R A P H A E L (Raffaello Santi or Sanzio, 1483-1520). Italian painter and architect, born in Urbino, where the Sand house still stands. Raphael is one of the most admirable and pleasure-giving painters of the Renaissance. As if to compensate for his brief life span, the gods seem to have showered on him all the blessings a mortal might desire-grace and good looks, a rare capacity for love and friendship, fame, health, and wealth. His father, Giovanni Santi, a respected painter, whom he lost when he was eleven, was his first teacher. For several years, Raphael was apprenticed to Pietro Perugino (1415/50-1523) in Perugia, imitating that master's limpid colors and staid compositions. His Betrothal of the Virgin (Milan, Brera), though borrowed from his teacher's Consignment of the Keys to Peter in the Sistine Chapel, demonstrates how far he had surpassed him. After a formative sojourn in Florence (1504-08), where he studied the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo, assimilating some of their pictorial idiom, he moved on to Rome, perhaps invited by his influential friend Bramante. Renaissance art was heading toward its culmination at the court of Julius II, and the young provincial was commissioned by the Pope-who had a flair for spotting genius-to fresco the walls of his new Vatican apartment. (Julius had decided to move upstairs from the old Borgia suite, jinxed by Alexander VI's demonic spirit.) Of the four rooms (stanze) Raphael was given charge of, tile first we enter-the Stanza dell'Incendio, named for a fresco of a conflagration-and the last, decorated with scenes from the life of Emperor Constantine, were painted, for the most part, by assistants. But the two middle rooms, done almost wholly by Raphael himself, rank with the most important achievements of High Renaissance art. He started with the Stanza della Segnatura ("Signature Room," actually Julius's private library) in 1508, the year in which Michelangelo began the Sistine ceiling, and it is likely that the "program," here as well as there, was dictated by Platonic-minded humanists, probably under Julius's guidance. The two main frescoes of the room are known as the School of Athens and the Disputa. The former represents, against a lofty architectural background in Bramante's style, a gathering of Greek philosophers dominated by Plato and Aristotle. The prominent foreground figure of Heraclitus, the "Weeping Philosopher," is an afterthought. Raphael had seen the portion of the Sistine ceiling that was unveiled in 1511, and the sixthcentury B.C. pessimist not only bears the features of Michelangelo, but is dressed as a stonecutter and painted in frank imitation of Michelangelo's manner-another sample of Raphael's chameleonic versatility. The so-called Disputa is no "dispute," but, in the opinion of most scholars, a twofold glorification of the Holy Sacrament, showing, above, the celestial Church (symbolized by Apostles, martyrs, and the Trinity), and, below, the Church on earth (formed by its saints and theologians). Besides these august compositions, the room contains the paganizing fresco of Parnassus, ruled by a fiddling Apollo, and, in the ceiling roundel just above it, Poetry-a sweet, winged maiden dressed in white and blue, ensconced amidst pink cloudlets, holding a lyre and a book, dreaming away with open eyes. The next room, named for the temple robber, Heliodorus (Eliodoro) who, in the principal fresco, is chased from the temple by a mounted messenger of God-also contains the Mars of Bolsena with its group of handsome Swiss Guards officers, and the night piece of the Liberation of Peter from Prison. Raphael strewed his frescoes with portraits. Julius II and his successor, Leo X, are depicted several times. Among the theologians, we spot Savonarola, executed as a heretic some thirteen years before on orders of Alexander VI, and, among the philosophers, Leonardo (in the guise of Plato), and Bramante and Raphael as themselves. As the fresco cycle progressed, the painter was in such demand that he farmed out more and more work to assistants, who used his designs with a good deal of leeway, among them Giulio Romano (c. 1499-1546), the Mannerist architect and painter. (The Vatican Loggias, known as "Raphael's Bible," were decorated, during the last years of his life, by no fewer than eight members of his studio.) Even so, the speed and quantity of his production is incredible. Within a few years, he worked on banker Agostino Chigi's Rome Villa and his sepulchral chapel at S. Maria del Popolo. He supervised the decoration of the private loggia and bathroom in the Vatican apartment of Cardinal Bibbiena. He painted the great triple portrait-a symphony in red-of Leo X and two cardinals (Florence, Ufhzi) and the small portrait-a symphony in gray and black-of his friend Castiglione (Paris, Louvre), which Rembrandt (1606-69) vainly tried to buy at auction. All of his portraits, among them the Veiled Lady (La Donna Velata), thought to have been his great love (Florence, Pitti), are psychological studies, probing the sitter's character beneath the finely finished features. Raphael's inner growth is strikingly reflected in his series of Madonnas, which so endeared him to nineteenth-century Europe and America, and which still form the basis of his worldwide popularity. During his brief Florence period, he painted seventeen of them, including Holy Familes, which pose a girl mother and her lively child in ever-varied attitudes, frequently with the boy Baptist as Christ's playmate. Many of them are outdoor pieces, suffused with sunlight and with glimpses of Tuscan landscape in the background. As Raphael matured, so did his Virgins. One of the loveliest is the Alba Madonna (Wash., D.C., National Gallery), the first he painted in Rome-a grave-faced mother, filled with premonitions as she plays, seated on the grass, with the two children. His