Raphael's Paintings

Raphael, original name Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, was the last crucial artist to have come from the High Renaissance and his paintings remain exceptionally respected across the western world. This article discusses the career of this great artist and underlines some of the best of Raphael's paintings.

Raphael followed on from Michelangelo in art history and went against the latter's use of new ideas, preferring a more sedate style which fitted it with what had gone before. Raphael's career stood out because of the technical brilliance with which he was able to follow these traditional ideas.

Italian art has long since been something of great passion for many right across the world who regularly visit the country in order to see some of the great original works at first hand. For Raphael to elevate himself into the top five or so artists to have come from this prolific period underlines his great qualities as an artist and also the significant legacy which his career left behind. For those unable to visit Italy, there are always reproduction prints available online which tend to cover his entire career. Raphael paintings are best suited to framed giclee art prints, with larger versions better recreating the great detail that his original oil paintings had in them. Whilst most modern art followers prefer Da Vinci and Michelangelo, there is still a significant interest in the paintings of Raphael.

Raphael produced large amounts of religious paintings as was common at that time but he also created many portraits too, including those of Elisabetta Gonzaga, Pope Julius II, Bindo Altoviti and Baldassare Castiglione. The artist became highly regarded in his short years and quickly received some highly prestigious commissions including those mentioned here. All of Italy's rich and famous right across this period would always want their own images to be captured by the best artists around at that time, and few were better known than Raphael who was born in Urbino but became heavily influenced by the artistic developments which occurred in Florence.

We can conclude that Raphael's paintings combined all of the academic teachings that had been built up over the different periods of the Renaissance movement which spread across the 15th and 16th centuries. Raphael has always divided opinion between those who accepted his work as technically perfect whilst others saw little or no imagination and were far more inspired by the achievements of Baroque painters who followed straight after.

You can find Raphael paintings at Raphaelpaintings.net.

There is also further discussion on Raphael paintings here.

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