At the end of the fifteenth century the rule of the Duke Federigo of Montefeltre, an enlightened prince who devoted the best of his energy and such time as he could spare from his duties on the battlefield to the patronage of the arts, to the adornment of his noble palace, and to the collecting of priceless manuscripts, paintings, antiques, and works of art of every description, had raised the old city of Urbino to one of the centres of culture and learning, and made the ducal court a gathering-place for the distinguished painters, architects, poets, and humanists who were attracted by the wealth and liberality of this great patron. Among the less distinguished satellites attracted by the sun of Montefeltre was one Giovanni Santi, who had come to Urbino in the middle of the fifteenth century. Though a painter of considerable skill, trained perhaps by Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, he found it necessary in the early days of his sojourn at Urbino to supplement his modest income by trading in oil and corn and other commodities, as his father had done before him. But his varied accomplishments soon brought him into prominence and secured him a position as court painter and poet. More important than any of the pictures that have come to us from his brush is his famous rhyming chronicle of 23,000 verses in Dantesque measure, in which he glorifies the virtues and exploits of his patron. He was a special favourite of Elisabetta Gonzaga, the youthful spouse of Federigo's son Guidobaldo, whose high esteem for Giovanni is expressed in a letter in which she informs her sister-in-law of the court painter's death.

To this Giovanni Santi and to his wife Magia Ciarla was born on Good Friday, the 28th of March[1] 1483, a son who was destined in the comparatively short span of his life to rise to fame such as has been the share of few mortals. An elder brother and sister of Raphael had died in infancy, and his mother followed them to the grave before he had reached his eighth year. Her place in the paternal home was taken by Bernardina Parte, a goldsmith's daughter, whom Giovanni wedded soon after his first wife's death. From Giovanni Santi's great poem it would appear that he was on terms of friendship and intimacy with some of the greatest masters of the time, such as Melozzo da Forli, Mantegna, Pier dei Franceschi, and Verrocchio; and it is reasonable to assume that Raphael's earliest art education under his father's guidance tended towards the development of that peculiar faculty which enabled him later on to seize and assimilate the excellences in the style of the various masters with whom he came in contact.

[1] The wording of Raphael's epitaph, which states that he died on the same day (of the year) on which he was born, has led some writers to the assumption that he was born on April 6, whereas it is merely meant to signify that he was born and died on Good Friday.

The ease with which his precocious talent absorbed the teaching of his masters became evident when, soon after his father's death, in 1494, from fever contracted in the malarial air of the Mantuan marshland, whither he had gone in the service of Elisabetta Gonzaga, he entered the bottega of Francia's pupil Timoteo Viti (or della Vite), who settled at Urbino in 1495, and whose eminent position among the painters of that city must have suggested to Raphael's guardian—his maternal uncle Simone Ciarla—the desirability of placing the youth under such competent tuition. And so thoroughly did Raphael acquire not only his first master's style, but even such of his mannerisms as the broad shape of hands and feet and the languid turn of the heads, that from such internal evidence Morelli, the originator of the modern method of criticism, was able after more than three centuries of error to disprove Vasari's assertion that Raphael passed straight from his father's workshop into that of Perugino. Timoteo's influence is apparent even in works painted by Raphael at a time when he had come under the spell of the more powerful personality of Perugino, like the "Sposalizio" or "Betrothal of the Virgin," of 1504, in the Brera Gallery in Milan; but it is unmistakably in evidence in the three earliest pictures that bear Raphael's name: the "Vision of a Knight," at the National Gallery, the "St. Michael," at the Louvre, and the "Three Graces," at Chantilly. Not only the features which connect this group of pictures with the style of Timoteo Viti, but the timid meticulous execution and the naÏve stiffness of the figures, mark them as works of Raphael's immature youth. The turn of the century, as we shall see, found Raphael at Perugia, so that the three pictures mentioned must have been painted before he had attained the age of seventeen. The panel of the "Three Graces," which, by the way, was obviously inspired by an antique cameo, was bought in 1885 by the Duc d'Aumale from Lord Dudley's collection for £25,000—surely a price without parallel for a work painted by a lad of sixteen! A portrait in chalk of the marvellously gifted, winsome boy by the hand of his first master is preserved at the University Galleries in Oxford.

