Italian painter born in Urbino, an artistic cultural center and then capital of the duchy of the same name, known as the prince of painters. Son of Giovanni Santi, a painter of few merits, but a cultured man and well connected in the court of the Renaissance Duke Federico de Montefeltro, known for his protection of the arts.
After the death of his father (1494), who had transmitted to his son a love for painting and the first lessons in the craft, he went to Perugia, where he learned the technique of fresco or mural painting from Pietro Perugino, and there he created his first work of enhancement, The Marriage of the Virgin (1504). He moved to Florence (1504), attracted by the fame of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, on whom he would have great influence.
Admired by the aristocracy and the papal court, at the suggestion of Bramante, his friend and Vatican architect, he was commissioned (1508) by Pope Julius II to decorate with frescoes the rooms of the Vatican, known today as the stanze de Rafael. In the 12 years that he remained in this city, he undertook numerous large-scale projects, in which he displayed a varied and fertile imagination.
After the death of Julius II (1513), he continued to work for the new pope, Leo X (1513-1517), and with the death of Bramante (1514), he was appointed to succeed him as architect of the Vatican and took over the works in progress in the basilica of St. Peter, where he replaced the plan in a Greek cross, or radial, by a simpler one, in a Latin cross, or longitudinal.
He also succeeded Bramante in decorating the loggias (galleries) of the Vatican. Despite the grandiosity of the undertaking, the last parts of which were left mainly to his disciples, he who had then become the fashion painter, took over at the same time numerous other tasks: he created portraits, altars, tapestry cards, theatrical sets, and architectural designs for profane buildings and churches like that of Sant'Eligio degli Orefici. Such was his prestige that, according to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, Leo X even thought of making him a cardinal.
He was appointed (1515) to oversee the preservation of precious Latin inscriptions on marble, and general in charge of all Roman antiquities (1517), for which he executed an archaeological map of the City. His last major individual work was Transfiguration (1517) and the design of sets (1519) for the comedy I suppositi, by Ludovico Ariosto. His early death, in Rome, on the day he turned 37, reinforced the mystical aura that surrounded his figure.
Famous for its Madonnas, series of pictures of the Blessed Virgin, several panels on the walls of the Vatican and various scenes from the Holy History, known as Raphael's Bibles, became a historical figure of the Renaissance, an artistic, scientific and literary movement that flourished in Europe in the corresponding period. between the Low Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age, from the 13th to the 16th century, with the cradle in Italy and having Florence and Rome as its two most centers important.
Its main characteristic was the appearance of the illusion of depth in the works and, chronologically, it can be divided into four periods: Duocento (1200-1299), Trecento (1300-1399), Quattrocento (1400-1499) and Cinquecento (1500-1599). Pre-Raphaelism: aesthetic current that emerged in England, with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Burne-Jones and others, in the mid-century. XIX, according to which the works of his predecessors represented the heyday of painting.
Picture copied from the PORTRAIT GALERY / UTL website:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/photodraw/portraits/
Source: http://www.dec.ufcg.edu.br/biografias/
Order R - Biography - Brazil School