More Info About Raphael

Raphael was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance, celebrated for the perfection and grace of his paintings and drawings. Together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period. Raphael was enormously productive and, despite his early death at thirty-seven, a large body of his work remains, especially in the Vatican. He was extremely influential in his lifetime, but after his death the influence of his great rival Michelangelo was more widespread until the 18th and 19th centuries, when his more serene and harmonious qualities were again regarded as the highest models. Raphael was born in the small but artistically significant Central Italian city of Urbino in the Marche region, where his father Giovanni Santi was court painter to the Duke. The reputation of the court had been established by Federigo da Montefeltro, a highly successful condottiere who had been created the first Duke of Urbino by the Pope - Urbino formed part of the Papal States - and who died the year before Raphael was born.