|
Raphael (painter) (1483-1520) (properly,
Raffaelo Sanzio), Italian painter who was one of the leading artists of the Italian Renaissance. He created many of the most significant
paintings of the early 16th century and his art was extremely influential for centuries after his death.
Raphael was born in Urbino on March 28
or April 6, 1483. His father, the artist Giovanni di Santi, worked mainly for Francesco Gonzaga in Mantua, and Raphael spent his youth in a courtly environment.
In 1500, so Vasari
records, Raphael was apprenticed to Perugino, a highly respected artist who was one of the first in Italy to paint extensively in oil. He employed pure strong colours for his figures,
which were imbued with a particularly sweet air of piety, often setting them in landscapes infused with pale, shimmering light. Raphael's early paintings include large altarpieces as well as smaller works,
both devotional and secular, many of them made for the court at Urbino. One such is a small panel painting, St George Slaying the Dragon (c. 1505, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); it seems to be connected with
Guidobaldo da Montefeltro's election to the Order of the Garter in 1504 and is remarkable for its miniature precision and
the knowledge of the work of the Flemish painter Han Memling that it displays. Raphael's earliest large-scale paintings were
executed in Cittą di Castello, which was a day's ride from Urbino.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Works such as the Sposalizio (or Marriage of the Virgin) (1504, Brera, Milan) and the Coronation of the
Virgin (c. 1503, Vatican Museum, Rome) demonstrate Perugino's influence in their static composition and sweet figure style.
Although intentionally similar in composition to earlier works by Perugino, Raphael's paintings already possessed a dynamic
spatial quality that is lacking in the former's work, and his consummate technical mastery and idealizing imagination led
to his working in competition with his former master on altarpieces in Perugia, for instance the Ansidei Altarpiece (1505, National Gallery, London) made for Bernardino Ansidei for the chapel of St Nicholas
of Bari in the Servite church of San Fiorenzo.
|
|
|
|
|
