The Renaissance artist Raphael is known for his extraordinary frescoes, his sublime Madonnas, devotional altarpieces, architectural designs, and his inventive designs for prints and tapestries. It was his use of ancient Roman art—the sculptures, the marble reliefs, the wall-paintings, and the stuccoes—and architecture—the temples, the palaces, and the theaters—as well as the churches and mosaics of early-Christian Rome, that formed his much-admired classical style. In Raphael and the Antique, Claudia La Malfa gives a full account of Raphael’s prodigious career, from central Italy when he was seventeen years old, to Perugia, Siena, and Florence, where he first met with Leonardo and Michelangelo, to Rome where he became one of the most feted artists of the Renaissance. This book brings to light Raphael’s reinvention of classical models, his draftsmanship, and his concept of art—ideas he pursued and was still striving to perfect at the time of his death in 1520 at the young age of thirty-seven.

Delightful reproductions of antique paper dolls. 7 figures, 26 costumes, including outfits for such fairy tale favorites as Cinderella, Prince Charming, Little Bo Peep, others.

A comprehensive re-assessment of Raphael's artistic achievement and the ways in which it transformed the idea of what art is.

Raphael’s Ostrich begins with a little-studied aspect of Raphael’s painting—the ostrich, which appears as an attribute of Justice, painted in the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican. Una Roman D’Elia traces the cultural and artistic history of the ostrich from its appearances in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to the menageries and grotesque ornaments of sixteenth-century Italy. Following the complex history of shifting interpretations given to the ostrich in scientific, literary, religious, poetic, and satirical texts and images, D’Elia demonstrates the rich variety of ways in which people made sense of this living “monster,” which was depicted as the embodiment of heresy, stupidity, perseverance, justice, fortune, gluttony, and other virtues and vices. Because Raphael was revered as a god of art, artists imitated and competed with his ostrich, while religious and cultural critics complained about the potential for misinterpreting such obscure imagery. This book not only considers the history of the ostrich but also explores how Raphael’s painting forced viewers to question how meaning is attributed to the natural world, a debate of central importance in early modern Europe at a time when the disciplines of modern art history and natural history were developing. The strangeness of Raphael’s ostrich, situated at the crossroads of art, religion, myth, and natural history, both reveals lesser-known sides of Raphael’s painting and illuminates major cultural shifts in attitudes toward nature and images in the Renaissance. More than simply an examination of a single artist or a single subject, Raphael’s Ostrich offers an accessible, erudite, and charming alternative to Vasari’s pervasive model of the history of sixteenth-century Italian art.

A comprehensive overview of sixteenth-century Italian art.

Raphael's "School of Athens" examines one of the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance and the artist's best known work. Commissioned by Pope Julius II to decorate the walls of his private library, the fresco represents the gathering of the philosophers of the ancient world around the central figures of Plato and Aristotle. Presented in this volume are the early criticism of the fresco along with new interpretations of its iconography in relation to the other frescoes in the Stanza and in the context of the humanism and rhetorical tradition of the papal court.

The selection of drawings demonstrates how Raphael created a specific mode of visual invention and persuasive communication through drawing. He used drawing both as conceptual art (including brainstorming sheets) and as a practice based on attentive observation (such as drawing from the posed model). Yet Raphael's drawings also reveal how the process of drawing in itself, with its gestural rhythms and spontaneity, can be a form of thought, generating new ideas. The Oxford exhibition will present drawings that span Raphael's entire career, encompassing many of his major projects and exploring his visual language from inventive ideas to full compositions. The extraordinary range of drawings by Raphael in the Ashmolean and the Albertina, enhanced by appropriate loans, will enable this exhibition to cast new light on this familiar artist, transforming our understanding of Raphael's art.

Raphael was for centuries considered the greatest artist who ever lived. Much of what we know about him comes from this biography, written by Florentine painter Giorgio Vasari. The Life of Raphael is a key text not only for the appreciation of Raphael's art--whose development Vasari portrays in detail--but also for its unprecedented attention to theoretical issues. This stand-alone edition of The Life of Raphael, published to coincide with a major exhibition of the artist's paintings and drawings at England's National Gallery, illuminates the entire span of Raphael's astonishing art.