RAPHAEL

Raphael, like Michelangelo and Leonardo, has long been regarded as one of the supreme draughtsmen of the Renaissance; he inherited a new approach to drawings that developed in Florence in the fifteenth century and which in his hands reaches a mastery that has been equaled but never surpassed. Raphael is best known for his Madonnas and for his large figure compositions in the Vatican in Rome. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur.