For Raphael Sanzio, beauty and serenity were his greatest emotional themes. He learned new techniques from famous artists, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. He is best known for his Madonna's and for his large figure compositions in the Vatican in Rome. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal human grandeur.
             In 1499, Raphael went to Perugis in Urbino and became a student and assistant of the painter, Perugio. Around 1508-09 he was 25 and called to Rome by Pope Julius II to direct the decoration of the state's room in the Vatican Palace. Raphael was little known in Rome but soon made a deep impression on Julius II and the papal court. The Madonna's that Raphael painted in Rome show him turning away from the serenity and gentleness of his earlier works in order to emphasize qualities of energetic movement.
             "One of the most frequently discussed and best-loved paintings of the Renaissance is Raphael's so-called Sistine Madonna" (Jones43). The Sistine Madonna (1513) show both Richness and boldness in compositional invention typical of Raphael's Roman Period.
             For many people, it remains the supreme example of western painting, and its popularity is virtually as great as that of the Mona Lisa. All who have written about this picture have acknowledged the strange and baffling expressions worn by Mary and the child Jesus, although attempts to decipher their meaning have frequently been evasive - "visionary pictorial composition was one interpretation" (Hager 23).
             Whole anthologies have been devoted to the problem. Famous painters and authors, including Goethe, Runge, Schlegel, C. G. Carus, Hebbel, Schopenhauer, and R. A. Schröder (to name only German commentators), not to mention a host of art historians, have attempted to explain the painting, and others again have confessed how much they "would love to get the bottom of the matter"(Galik 25).
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