Works by Raphael

One writer after Raphael's death said he always found four or six ways to tell a story; below are his Madonnas, saints and portraits, along with drawings.

Raphael's father, the painter Giovanni Santi, served the court of Urbino and died in 1494, when his son was eleven. The black chalk Portrait of an unknown youth, from about the 1490s, may be a self-portrait. By about 1500, most historians agree, he was assisting Pietro Perugino, and the two laid on paint alike, thick in shadows, thin over skin. The Mond Crucifixion of about 1503 keeps Perugino's still order: two angels in green and gold catch Christ's blood in cups above four quiet mourners. In Saint Michael Vanquishing Satan, a small panel probably made for collectors at Urbino, the angel stamps on a winged monster while gilded, hooded figures trudge past a burning city. On Saint George and the Dragon the horse's harness is lettered RAPHELLO in gold.

Several Madonnas from his Florence years, 1504 to 1508, set mother and child in open country or against bare sky. In the Niccolini-Cowper Madonna, with the year MDVIII lettered on Mary's neckline, a plump child on a white cushion grins out of the picture and tugs at that neckline. In the round Alba Madonna of about 1510 she sits on the grass, a finger marking her page in a book, as her son grasps a slim cross held up by a kneeling boy in an animal skin.

Julius II brought him to Rome in 1508 to paint rooms in the Vatican palace, and he stayed until his death there in 1520. By Vasari's account the workshop grew to fifty pupils and assistants, who carried out much of the later painting from his drawings. He drew Christ in Glory from a live model, the legs first and then the cloth over them, so their outline still shows through the folds. Late in life he was among the first to draw women from female models instead of from the male pupils who usually posed for both. Study of the Head and Left Shoulder of a Woman is for his last painting, the Transfiguration. He made no prints himself, but Marcantonio Raimondi engraved his designs, and until the twentieth century people outside Italy knew his art mostly from such prints.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, National Gallery, Kunsthistorisches Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, Rijksmuseum, Ashmolean Museum, Louvre.