Raphael Prints

About Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio was born in Urbino in 1483, the son of Giovanni Santi, court painter to the duke, and was recorded as a fully trained master by December 1500, probably after time with Pietro Perugino in Perugia. He worked in Umbria and then, from about 1504, in Florence, where he studied Leonardo and Michelangelo and painted the series of Madonnas that made his reputation. In 1508 Pope Julius II called him to Rome and set him to fresco the papal apartments; The School of Athens, in the Stanza della Segnatura, was the result, and he remained in Rome for the rest of his life, running the largest workshop in the city. The Sistine Madonna, painted for a church in Piacenza and now in Dresden, dates from the same years. In 1514 Leo X made him architect of St Peter's, and his ten cartoons for the Sistine Chapel tapestries, seven of which survive in London, were among his last projects. He died in Rome on 6 April 1520, aged thirty-seven, and was buried in the Pantheon. Raphael's balance, the sense that every figure is placed exactly where the composition needs it, is the quality that has kept him on walls for five centuries.