Presumed self-portrait of Raphael © Public domain
Raphael
Italian
1482 - 1519
"The beauty of paint is its silence"
Did you know?
A famous piece of Renaissance gossip about Raphael is his intense love affair with a woman known as La Fornarina—believed to be Margherita Luti, the daughter of a baker.
According to contemporaries, Raphael was so passionately devoted to her that Pope Leo X allegedly had to house her near the Vatican so the artist would stop sneaking away from work. Legend even says Raphael’s exhausting love life contributed to his early death at just 37 years old, a story that helped build the myth of the artist as a brilliant, sensual genius.
Biography
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known in English as Raphael, painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, and visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur.
Together with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period.
Raphael was enormously productive, running an unusually large workshop and, despite his early death at 37, leaving a large body of work.
Raphael is celebrated for his perfect sense of composition. His paintings achieve an exceptional balance between figures, space, and emotion, creating a calm, ideal beauty that became a model for centuries of Western art.