ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATED LECTURE: RAPHAEL SANTI, Italian painter and architect (1483-1520). He was the son of Giovanni Santi, a painter active in Urbino where Raphael was born. After his father, his first teacher was Timoteo Viti. In 1499 he became an assistant to Perugino in Perugia where his gifted drafting and painting skills were nurtured. He worked there until his move to Florence. In Florence he came into contact with the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Fra Bartolommeo, and as a result began to develop a more incisive and monumental style of his own. His development during his Florentine period can be traced to the sequence of Madonna's and Holy Families he painted there, which are devoted chiefly to compositional problems arising from the positioning of figures in space. In 1507 he completed the "Entombment", his most dramatic and active figural composition to that time. Toward the end of 1508 or early 1509 he left Florence for Rome.

Pope Julius II at once employed Raphael to decorate the Stanza della Signatura in the Vatican. Its frescoes exhibit a complex program of Renaissance humanist themes in which Philosophy, Theology, Jurisprudence, and Poetry are interrelated in a harmonious figural and architectural scheme. On facing walls, among other works, are paired the monumental frescoes of the "Dispute Over the Sacrament" and the "School of Athens". This room is considered one of the purest embodiments of the ideal style of the High Renaissance. In 1515 he began designs for a series of tapestries destined to decorate the lower zone of the Sistine Chapel. They are his most concentrated and dramatic figural compositions, and they became prototypes that were studied and imitated until the 18th century.

In 1514 he was appointed architect of St. Peter's and in 1515, commissioner of antiquities in Rome. His last fresco cycle was the "Story of Psyche" for one of the ceilings of the Villa Farnesina finally executed by assistants from his plan and drawings. His other paintings executed in Rome are the "Ecstasy of St. Cecilia" and the "Transfiguration".
The classic style of the High Renaissance found its most harmonious embodiment in the works of Raphael. After his own close circle of followers in Rome had dispersed his fame was temporarily eclipsed, but from the 17th to the 19th century he was the fountainhead of all movements in painting that aspired to the classical concept of form.

This lecture is not sponsored by The Getty Center.

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Artists Demonstrations:Contemporary draughtsperson and painter Peter Zokosky will demonstrate how Raphael used metalpoint, pen and ink, charcoal, and red chalk in the drawing style of Raphael and techniques used by Reanisance artists.
Getty Center, Thurs. Nov. 2, 16, 30 & Sun. Nov. 5, 19, 1-4 p.m., East Pavilion Art Information Room.
Artist Walk Thorugh: Contemporary draughtsperson and painter, Laura Lasworth will conduct a tour through the Rapahel exhibitions,
Fri. Dec. 8, 6:00 and 7:30 p.m., limited to 25 people.