Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio was born in Urbino in 1483, trained in the circle of Pietro Perugino, and spent four years in Florence absorbing Leonardo and Michelangelo while painting a run of Madonnas, among them the Madonna of the Goldfinch (c. 1505–06). In 1508 Pope Julius II called him to Rome to decorate the papal apartments, where The School of Athens (1509–11) sets the philosophers of antiquity in a great vaulted hall.

He ran a large workshop, designed tapestries for the Sistine Chapel whose full-size cartoons survive in London, succeeded Donato Bramante as architect of St Peter's, and supplied drawings that Marcantonio Raimondi engraved, which is why so many prints carry his designs. He died in Rome in 1520, aged thirty-seven. The Transfiguration (1516–20) was his last painting.