One of the four circular medallions on the vault of the Stanza della Segnatura, about 180 cm in diameter, painted in fresco above the Disputa wall: a female figure seated on clouds, robed in white, green and red — the colours of the theological virtues — holding a book and pointing downward towards the Disputa, with two putti at her sides holding tablets inscribed DIVINAR[UM] RER[UM] NOTITIA, "the knowledge of divine things," against a ground of gold mosaic. The roundels were the first things Raphael painted in the room, in 1508–09, and they announce the programme: each personification sits above the wall whose faculty she governs and gestures towards it. Theology is the most Peruginesque of the four — a sweet, inclined head, a calm frontal pose, a Florentine Madonna in allegorical dress — and her downward gesture, towards the Disputa below, is the simplest statement of the room's logic: the faculty above, the assembly below. The gold-mosaic ground, imitated in fresco, connects the ceiling's roundels to the Byzantine tradition of Roman apse mosaics and to the Disputa's own gold heaven. The putti with their tablets, which repeat the Latin motto from the Digest's definition of jurisprudence — "knowledge of things divine and human" — are of the type Raphael had painted in grisaille for the Baglioni predella, now in colour and in the air. The ceiling's frame of grotesques and gilded stucco was largely Sodoma's, begun before Raphael arrived; the figures in the roundels and rectangles are Raphael's, and they show him, in his first months in Rome, still working in the Florentine manner on a Roman programme. The Vatican's restoration of the 1990s cleaned the ceiling and confirmed the division of hands.

A word on the ceiling's structure, which the four roundel entries share. The Segnatura's vault is a cross-vault divided by painted ribs into four triangular fields, each with a roundel at its centre and, at the corners where the fields meet, four rectangular scenes; the spandrels and ribs are filled with grotesque ornament, gilded stucco and small figures in the manner of the Borgia apartment below and of Pinturicchio's ceilings. Sodoma had begun this framework in 1508, and the central octagon with its putti and the Pope's arms is his; Raphael, arriving, kept the framework and painted the roundels and rectangles within it — so that the ceiling is a collaboration across the change of command, the old decorative system of the Quattrocento enclosing the new figures of the High Renaissance. The roundels' personifications look down towards the walls they govern; the rectangles, at the corners, link adjacent faculties; and the whole, read from the floor, is a diagram of the room's programme — the four kinds of knowledge, each with its emblem above and its assembly below.

The Theology roundel is the one a visitor sees first on entering from the Eliodoro, and it was probably the first Raphael painted; its putti's tablets name the faculty, and the figure's downward gesture — her finger pointing to the Disputa — was the signal, in 1509, that the wall beneath would be hers. The roundel's gold ground has darkened less than the others' and its colours are the clearest of the four.

The full-scale preparatory cartoon for the figures of the School of Athens, in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan: charcoal and black chalk heightened with white lead on some two hundred joined sheets of paper, about 285 by 800 cm, showing all the figures of the fresco except Heraclitus (added later on the wall) and without the architecture, which was constructed separately. It is the only complete cartoon for a High Renaissance fresco to survive, and it is the most important single document of Raphael's working method: the figures are drawn at full size, their contours pricked for pouncing and in places incised, their modelling worked in chalk with great care, so that the cartoon is itself a monumental drawing of extraordinary quality — the heads of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and Euclid among the finest of Raphael's graphic works. The cartoon passed to Cardinal Federico Borromeo, founder of the Ambrosiana, in 1610, and has been there since; it was restored in 2014–19 and is displayed in a purpose-built room. Its survival allows the fresco to be compared with its design at every point — the correspondence is close, with small adjustments on the wall — and it is the evidence that Heraclitus was an afterthought. It is also, in its own right, one of the great drawings of the world: eight metres of Raphael's hand at the height of its power, on paper.

The fresco

The first of the great wall frescoes of the Stanza della Segnatura, about 500 by 770 cm, on the wall under the roundel of Theology, painted in 1509–10: a vision of the Church in heaven and on earth, gathered around the Sacrament. Above, on a bank of cloud that sweeps across the upper half in a great semicircle, Christ sits enthroned between the Virgin and John the Baptist, with God the Father in a glory above him and the dove of the Holy Spirit below, flanked by the four Gospels held by putti; on either side, seated on the cloud in a half-circle, the saints and patriarchs of the Church triumphant — Peter, Adam, John the Evangelist, David, Lawrence and Judas Maccabeus at the left; Paul, Abraham, James, Moses, Stephen and another at the right — with angels in the golden sky behind. Below, on a marble pavement before a landscape, an altar bears a monstrance with the Host; around it stand and sit the Church militant — the four Latin Doctors, Gregory and Jerome at the left, Augustine and Ambrose at the right, at the altar's sides; popes, bishops, theologians, monks and laymen in animated groups to either side, among them identifiable figures — Sixtus IV in gold, Dante crowned with laurel, Fra Angelico in his Dominican habit, Savonarola (perhaps), Bramante leaning on the balustrade at the left — and, at the left edge, a young man who points upward, and at the right, a group disputing over books. Unfinished buildings rise in the distance, a reference to the new St Peter's.