two most famous Madonnas, the Madonna della Seggiola--"of the Chair"--(c. 1515; Florence, Pitti) and the Sistine Madonna (c. 1513; Dresden, Gemdldegalerie), mark the climax of the evolution of the Madonna image from its dim beginnings in Rome's Catacombs. The former, composed within a circle twenty-eight inches across, with a young peasant mother and her round-limbed, tightly-held baby gazing serenely at the viewer, has been a universal favorite for many generations. The latter, a large canvas (104 X 77 in.), confronts us with a tall, windblown Virgin of heavenly beauty, cradling a solemn-faced, twoyear-old boy as she walks toward us over pale clouds between S. Barbara and S. Sixtus. (The latter bears the features of Julius II, who had just died when Raphael created this work [1513/14], and his tiara-topped sarcophagus, supporting two enchanting putti, is seen below.) Raphael's last large painting, the powerful Transfiguration (Vatican), was, at his funeral, placed at the head of his bier. Raphael's ripest contribution to the Grand Manner of the Renaissance is the set of ten cartoonspreparatory paintings-for tapestries to be hung in the Sistine Chapel. Illustrating the lives of Peter and Paul, they present us with a race of heroes moving with the dignity of tragic actors. At least five of them are almost entirely by Raphael's hand, the rest being painted by assistants after his designs and often finished by himself. Superlatives are the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, the Healing of the Lame Man, Paul Preaching in Athens. Among their details is a squiggly catch of fish from the Sea of Galilee. The cartoons were sent to Brussels for weaving, and Raphael may have seen the finished tapestries, before he died, hanging on the lower walls of the Sistine Chapel. They were briefly pawned, for the value of their gold and silver threads, after Leo X's death. During the Sack of Rome (1527), Isabella d'Este had the good sense to take some of them north with her as she fled. At least two of the tapestries were captured by Barbary pirates who carried them to Tunis; sold to the doge of Venice, they turned up later in Constantinople and, in 1554, were returned to the pope by the duke of Montinorency, constable of France. Meanwhile, the rest of the series, minus some bits and pieces, had been repurchased by the Vatican, we do not know where. Having acquired European fame, the hangings were used, for centuries, to decorate the route of the Corpus Christi procession through Rome. Napoleon removed them to Paris, along with many other works by Raphael, including the Transfiguration and the Madonna della Seggiola. They are now in the Vatican Museum. As for Raphael's cartoons, seven of them-all that was left-were acquired, presumably from Genoese traders, by the future king Charles I of England in 1623, and are on loan from the Royal Collection in London's Victoria and Albert Museum. Art historian John Shearman, the expert on the subject, calls them "the greatest set of paintings in England." In 15 14, a year before Raphael started work on the cartoons, Pope Leo X, upon Bramante's deathbed recommendation, appointed him chief architect of S. Peter's. Shortly afterwards, he bestowed on him the title of Superintendent of Antiquities for Rome and its Surroundings, a position giving him responsibility for all excavations and newly found works of ancient art, and deepening his interest in antiquarian research. He employed draftsmen in the south of Italy who sent him plans and measurements of Greek and Roman structures. In a report to Leo, dated 1518, he came out strongly for the preservation of ancient monuments. Of Raphael's architectural works, little besides the Chigi Chapel has survived. His major project was Villa Madama on the slope of Monte Mario, then outside Rome, commissioned by Pope Clement VII when still a cardinal. Raphael planned a sprawling complex in the style of Nero's Golden House, a union of art, residence, and nature. Arranged around a circular court, it was to include a theater, a hippodrome, stables for two hundred horses, a running stream, vineyards, woods, terraced gardens, and a grand stairway leading down into the valley. The work was directed by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. Nearly all he had built of it went up in smoke during the Sack of Rome, among the few surviving remnants being an elegant, tripartite garden loggia. Restored, the Villa, a shrunken image of Raphael's grandiose design, was acquired by "Madama" Margaret of Austria, the natural daughter of the emperor Charles V. It now belongs to the Italian government. In Rome, Raphael, during the last four years of his life, was the idol of the papal court. No artist ever had enjoyed such princely status. Made rich by his work, an intimate of humanists and savants, he went around with a jaunty retinue of some fifty adulators and assistants-a curious contrast to the terribilità (or "awesomeness") of Michelangelo, who walked alone. No love was lost between the two, inasmuch as Raphael was a protégé of Michelangelo's enemy, Bramante. Still, Raphael paid his respects to him with his Michelangelesque frescoes of Isaiah (Rome, S. Agostino) and the Sibyls (Rome, S. Maria della Pace), and was heard to say oti several occasions that he was thankful for living in the days of Michelangelo. Raphael's numerous love affairs often made him divide his time between his work and the lady of the hour. He scribbled love poems on drawings for his Disputa. The idea of wedlock did not appeal to him, however, and when Cardinal Bibbiena virtually forced him into an engagement with his niece, Maria, Raphael did not hurry the marriage. He died, unwed, aged thirty-seven, probably of malaria. He was laid to rest, as he had wished, in the Pantheon, in an antique sarcophagus of Greek marble, bearing a Latin epitaph by his friend Pietro Bembo.