

After his death his pupils spread his style across Italy, and in the following centuries the academies of Rome, Paris and London held him up as the supreme master of composition, drawing and ideal beauty. In the nineteenth century a group of English painters called themselves the Pre-Raphaelites precisely because they believed art had grown stale after him, a sign of how dominant his example had become. With Leonardo and Michelangelo he is one of the three figures who define the High Renaissance in Italy, and his Vatican rooms remain among the most visited works of art anywhere.