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RAFFAELLO Sanzio
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Oil Painting ID: 63546
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Madonna and Child with the Infant St John
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1508 Tempera and oil on wood Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest Raphael, perhaps the most popular and widely appreciated master of Renaissance Italy, was a man of many talents. He succeeded Bramante as architect of St Peter's and was surveyor of excavations of the antiquities of Ancient Rome, as well as producing monumental frescoes and outstanding religious compositions and portraits. It is as a painter of Madonnas, however, that he is most widely known, and his unrivalled popularity with succeeding generations has been mainly due to the harmony and beauty of these paintings. He depicted Mary as a heavenly being who was yet flesh and blood: in half-length or full-length pictures she is seen enthroned or floating through the heavens, against a landscape background or in some interior scene, alone with her Child or in the company of saints
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RAFFAELLO Sanzio:
Italian High Renaissance Painter, 1483-1520
Italian painter and architect. As a member of Perugino's workshop, he established his mastery by 17 and began receiving important commissions. In 1504 he moved to Florence, where he executed many of his famous Madonnas; his unity of composition and suppression of inessentials is evident in The Madonna of the Goldfinch (c. 1506). Though influenced by Leonardo da Vinci's chiaroscuro and sfumato, his figure types were his own creation, with round, gentle faces that reveal human sentiments raised to a sublime serenity. In 1508 he was summoned to Rome to decorate a suite of papal chambers in the Vatican. The frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura are probably his greatest work; the most famous, The School of Athens (1510 C 11), is a complex and magnificently ordered allegory of secular knowledge showing Greek philosophers in an architectural setting. The Madonnas he painted in Rome show him turning away from his earlier work's serenity to emphasize movement and grandeur, partly under Michelangelo's High Renaissance influence. The Sistine Madonna (1513) shows the richness of colour and new boldness of compositional invention typical of his Roman period. He became the most important portraitist in Rome, designed 10 large tapestries to hang in the Sistine Chapel, designed a church and a chapel, assumed the direction of work on St. Peter's Basilica at the death of Donato Bramante,
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