Sanzio Raffaello,known as Raphael, was the son of Giovanni Santi, a painter according to the 16th-century artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari, "of no great merit." He gave his son his first instruction in painting, and, before his death in 1494, when Raphael was 11, he had introduced the boy to philosophy at the court.

Raphaels' principal teachers in Florence were Leonardo and Michelangelo. Many of the works that Raphael executed in the years between 1505 and 1507, most notably a great series of Madonnas, are marked by the influence of Leonardo, who, since 1480, had been making great innovations in painting.

In 1507 Raphael was commissioned to paint the Deposition of Christ that is now in the Borghese Gallery in Rome. In this work, it is obvious that Raphael deliberately learned from Michelangelo. the expressive possibilities of human anatomy. But Raphael differed from the other artists, in that he wished to develop a calmer and more extroverted style that would serve as a popular, universally accessible form of visual communication.

Raphael's last masterpiece is the Transfiguration, commissioned in 1517. It is an enormous altarpiece that was unfinished at his death and completed by his assistant. It now hangs in the Vatican Museum. It is a complex work that combines formal polish and elegance of execution with an atmosphere of tension and violence. It shows a new sensibility that is like the prevision of a new turbulent and dynamic world in its feeling and composition. It inaugurated the Mannerist movement and tends toward an expression that may even be called Baroque.