CARMEN BAMBACH: Raphael has this kind of personality that’s very amicable, very social, very willing to collaborate.

ISABELLA ROSSELLINI (NARRATOR): Raphael’s social graces helped him to secure commissions from powerful people. And his ability to collaborate and delegate to assistants and craftsmen allowed him to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for his work.

BAMBACH: For Raphael, the moment of creativity, of invention of the subject matter is really the seed of what an artist is all about.

ROSSELLINI: When it came to the execution of complex projects, he could rely on help from his highly-organized workshop.

BAMBACH: Raphael himself came from a kind of studio tradition where using collaborators was pretty normal. His father, Giovanni Santi, used them. Perugino also had lots of assistants.

ROSSELLINI: Some of Raphael’s bitter rivals—like Michelangelo, for example—did criticize his use of assistants. But despite our often idealized conception of the lone artistic genius, Raphael’s approach has been fairly common throughout history.

CARMEN BAMBACH: We know, for example, of many contemporary artists who work with teams of assistants, even a hundred assistants. In some ways, what Raphael was creating, this model of artistic entrepreneurship, is actually kind of the ancestor to that approach.

ROSSELLINI: In this gallery, you’ll also see examples of Raphael’s successful collaboration with printmakers. Look out especially for Raphael’s large beautiful drawing of Lucretia. It inspired Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving of Lucretia nearby… which in turn inspired the Lucretia imagery on a pair of colorful, painted plates.

BAMBACH: The fact that Raphael was able to happily and productively collaborate with printmakers by having prints done after his compositions, especially his very famous compositions meant that in the era before photography, before digital images, it becomes a way of disseminating his inventions.