Raphael (1483-1520) was for centuries considered the greatest artist who ever lived. Much of what we know about him comes from this biography, written by the Florentine painter Giorgio Vasari and first published in 1550.

Vasari’s Lives of the Painters was the first attempt to write a systematic history of Italian art. The Life of Raphael is a key text not only for the appreciation of Raphael’s own art – whose development and chronology Vasari describes in detail, together with the spectacular social career of the first painter to be mooted, it was claimed, as a Cardinal – but also for its unprecedented attention to theoretical issues.

This is the first standalone edition of the Life, and was published to coincide with the major exhibition of Raphael paintings and drawings at the National Gallery. It is introduced by Dr. Jill Burke, Research Fellow at Edinburgh University, and has 22 pages of colour illustrations covering the span of Raphael’s astonishing art.