Word: raphael
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...most versatile painting family in Italian history was the Carracci of 16th century Bologna, two brothers and a cousin who burst on the post-Renaissance scene as tireless and talented jacks-of-all-styles. Singly or together, they could turn out madonnas with Raphael's angelic sweetness, turbulent figures that writhed in Michelangelesque contortions, landscapes as peaceful as Giorgione's, plus a wealth of portraits, murals, ceiling decorations, caricatures. Their proud boast was that by borrowing from the best of the Renaissance masters they avoided becoming the followers of any one, instead were the equals...
...just as today Trastevere's tough soccer players are the best in all Italy. Many another superlative can be applied to Trastevere; its poverty is the deepest, its streets and alleyways the most crowded, its feasting the lustiest in all of Rome. It was in Trastevere that Raphael himself found the baker's full-bosomed daughter whose sensuous charms he bequeathed to the world in the painting La Fornarina...
...admitted his debt: "I have had three masters: Velasquez, Rembrandt, and nature." As the pendulum swung from classicism to romanticism in the 19th century, Delacroix seized on Rembrandt to best his classicist rival, Ingres, and wrote: "Perhaps we shall one day find that Rembrandt is a greater painter than Raphael...
Russian Operatic Arias (Raphael Arie, basso; Paris Conservatory Orchestra conducted by Alberto Erede; London). One of the world's best bass voices, used as it should be, in some of the finest bass arias. Included: songs from Eugene Onegin, Prince Igor, Sadko, Boris Godunov...
...collector, he acquired such paintings as Vermeer's Girl Reading a Letter (which he thought was a Rembrandt), Rubens' Bathsheba and Tintoretto's Rescue of Arsinoe, in one peak year bought a grand total of 715 paintings. Greatest of Augustus' coups was his acquisition of Raphael's Sistine Madonna, once the property of the Benedictine monks of San Sisto, in Piacenza, Italy. When the painting was brought before him, Augustus pushed aside his throne, then in a rare gesture of royal humility cried: "Make room for the great Raphael...