Raffaello Sanzo, known as Raphael, was the third giant of the High Renaissance. In his art the High Renaissance ideal of harmony comes to its most complete expression.

       Raphael was born  in Urbino. First taught by his father, Gio­vanni Santi, a mediocre painter, Raphael worked for some time in the studio of Perugino.

          The sixteenth century in central Italy was dominated by the colossal genius of Michelangelo Buonarroti.

     Andrea Mantegna was the first major north Italian artist to experience the foil force of the Florentine Renaissance. In 1454, the year of Donatello's departure from Padua, Mantegna began, with several older artists, a series of frescoes in the Chapel of the Overati family in Padua. He finished the frescoes himself in 1457 when he was twenty six years old.

       The break between what had gone before and the new 15th century creative art of Florence is seen immediately in the Enthroned Madonna and Child by the short-lived Tommaso di Ser Giovanni known to his contemporaries as Masaccio who was, after Giotto, the next great founder-figure not only of Italian but of Western painting. This picture is a central panel of an altarpiece painted by Masaccio when he was twenty-five. Its revolutionary heroic realism can be paralleled only in the work of his friend, the sculptor Donatello, older than Masaccio but working in Florence at the same time. In spite of the Gothic pointed arches used for the panels and the golden background this is a Renaissance picture. Masaccio's Madonna and Child are a simple, sculpted group, as if blocked out from the same piece of stone, absorbed, archaic and unsmiling images. The throne on which they sit and on which the large monumental Madonna casts a shadow is solid and three-dimensional. The Child is realistically human and seriously divine. He takes grapes from his Mother as a solemn foretaste of the Passion.

      The final break with the Byzantine tradition was accom­plished by Giotto di Bondone. He was the first giant in the long history of Italian painting; he was a painter, a sculptor and an architect. Now Giotto is regarded as the father of modem painting, but even in his own day Giotto's greatness was recog­nized by his contemporaries. They listed him as one of the great' men of the Floritine Republic, called him the pupil of Nature and said that Giotto revived the art of painting which had de­clined in Italy because of many invasions.