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Raphael (1483-1520), one of the greatest masters of the Renaissance.

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His name has become legendary in his lifetime, his contemporaries called him "the divine Sanzio," and his art - a clear embodiment of harmony, balance, purity of style. Raphael, as a true son of the Renaissance, was a versatile artist: an architect, painter, draftsman, a master of monumental painting. Of particular notoriety he gained as a portraitist. He created such paintings as "Saint Sebastian" (Pinacoteca Carrara Academy, Bergamo, Italy), "Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione" (Louvre, Paris), the portrait of "Pope Julius II» (London National Gallery), as well as unforgettable images of women , captured in pictures depicting the Madonna: "Madonna and scheglenkom" (Uffizi, Florence), "Madonna with the fish" (Prado, Madrid), "The Sistine Madonna" (Art Gallery, Dresden), etc.
It is a genre of the portrait is a masterpiece - "The Lady with the Unicorn" (1505 - 1506), which has a very difficult destiny. In 1897, Giovanni Morelli, first introduced the masterpiece that is stored in the Galleria Borghese, in the tradition of art history, but she found the name of Raphael's later, in the XX century, thanks to the remarkable intuition of Roberto Longhi. In the 1930s, were found later recordings, which opened the complex process of distortion created by Raphael original image. Interestingly, for the study of this painting for the first time in the history of X-ray was used. Restoration of the painting allow him to return the masterpiece authentic look.
Portrait of "Lady with the Unicorn" was written by the artist during his stay in Florence. He created the image of a young beautiful woman full of charm and purity of youth. This impression is also connected with the mysterious beast to its knees - a unicorn, a symbol of female chastity. Stranger, illustrated by Raphael, is in complete harmony with the surrounding world. Of particular interest is the work of Raphael is the fact that it is a kind of dialogue with the artist Leonardo da Vinci, who lived in those years in Florence and just finished his famous "Portrait of the Mona Lisa," who could not make an impression on the young artist. Rafael followed by a brilliant master of placing your model in the space of a landscape, the division plane of the picture on separate zones. He uses the lessons of Leonardo, a new ranking model depicted the portrait of a dialogue with the viewer, creating a new imagery and other mundane level of existence is not the heroine, thus raising the portrait of a new, previously unknown level of generality.
However, referring to the brilliant discoveries of his contemporary, Raphael, creates a new type of Renaissance portraiture. Plays an enormous role in his portrait of color solutions. Glorified 'sfumato' (Italian sfumato-shaded, literally - disappearing like smoke), Rafael Leonardo opposes a colorful palette, based on a gradation of pure light color, and gives the landscape a clear transparency, which emphasizes the purity and integrity shown in the background of the female image. Plastic expressive portrait of a willful strengthens top heroine portrait of the "Lady with the Unicorn," in contrast to Leonardo's Mona Lisa with her complex inner world, rather, remains a mystery to the viewer.