Raphael packed three careers into thirty-seven years
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, born 28 March or 6 April 1483 and dead on his birthday in 1520 aged thirty-seven, joined Leonardo and Michelangelo as a High Renaissance pyramid peak. Clarity, ease, and Neoplatonic grandeur defined Umbrian beginnings, Florentine absorption, then twelve frantic Roman years for two popes.
Raphael grew up at the court of Urbino, where his father Giovanni Santi was court painter and a poet of sorts who wrote a rhymed chronicle of Duke Federico da Montefeltro. Under Federico's son Guidobaldo and his wife Elisabetta Gonzaga the court stayed a literary centre, later idealised in Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, and Vasari credited it with Raphael's polished manners. His mother Màgia died in 1491 and his father in 1494, leaving him an orphan at 11 in the care of an uncle, a priest who went on to sue his stepmother. He seems to have helped run the family workshop.
His training is uncertain. Vasari says he was placed with Pietro Perugino, though some historians suggest early lessons from Timoteo Viti, and most agree he assisted Perugino from around 1500, whose influence is obvious in the early work. His first documented commission, the Baronci Altarpiece for Città di Castello of 1500 and 1501, now survives only in cut fragments; The Marriage of the Virgin followed in 1504. From about 1504 he spent long spells in Florence, carrying a recommendation from the mother of the future Duke of Urbino, and absorbed Leonardo's complex poses and Fra Bartolomeo's monumental figures. Michelangelo, only eight years older, came to dislike him and blamed him for plots against him.
In 1508 Pope Julius II called him to Rome to decorate the Vatican palace, and the frescoed Raphael Rooms, with The School of Athens, became his largest work. Running an unusually big workshop, he served two popes, took up architecture and left a vast output before dying at 37 in 1520. Winckelmann later made him a model for Neoclassical painters, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood defined itself against him.
Source: Raphael
