49 Fun Facts About Raphael

In which small Italian city was Raphael born in 1483?

Urbino. He carried the town in his name for life, signing paintings and documents 'Raphael Urbinas', Latin for Raphael of Urbino.

Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo are the three great masters of which period of Italian art?

High Renaissance. Raphael was the youngest of the three by far, and at 21 he went to Florence to study what the other two were doing there.

The Vatican room holding The School of Athens is thought to have been planned as a pope's private what?

Library. Each wall stands for a branch of learning its books covered: philosophy faces theology, with poetry and law on the two side walls.

Raphael died at 37 on which holy day?

Good Friday. Vasari wrote that he was born on a Good Friday too, and blamed the fatal fever on a night of amorous excess that Raphael hid from his doctors.

Which pope invited Raphael to Rome in 1508?

Julius II. He no longer wanted to live in the rooms of his detested predecessor, Alexander VI, so he had the floor above redecorated and Raphael got the job.

Under which Umbrian master did Raphael most probably train?

Pietro Perugino. Raphael absorbed his style so fully that, Vasari wrote, nobody would believe one early altarpiece was the pupil's if he hadn't signed it.

Which two philosophers stand at the centre of The School of Athens?

Plato and Aristotle. Plato points up to the heavens while Aristotle holds his hand out over the ground, usually read as ideals against the world we can see.

Which artist is believed to be portrayed as Plato in The School of Athens?

Leonardo da Vinci. Plato's long-bearded face so resembles a red-chalk drawing in Turin that the likeness helped get that drawing labelled Leonardo's self-portrait.

As which philosopher did Raphael paint Michelangelo in The School of Athens?

Heraclitus. The sulking loner was a last-minute addition: Raphael cut into the finished wall, laid fresh plaster and painted him in.

Raphael painted himself into The School of Athens beside which ancient Greek astronomer and geographer?

Ptolemy. The young face in a black cap looking out beside him is the one portrait of Raphael everyone accepts, because Vasari vouched for it.

Raphael's workshop took its 'grotesque' wall ornament from the buried palace of which Roman emperor?

Nero. His Golden House lay underground by then, its painted rooms entered like caves, or 'grotte', which is the likely origin of the word grotesque.

Which Raphael fresco in the Vatican is a night scene lit by a glowing angel?

The Liberation of Saint Peter. Raphael set three kinds of light against each other, moonlight, a guard's torch and the angel's glow, and let the angel's outshine the rest.

Which fresco on the opposite wall from The School of Athens represents theology?

La Disputa. The two frescoes face each other on purpose, setting Christian faith opposite Greek philosophy as partners rather than rivals.

In which German city does the Sistine Madonna hang?

Dresden. Augustus III, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, bought it in 1754 from the monastery church it was painted for and brought it north.

Which detail of the Sistine Madonna became famous in its own right as a popular image?

The two cherubs. Leaning on the ledge and gazing upward, they have been lifted out of the painting onto T-shirts, socks, stamps and gift-shop mugs.

In 1931 the Soviet government secretly sold Raphael's Alba Madonna from the Hermitage to which American financier?

Andrew Mellon. He bought it through a chain of dealers in Berlin, London and New York, then gave it to the nation in the founding gift of the National Gallery of Art.

Where was the Sistine Madonna kept for a decade after World War II?

Moscow. Soviet troops took it there in 1945, and it was handed back to East Germany in 1955, after Stalin's death, as a gesture of friendship.

In Raphael's Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia, what lies scattered at the saint's feet as she listens to angels sing?

Musical instruments. The patron saint of musicians ignores them to listen to the choir overhead, and Vasari wrote that they looked 'not painted, but real'.

What was Raphael's last painting, unfinished at his death?

The Transfiguration. It was set up at the head of his bier as he lay in state in his studio, and it was never sent to the French cathedral it was painted for.

Which cardinal commissioned Raphael's last altarpiece for his cathedral at Narbonne in France?

Giulio de' Medici. The future Pope Clement VII ordered a second altarpiece for the same cathedral from a rival, sent that one to France and kept Raphael's in Rome.

Which rival painted The Raising of Lazarus in competition with Raphael's last altarpiece?

Sebastiano del Piombo. Michelangelo slipped him drawings for the main figures to help him outdo Raphael, and it was his picture, not Raphael's, that went to France.

Which London institution has displayed the Raphael Cartoons on loan since 1865?

Victoria and Albert Museum. They still belong to the Crown: the future Charles I bought them in 1623 to weave copies from, and Queen Victoria lent them in 1865.

Raphael's Cartoons show the lives of Saint Paul and which other saint?

Peter. Seven of the ten designs survive: they were cut into long strips, and the strips were only put back together in the 1690s at Hampton Court.

In which city were the Sistine tapestries woven from Raphael's cartoons?

Brussels. A tapestry came off the loom as a mirror image of its design, so Raphael had to plan every scene back to front.

Who kept the Raphael Cartoons for the state when the rest of Charles I's art collection was sold off?

Oliver Cromwell. They were among the few royal treasures he held back from the sale after the king's execution, and the Crown recovered them at the Restoration.

By tradition, who was 'La Fornarina', Raphael's long-term lover in Rome?

