Raphael valuation
The School of Athens, the Sistine Madonna and the Madonnas that defined grace for four centuries of painters.
Raphael (1483–1520), Raffaello Sanzio, was born in Urbino, the son of the court painter Giovanni Santi, and learned from Pietro Perugino before moving to Florence in 1504, where he studied Leonardo and Michelangelo and painted a series of Madonnas.
What a work by Raphael is worth
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Bio
Raphael (1483–1520), Raffaello Sanzio, was born in Urbino, the son of the court painter Giovanni Santi, and learned from Pietro Perugino before moving to Florence in 1504, where he studied Leonardo and Michelangelo and painted a series of Madonnas. In 1508 he was called to Rome by Pope Julius II to decorate the papal apartments in the Vatican, the Stanze, where The School of Athens is, and he became the most sought-after painter in the city, with a large workshop, the post of architect of St Peter's and the commission for the tapestries of the Sistine Chapel; seven of his full-size designs for them, the Raphael Cartoons, are on loan from the Royal Collection to the V&A. The Sistine Madonna is in Dresden.
His paintings are almost all in museums, and the market sees mostly the work of his workshop, which included Giulio Romano and Giovanni Francesco Penni, and the countless copies of his Madonnas made from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. His drawings are rare and highly prized. Prints are the accessible side: the engravings Marcantonio Raimondi made from Raphael's designs spread his compositions across Europe, and impressions of them, early and late, still come up regularly, as do the later reproductive prints after his paintings, which are of much lower value. Maiolica painted with scenes after his compositions is a collecting field of its own.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
