Raphael: Paintings

Raffaello Sanzio (or Santi, Raphael ) was one of the greatest artists of the High Renaissance in Italy. He was admired personality, celebrated, prosperous, and honored, and his influence was broadly extend even during his own life. Together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of Renaissance.

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.