Raphael: 135 Masterpieces

Raffaello Sanzio (or Santi, Raphael ) along with his elder contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti characterized the High Renaissance in Italy.

Raffaello was admired persona, celebrated, prosperous, and honored, and his influence was broadly extend even during his own life.

His after life fame was even superior, for until the later 19th century he was considered by almost all critics as the greatest painter who had ever lived — the artist who expressed the essential dogmas of the Christian Church through figures that have a physical beauty worthy of the antique. He became the ideal of all academies; it was against his authority that the Pre-Raphaelites revolted. He has been a key motivation to great classical painters like Poussin, A. Carracci, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.