Raphael and Michelangelo

In the early 1500s, Rome replaced Florence as the center of Italian art, because the popes paid for it. Two artists dominated: Raphael (1483 to 1520), from Urbino, and Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475 to 1564), from Florence. The period of about 1490 to 1527, with Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, is called the High Renaissance.

Looking closely: Raphael's Castiglione. Raphael's friend Baldassare Castiglione, a diplomat who wrote The Book of the Courtier, a famous guide to graceful behavior, sits turned three-quarters toward us, his hands folded. The colors are almost all grays, blacks and soft whites: a fur-trimmed gray doublet, a black hat, a white shirt, a warm gray background. The pyramid of his body is calm and stable, and his blue eyes meet ours directly. Everything is relaxed and effortless, exactly the grace Castiglione wrote about. Rubens and Rembrandt later studied this portrait.

Raphael ran a large workshop in Rome and painted frescoes for the popes in the Vatican palace, along with altarpieces and portraits. His figures are graceful and his compositions balanced, so for centuries teachers held him up as the model of perfect harmony. He died at 37.

Looking closely: St. Peter's dome. When Michelangelo took charge of rebuilding St. Peter's in 1546 to 1547, he was over seventy. He designed a dome on a tall drum ringed with paired columns, with sixteen ribs rising to a lantern. He studied Brunelleschi's dome in Florence for it. He did not live to see it built; Giacomo della Porta completed it in 1590, with a somewhat taller, more pointed profile. It still dominates the skyline of Rome.