The name and the subject

The title Disputa is a misnomer, given by Vasari and kept by everyone since: the fresco shows not a dispute but an adoration — the Church on earth gathered around the Eucharist, the Church in heaven confirming it — and the "dispute" is only the animated conversation of the theologians below, who discuss the mystery they contemplate. Its true subject is the Sacrament as the meeting-point of heaven and earth: the Host on the altar, at the exact centre of the composition, is the small white disc on which everything turns, the visible form of the Christ enthroned above it, and the vertical axis that runs from God the Father through Christ and the dove to the monstrance is the structure of the whole. The fresco is, in that sense, a painted theology of the Eucharist — the theology of Julius's library — and its placement under Theology makes it the room's statement of the first faculty.

The composition

The composition is a semicircle above and a shallow arc below, the two joined by the vertical axis of the Trinity and the Host. The upper half is hieratic, symmetrical, almost Byzantine — the gold sky, the ranked saints, the frontal Christ — and it derives from the Umbrian and Florentine tradition of the Last Judgement and the Coronation (Fra Bartolomeo's Last Judgement fresco at Santa Maria Nuova, with its semicircle of saints, is the immediate source, and Raphael's own San Severo fresco of 1505 the first attempt). The lower half is a crowd scene of extraordinary variety, in which every figure is individually conceived and the groups are linked by gesture, glance and the fall of the draperies into a single animated frieze that converges on the altar. Between the two halves the cloud bank and the landscape make a horizon; the unfinished architecture at the right, with its scaffolding, is Bramante's St Peter's rising.

The drawings for the Disputa are the largest surviving group for any Raphael composition — some forty sheets, in Windsor, Chantilly, Oxford, London, Frankfurt, Vienna, Lille and elsewhere — and they show the design evolving from a Peruginesque arrangement of two tiers (the Windsor composition study, with the figures in rows) through successive reworkings of the lower half towards the animated groups of the finished wall. The studies for individual figures — the young man pointing at the left, the old man leaning on the balustrade, the standing theologians seen from behind — are among the finest of Raphael's Roman drawings, in pen, chalk and metalpoint, and the Study for the lower left section in the Städel (Q114697141) is one of the sheets on which the left-hand group was settled. The sequence shows a painter working at the very limit of his powers: the first major public commission of his life, at twenty-five, on a wall eight metres wide, in a medium he had used once.

The figures

The lower half is the Disputa's glory and the place where the Roman Raphael is born. The four Doctors at the altar — Gregory in papal tiara, Jerome reading with his lion at his feet, Augustine dictating to a scribe, Ambrose looking up — are grand seated figures of a new monumentality; the standing theologians around them, in their various habits, are disposed in groups that each have an internal drama (the pointing youth at the left who calls attention to the vision, the group at the right bent over a book, the figures at the balustrade); and the portraits — Dante's profile, Sixtus's gold cope, the friar who may be Savonarola, Bramante's bald head — anchor the ideal assembly in the real Church. The upper half is calmer and more conventional, but its Christ — frontal, showing his wounds, with the Virgin and Baptist turned towards him — is a figure of great dignity, and its saints, seated on the cloud in relaxed, conversational poses, are already the philosophers of the opposite wall in embryo.

Technique

The fresco was painted in buon fresco in giornate mapped by the Vatican's restorers — the upper half first, in larger patches, the lower half in smaller ones — from cartoons transferred by pouncing (the dotted lines are visible in raking light on many heads) and, in the architecture, by incision. The gold of the heaven, the rays and the halos were applied a secco; the blues of the sky and some draperies in azurite a secco over a fresco underlayer, and have partly flaked, which accounts for the thinness of some passages. The restoration of 1994–97 removed grime and overpaint and recovered the original tonality — the warm gold of the heaven, the cool grey of the pavement, the clear colours of the draperies — and documented the technique. The wall is in good condition for its age.