The records of a lawsuit between some members of his family prove that Raphael was still at Urbino in 1499, since in the summer of this year he appeared as a witness in court. When the verdict was given in the following year, he had already left for Perugia to continue his studies as an assistant of Perugino. Again we find him before long assimilating the style of his new master so successfully and completely that, to use Vasari's words, "His copies cannot be distinguished from the original works of the master, nor can the difference between the performances of Raphael and those of Pietro be discerned with any certainty." Plagiarism in those days did not trouble the artistic conscience, and it is easy to trace in Raphael's pictures of that period entire groups that are borrowed from the elder master. Thus the "Crucifixion," painted about 1501 for a church in CittÀ di Castello, and now in the collection of Dr. Ludwig Mond, is obviously based on Perugino's version of the same subject at St. Augustine's, Siena, whilst the whole upper part of the Vatican "Coronation of the Virgin" is "lifted" from an "Assumption" by Pietro. But this almost literal imitation was only a passing phase, whilst the great lesson of space-composition and the typically Umbrian gift of almost religious fervour in stating the peaceful glory of the Umbrian hill-land, which had been imparted to Raphael at Perugia, remained permanent acquisitions to his art.

In 1502 Perugino went back to Florence, and Raphael probably joined Pinturicchio's staff of assistants, though Vasari's statement that he furnished the designs for the latter master's frescoes in the Piccolomini Library at Siena may be dismissed as a fable. During this time Raphael painted his first Madonna pictures, notably the "Conestabile Madonna" (now at St. Petersburg), which is based entirely on Perugino's "Virgin with the Pomegranate," and two panels at the Berlin Museum. The Milan "Sposalizio," in which the young master's personality already asserts itself through the very marked Ferrarese and Peruginesque influences, was painted in 1504 for the church of St. Francesco at CittÀ di Castello. His early mastery in portraiture is illustrated by his portrait of Perugino at the Borghese Gallery, which is so firm in character and perfect in execution that it could pass for many years as the handiwork of Holbein.

Meanwhile Duke Guidobaldo had returned to Urbino after the death of his enemy, Pope Alexander VI., and thither Raphael proceeded in 1504. The little "St. George" at the Louvre is a memento of this short visit which terminated in October of the same year, when Raphael, armed with a letter of warmest recommendation from Guidobaldo's sister Giovanna della Rovere to the Gonfaloniere Pier Soderini, left his native town for Florence, then the centre of artistic life, astir with the rivalry between the giants Michelangelo and Lionardo da Vinci.The young man must have been fairly bewildered at the multitude of new impressions that crowded upon him in the glorious city on the banks of the Arno, with its imposing palaces and churches, its seething life and its art so much more virile and monumental than the dreamy, almost effeminate art engendered by the soft balmy atmosphere of Umbria. How he must have revelled in the contemplation of Masaccio's noble frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel—the training school of generations of painters—which ten years later were echoed in his tapestry cartoons for the Sistine Chapel! How he must have stood in wonder and amazement before Michelangelo's "David," and have resolved forthwith to devote himself to a more intimate study of the human form and movement! The fascination exercised upon him by the genius of Lionardo found expression in some of the earliest fruits of Raphael's sojourn in Florence—the portraits at the Pitti Palace known as "Angelo Doni" and his wife Maddalena Strozzi, who, however, could not possibly have been the model for this reminiscence of Lionardo's "Mona Lisa," since it is known that she was baptized in 1489, whereas Raphael's portrait of 1504 represents a woman of ripe age.

