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Raphael was a proficient painter and architect, and the youngest of three giants of high renaissance. His full Italian name is Raffallo Sanzio. He was born April, 6 1483 in Urbino, a small town in Italy. He died the same day, 37 years later. Raphael is loved and missed for his brilliant and revolutionary works, which are admired for their clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. While we may term other works paintings, those of Raphael are living things; the flesh palpitates, the breath comes and goes, every organ lives, life pulsates everywhere. ( Vasari, Lives of the Artists) He received his earliest techniques of painting from his father, who was said to be a painter of no great merit. He was however, a man of culture who was in constant contact with the advanced artistic ideas current at the court of Urbino. Before his death in 1494, when Raphael was only 11, he had introduced the boy to humanistic philosophy at the court.
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