Reception

The Disputa was, for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the equal of the School of Athens — Vasari described it at greater length, the Academies admired its Doctors, and it was engraved as often — and for the Catholic Counter-Reformation it was the supreme image of the Eucharist; Bellori made it the model of the sacred history. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, more secular, preferred the School; the Romantics found the upper half archaic; Ruskin, characteristically, admired the lower half and thought the upper a failure of faith. Modern writing — Wölfflin's analysis of the two zones, Shearman's on the library programme, the Vatican's restoration reports — has restored the balance, and the Disputa is again seen as what it is: the fresco in which Raphael first organised a great assembly around a single point, and the one in which the passage from the Oddi Coronation to the School of Athens — from the Umbrian hierarchy to the Roman conversation — is accomplished on one wall.

What to look at

The Host, at the centre, and the axis above it; the young man at the left edge pointing up; the old man leaning on the balustrade beside him (Bramante); Dante's profile at the right, crowned with laurel; Augustine dictating; the unfinished building at the right; and the cloud bank, where the two halves of the Church meet. Then the opposite wall.

The upper zone, more closely

The heavenly half of the Disputa deserves a closer look than it usually gets, because it is the last appearance in Raphael's work of the hieratic mode he had inherited from Umbria, and the place where he transformed it. The bank of cloud is a great semicircle — the apse of a church, in effect, painted in the sky — and the seated saints and patriarchs on it are ranged in pairs, Old Testament and New, so that the composition reads as a typological sermon: Adam beside Peter, Abraham beside Paul, David beside Stephen, Moses beside James. They sit in relaxed, conversational attitudes — turning to one another, reading, looking down at the altar — that are the seeds of the philosophers opposite; Adam, nude, with his leg crossed, is a Michelangelesque figure before the Sistine was unveiled; Moses, with his tablets, looks forward to the Sibyls. Above them the Trinity is arranged on a strict vertical — Father, Son, Dove — with the Virgin and Baptist at Christ's sides in the Byzantine Deesis, and the angels in the gold behind are painted as a flat host of heads, like the cherubim of the Oddi Coronation multiplied. The whole upper zone is a synthesis of the Italian tradition of the painted apse — Roman mosaics, Giotto's Paradise, Fra Angelico's heaven, Fra Bartolomeo's Last Judgement — and it is the last time Raphael painted heaven in this way: the Sistine Madonna's cloud of faces and the Transfiguration's floating Christ are its descendants, but they are visions, not hierarchies.

The portraits and the Church

The identifications of the figures in the lower zone are more secure than those in the School of Athens, because several carry inscriptions or attributes: the four Doctors are labelled by their books and vestments; the popes include Sixtus IV, in gold, Julius's uncle, at the right, and Innocent III and Gregory the Great; Dante is unmistakable; Fra Angelico, in the Dominican habit at the left, is by tradition; the bald old man leaning on the balustrade at the far left is Bramante, by tradition; Savonarola, the Dominican at the far right, is disputed — his presence in a papal room twelve years after his burning would have been a bold gesture, and it may reflect the humanist sympathy for him at Julius's court. The mixture of saints, popes, theologians and living men is deliberate: the Church militant is the Church of history and of the present, and Julius's library was its shelf. The unfinished building at the right, with its scaffolding and its block of marble, has been read as the new St Peter's under construction — the Church as a work in progress — and as an emblem of the Pope's building programme; the block of marble, with its chiselled surface, is a small painted still life in fresco.

Drawings, again

The Disputa drawings repay naming because they are the best record of how Raphael designed a wall. The Windsor composition study, in pen and wash, shows the first idea: two horizontal zones, the heaven a row of seated figures, the earth a row of standing ones, in the manner of Perugino's Assumption. The Chantilly study reworks the heaven as a semicircle. The British Museum and Oxford sheets work on the lower zone's groups, figure by figure — the pointing youth, the leaning old man, the standing theologians seen from behind — in pen and metalpoint, with the poses tried and retried. The Frankfurt sheet (Q114697141) settles the left-hand group. The Lille studies of drapery over nude figures show the final stage before the cartoon. And the cartoons themselves — lost, like all the Stanze cartoons except the Ambrosiana's — are recorded by the pounce-marks on the wall. The sequence, some forty sheets in all, is the most complete surviving record of a Renaissance fresco's design from first thought to wall, and it has been the basis of every account of Raphael's method since Fischel. To stand before the wall with those drawings in mind is to see the fresco as the end of a long argument with himself, won. The Windsor study, the earliest, is the one to begin with; the fresco is where it ends. Between them lies the year in which Raphael became Raphael — the year the Umbrian hierarchy turned into the Roman conversation, on this wall, in the presence of a pope who wanted both. He got both.