In the workshop of the architect Baccio d'Agnolo, which was then a favourite social resort of the younger artists of Florence, the youth from Urbino met on terms of equality such masters as Ridolfo Ghirlandajo, Antonio da Sangallo, Sansovino, and Fra Bartolommeo, who again had a considerable share in the formation of Raphael's style, as may be seen from the "Madonna di Sant'Antonio," now lent to the National Gallery by Mr. Pierpont Morgan who is said to have paid for it the enormous price of £100,000. This picture, and the "Ansidei Madonna," which was bought for the National Gallery from the Duke of Marlborough's collection for £70,000, were painted during a visit to Perugia towards the end of 1505—the former for the nuns of St. Antony of Padua, in Perugia, and the other for the Ansidei Chapel in the church of San Fiorenzo of the same city.

The records of Raphael's movements between 1504 and 1508, when he finally left Florence, are scanty and unreliable. Certain it is that, besides his visit to Perugia, he spent some time at Urbino in 1506, when he painted for Guidobaldo the "St. George" which figured among the gifts taken by Castiglione to Henry VII. of England, from whom the Duke of Urbino had received the insignia of the Garter two years previously. The picture is now at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The majority of those exquisite Madonna pictures, which have contributed more than anything else to Raphael's undying fame and popularity, date from his Florentine period—the "Madonna del Granduca" at the Pitti Palace, the "Casa Tempi Madonna" at Munich, the Chantilly "Madonna of the House of Orleans," the "Madonna of the Meadow" in Vienna, the "Madonna of the Goldfinch" at the Uffizi, the "Madonna of the Lamb" at Madrid, Lord Cowper's famous picture at Panshanger, and the "Belle JardiniÈre" at the Louvre.

To the same period belongs the portrait of himself, in the Painter's Hall of the Uffizi, and the portrait of a youth in the Budapest National Gallery. On the occasion of his visit to Perugia, Atalanta Baglione, the mother of Grifonetto Baglione who had fallen a victim to the bloody family feud that turned Perugia into a slaughter-house in 1500, commissioned from Raphael an altar-piece in memory of that event—the "Entombment" which the master finished in Florence in 1507, and which is now at the Borghese Gallery. It was Raphael's first attempt at dramatic composition, the art of which he had yet to master—its forced, unnatural emotion lays it more open to criticism than any other work from his own hand.

A law-case in connection with the payment of 100 crowns due by him for a house he had purchased from the Cervasi family, necessitated Raphael's presence at Urbino once again in October 1507. In April of the following year Guidobaldo died; and a letter from Raphael to his uncle Simone Ciarla, who had informed him of this sad event, proves that the master was then back again in Florence. After expressing his grief at the news of the Duke's death ("I could not read your letter without tears"), Raphael appeals in this letter to his uncle to procure him another letter of recommendation to the Gonfaloniere of Florence "from my Lord the Prefect," since it was in the power of the chief magistrate of Florence to place an important commission for the decoration of a certain apartment.

But a better fate was in store for the youthful applicant, who was to be called to a wider field of action. According to Vasari it was Raphael's kinsman, Bramante of Urbino, who drew Pope Julius II.'s attention to the rare gifts of Raphael, and caused him to be summoned to Rome. And the voice of Bramante, who stood in high favour with the Pope, and was engaged on the scheme of rebuilding the Cathedral of St. Peter, would certainly have commanded attention. But on this, as on many other points, Vasari is not wholly trustworthy. First of all, Bramante was not connected with Raphael by any family ties; and, then, it is far more probable that the thought of calling Raphael to Rome to assist in the decoration of the papal apartments in the Vatican was suggested to Julius II. by the Prefetessa Giovanna della Rovere, who had always been a staunch supporter of the Urbinate, or by her son Francesco, the nephew and successor of Duke Guidobaldo Montefeltre. Bramante, who was on terms of friendship with his fellow-artist and fellow-townsman, may well have supported the recommendation. However this may be, Raphael received the Pope's command, and journeyed to Rome, whither he had already been preceded by Michelangelo.

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