“Great Artists” - a collection about outstanding masters of painting. The book series contains about 50 illustrations, an “elegantly written” biography of the artist and the history of the creation of the paintings.

The first volume of the collection is dedicated to one of the brightest representatives of the Renaissance, Raphael Santi (1483-1520). A younger contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who lived a short but extremely eventful life, he absorbed and synthesized all the achievements of his great predecessors, creating his ideal of a beautiful, harmoniously developed person surrounded by majestic architecture or landscape. “The Divine Sanzio” - this is what the artist’s contemporaries called him. Raphael's talent and his brilliant works have delighted art connoisseurs since the 16th century to this day. In his works he embodied the idea of the brightest and most sublime ideals of humanism. All his life he searched for the most elegant and accurate ways to depict the beauty of the human spirit through painting. The multi-talented artist gained fame in various fields of art. Raphael was known as a master of portrait and decoration, architect, monumentalist and poet. He designed St. Peter's Cathedral, built the Chigi Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, he painted the Vatican loggias and Villa Farnesina. Almost all of his paintings are very famous, but perhaps the most famous of them are “The Three Graces”, “The Sistine Madonna”, “The Betrothal of the Virgin Mary”, “The Triumph of Galatea”. Raphael had a huge influence on the subsequent development of Italian and European painting, becoming, along with the masters of antiquity, the highest example of artistic perfection.