PARIS.- This unprecedented exhibition, organized by the Louvre in partnership with the Prado Museum, brings together the works produced by Raphael in Rome during the last years of his short life. This was the period in which his style attained its full maturity, marking without a doubt the apogee of the Italian Renaissance. All of the works presented—church altarpieces, paintings for private devotion, official portraits contrasted with remarkably subtle portraits of friends, as well as a selection of the artist’s most beautiful drawings—attest to Raphael’s extraordinary inventiveness, technical perfection, and unequaled sense of grace. But Raphael was far from a solitary genius. He worked with the aid of numerous disciples in order to fill the many commissions he received. Other hands therefore often had a part in his creations, especially those of his trusted assistants, Giulio Romano and Gianfrancesco Penni. In all, some 100 paintings, drawings and tapestries from the collections of nearly forty institutions are featured in the exhibition, including a number of masterpieces never before seen in France, thus retracing the development of Raphael’s art together with that of his closest collaborators from the accession of Pope Leo X in 1513 until 1524, four years after the death of the great master of Urbino, when Giulio Romano left Rome for Mantua. It was during the last seven years of Raphael’s life that the works later to exert the most decisive influence on European art were produced…
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