"This companion volume provides a timely reassessment of Raphael, the rare painter who has never gone out of fashion, and addresses the interests of recent scholarship, which has changed the focus from concerns with attribution and definition of the artist's style and the High Renaissance to more practical matters. Essays in this volume examine the intellectual and cultural history of sixteenth-century Rome and Florence that have made it possible to set Raphael in the context of his patrons and his other contemporaries. They demonstrate Raphael's considerable skills as the manager of the largest workshop of his day, one that provided a model for many artists who followed him."--Jacket.