Raphael

Born Raffaello Sanzio in Urbino, trained under Perugino in Perugia, and dead in Rome at exactly thirty-seven on Good Friday 1520 — the date is probably a later legend, but the coincidence felt appropriate to contemporaries. Raphael compressed the entire ideal of High Renaissance grace, clarity and disegno into a career of barely twenty years, and in so doing created the visual standard against which European academic painting measured itself for the next four centuries. He had an extraordinary facility for learning from the masters around him — Perugino gave him technique; Leonardo gave him psychological depth; Michelangelo gave him formal power — and an equally extraordinary ability to synthesize what he learned into something entirely his own. The Vatican Stanze frescoes — the School of Athens, the Disputa, the Mass of Bolsena, the Liberation of St. Peter — painted from 1508 onward for Pope Julius II and Leo X, represent the high point of his achievement: vast compositions of dozens of figures arranged with perfect rhythmic clarity, the space constructed with mathematical authority, the expressions and gestures full of individual life within a harmonious whole. The School of Athens alone contains more than fifty recognizable figures from classical antiquity, each with a distinct character and position, arranged around the central contrasting figures of Plato and Aristotle. He also ran the largest painting workshop in Rome, managing a team of assistants who executed much of the physical work under his direction. He was simultaneously appointed architect of St. Peter's Basilica after Bramante's death in 1514 and oversaw the early excavations of classical Rome, writing a report to Leo X on the state of the ancient monuments that is one of the founding documents of architectural conservation. He never married, though Vasari records a long attachment to a baker's daughter, the 'Fornarina.' He was buried in the Pantheon, at his own request.