The Artist Raphael

ALL ARTISTS

RAPHAEL, the Italian painter, was born in Urbino, Italy, March or April 1483 and died in Rome, April 6, 1520. His remarkably short life is divided into three periods. The first, up to the age of 21, was spent in Umbria, largely in Urbino, but also in the upper Tiber Valley between Citta di Castello and Perugia. Late in 1504 he went to Florence, possibly via Siena ; the ensuing four years are generally described as his Florentine period, but his time was about equally divided among Florence, Perugia, and Urbino. Toward the end of 1508 he moved to Rome, and was already recorded as working for Pope Julius II in January 1509; he appears to have settled in Rome as if permanently, and there is only mention of a brief return to Florence in 1515. His sudden death in 1520 was the result of a fever. It is a mark of the exceptional status he had acquired that he was buried in the Pantheon.

Early Years

Raphael's entry onto the Renaissance scene is subject to a peculiar, precocity, but if he was an infant prodigy, it is even more rare that the promise was abundantly fulfilled. There are in fact surviving works from his sixteenth or seventeenth years; these are two pictures for a processional standard (the Creation of Eve and the Trinity) now in the Pinacoteca in Citta di Castello. In 1500 followed a contract for an immense altarpiece, also for 'Citta. di Castello, which now exists only in fragments (two in Naples, one in Brescia). This very early assertion of independence was probably due to exceptional circumstances. Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi, was the most respected painter of Urbino and court painter to the dukes of Urbino and Mantua; his death in 1494, preceded by that of his wife, left Raphael an orphan but presumably the spoilt darling Of the Urbino workshop, which continued to flourish as before. Thus it seems likely that Raphael had no normal Renaissance apprenticeship, but that he learned his craft in his own house.

The style practiced in this workshop was compounded of local styles, like Melozzo da Forli's and Piero della Francesca's, with an increasing reflection of that of the most famous painter of the region, Il Perugino. Raphael is often said to have been Perugino's pupil, but this is unlikely to be true ; his very close contact with this artist came a little later, about 1502-1503, when he painted an altarpiece for a Perugian church (the Coronation of the Virgin; Pinacoteca Vaticana). It is more probable that Raphael, by this date a fully independent young master, was for a brief time Perugino's colleague ; at all events he showed henceforth a detailed knowledge and study of the latter's work. The final painting of this phase, the Sposalizio (Marriage of the Virgin, 1504; Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan), gives the best possible opportunity for comparison with Perugino, because it is closely based in composition on the latter's altarpiece of the same subject (now in Caen). Raphael's picture is distinguished (not only from Perugino but from the work of any contemporary painter) by its geometrical clarity and by its truly architectural sense of design. It is possible that this quality in his work was fostered by the strong architectural interests of the cultivated Montefeltro court at Urbino, to which Raphael had access. The Sposalizio is also different from Perugino's in the greater structural ambition in the figures, in the warmth and variety of their humanity, and in the strong emphasis on clear exposition of the subject.

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