Margherita Luti. The nickname means the baker's daughter, after her father's trade, and on his deathbed Raphael left her enough money to live on.

Raphael is known by one name, but which surname do Italians give him?

Sanzio. It comes from a Latinised form of Santi, the plain surname of his father Giovanni, and Italians still call him Raffaello Sanzio.

Which Rome palace houses La Fornarina?

Palazzo Barberini. A ring on her left hand was painted over after Raphael died, and its rediscovery set off talk that the two had secretly married.

To whose niece was Raphael reluctantly engaged from 1514?

Cardinal Bibbiena. Raphael kept putting the wedding off, and Vasari gives a reason: he had been led to hope for a cardinal's red hat, which a wife would rule out.

Where was Raphael buried at his own request?

The Pantheon. In his will he paid to restore one of its ancient shrines as his own tomb and to set a marble Madonna above it.

Whom did Raphael succeed as architect of the new St Peter's in 1514?

Bramante. Raphael stretched his predecessor's compact, centralised plan into a long nave, which one later architect compared to an alley and Michelangelo's design replaced.

Which Medici pope succeeded Raphael's first papal patron in 1513?

Leo X. Raphael grew even closer to him than to the pope before, and ended up in charge of nearly all the papacy's building, painting and decorating in Rome.

In 1515 Raphael was given a papal post protecting what in Rome?

Ancient remains. The pope was quarrying old ruins for stone to build St Peter's, and Raphael's job was to see that inscriptions and sculpture were recorded and saved first.

Which rich banker had Raphael paint The Triumph of Galatea in his villa?

Agostino Chigi. The banker to the popes kept Raphael busy: besides the villa frescoes he ordered two chapels, one of them his own tomb in Santa Maria del Popolo.

Vasari wrote that Raphael, escorted to court by fifty painters, lived like a what?

Prince. The fifty were his pupils and assistants, and Vasari says he taught them with the love due to his own children, so the huge workshop ran without quarrels.

Which young pupil inherited Raphael's drawings and carried on the workshop?

Giulio Romano. He finished Raphael's last altarpiece and the Vatican rooms, then moved to Mantua, where he designed and frescoed the Palazzo del Te for the Gonzaga.

Which French painter took the seated group in his scandalous 1863 picnic scene from a print after Raphael?

Manet. The pose in Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe comes from Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving The Judgement of Paris; Raphael gave Raimondi drawings to engrave, and the prints carried his designs across Europe.

Which friend of Raphael wrote The Book of the Courtier and coined 'sprezzatura'?

Baldassare Castiglione. Raphael painted the portrait of him that hangs in the Louvre, and accounts of the painter's own easy charm read like the book's ideal courtier.

What was Raphael's father's profession?

Court painter. His own work was 'of no great excellence' in Vasari's judgement, but he gave his son his first painting lessons before dying while the boy was still a child.

Which Milan gallery holds Raphael's 1504 Marriage of the Virgin?

Pinacoteca di Brera. Raphael based it on his teacher's painting of the same subject, and setting the two side by side is the classic way to watch the pupil pull ahead.

Raphael's epitaph says who feared being outdone while he lived and feared dying when he died?

Nature. The Latin couplet on his tomb is traditionally credited to the poet Pietro Bembo, and Vasari says the pope wept bitterly when Raphael died.

Raphael supplied drawings for Pinturicchio's frescoes in the Piccolomini Library of which city's cathedral?

Siena. Pinturicchio was one of the leading painters in Italy, yet he turned to a teenager for the designs, knowing him, Vasari says, as a draughtsman of the highest quality.

Whose armies carried Raphael's last altarpiece off to Paris as war booty?

Napoleon. French troops took it in 1797 and hung it in the Louvre; it came home after his fall, to the Vatican's picture gallery rather than its old church.

Which painter helped found the Victorian brotherhood that named itself in revolt against Raphael's influence?

Rossetti. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt and Millais had all studied at the Royal Academy and were under 25 when they formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, rejecting the Academy's reverence for Raphael.

Years after Raphael's death, Michelangelo wrote in a letter that Raphael had got what from him?

All his art. 'All he had of art he owed to me,' Michelangelo wrote in 1542, in a letter blaming his old quarrels with the pope on the envy of Raphael and another rival, twenty-two years after Raphael died.

Which unfinished hillside retreat for the future Clement VII did Raphael design?

Villa Madama. Raphael planned it to rival the villas ancient Roman writers described, with a theatre cut into the hill, and even unfinished it set the pattern for later Italian villas.

Which just-finished painting did Raphael echo in a pyramidal drawing of a young woman?

Mona Lisa. His pen sketch, now in the Louvre beside it, shows the columns at the sitter's sides far more clearly, and he reused the pose for his portrait of Maddalena Doni.

Which Raphael Madonna hung in an English castle, dismissed as a copy, until a curator recognised it in 1991?

Madonna of the Pinks. Once it was accepted as his, its owner agreed to sell it to the Getty in Los Angeles, and Britain's National Gallery ran a public appeal to keep it.

What event in 1527 scattered and killed members of Raphael's former workshop?

The Sack of Rome. Troops of Emperor Charles V laid the city waste, and the pupils who fled carried Raphael's style to other parts of Italy and beyond.