Raphael (born 1483) grew up in the artistically refined ambit of Urbino, the son of court painter Giovanni Santi. According to Vasari, he was apprenticed to Perugino in Perugia, and although recent scholarship has questioned this, by the time he was twenty, Raphael was able to imitate Perugino’s fashionable style. Aged twenty-one, already with a string of Umbrian altarpiece commissions behind him, he established himself in Florence, where he produced some of ‘iconic’ early works, such as the Madonna of the Goldfinch and the Entombment. Raphael’s ambitions, however, led him to aspire to a larger stage, and in 1508 the twenty-six-year-old artist left Florence permanently, for Rome…