A panel, 38.7 by 32.7 cm, in the National Gallery, London: the Virgin, seated at three-quarter length in an interior, holds the naked Christ Child on her lap; he leans across to take a carnation from the infant Baptist, who stands at the left holding the flower up to him; the Virgin, her head inclined, looks down at the Baptist; behind her a grey wall, and at either side two windows opening onto a landscape — a Roman landscape of hills and ruins at the left, a quieter view at the right. The picture is named after Lord Garvagh, who owned it in the nineteenth century and from whose heirs the National Gallery bought it in 1865; it had been in the Aldobrandini collection in Rome (hence its older name) and then in the Borghese, and came to England in the early nineteenth century. It is usually dated around 1509–10, in the first Roman years, and it is the most intimate of the Roman Madonnas.

The Garvagh is a small, perfect domestic picture — the Roman counterpart of the Florentine Orléans and Pinks — and it shows the Florentine Madonna carried to Rome and made grander in type while keeping its scale. The Virgin is of the new Roman type: fuller, more classical, her head wound in a veil, her drapery heavier; the Child and the Baptist are the Florentine infants, but more firmly modelled; the interior, with its two windows, is the Florentine camera opened, at either side, onto the Roman campagna. The group is a compact triangle — the Virgin's inclined head at the apex, the two children at the base — bound by the flower that passes between the children and by the Virgin's gaze; the carnation, like the pinks of the London Pinks, is the flower of the Passion, offered by the Baptist and taken by Christ, and the picture is a meditation on that exchange in the guise of a game.

The picture's quality is in its modelling and its light. The Virgin's face, in three-quarter view, is painted in the soft, warm gradations of the Roman manner, with the half-shadow on the cheek turned away; the children's bodies are drawn with the full knowledge of the Florentine years and modelled with a new roundness; the two windows admit a cool light that falls on the group from the left and a glimpse of the world — the ruins at the left are the Roman campagna's, and they place the picture in its city. The colour is the classic red, blue and flesh against grey, with the landscapes' blues and greens at the sides.

Technically the panel is in the fluent oil of the Roman years over a white ground, with a free underdrawing (visible in infrared) that shows the children's positions adjusted; the surface is in excellent condition, cleaned in the twentieth century, and the picture is among the best preserved of the Roman Madonnas. The National Gallery's technical examination confirmed the date and the autograph status; some have seen workshop participation in the landscapes, but the figures are Raphael's own.

The Garvagh is one of the pictures that made the National Gallery's Raphael room, with the Ansidei, the Mond, the Saint Catherine, the Julius and the Pinks, the most complete sequence of his development outside Italy — the Umbrian, the Florentine, the Roman in one room — and it is the Roman Madonna in that sequence; its purchase in 1865, under Eastlake, was part of the Gallery's deliberate building of that sequence. It is small, it is often passed, and it is one of the most satisfying pictures he painted: the whole of the Roman Madonna, in a panel the size of a book.

The two windows are the picture's most distinctive feature and deserve a note. Florentine Madonnas of the type — the Orléans, the Pinks — have a single window, to one side; the Garvagh has two, symmetrically placed, and through them two different landscapes: at the left, a view with ruins, recognisably Roman — the campagna with its broken aqueducts and tombs, the country Raphael was now walking; at the right, a quieter prospect of hills. The device gives the interior a symmetry that the figures' asymmetric group plays against, and it lets the Roman world into a picture whose subject is domestic; it is also, perhaps, a visual rhyme with the two children, each with a window behind. The carnation passed between them is the picture's hinge, as the pinks are in the London panel, and the gesture — the Baptist offering, Christ taking, the Virgin watching — is the Florentine triangle of glance and touch carried into the Roman manner.

The Aldobrandini and Borghese provenance places the picture among the Roman collections of the early seventeenth century, when Raphael's small Madonnas were the most coveted pictures in the city; how it left Rome is not recorded, but it was in England by the 1820s, and Lord Garvagh's ownership, and the National Gallery's purchase from his heirs in 1865, belong to the era when Eastlake was building the Gallery's Italian collection on historical principles. The picture's arrival completed, with the Ansidei twenty years later, the sequence that makes the London Raphael room what it is. It was cleaned in the 1970s; its windows' landscapes, long dim, recovered their blues, and the carnation its red. A technical note: the two landscapes are painted more thinly than the figures, and in the left window the ruins are indicated with a few strokes over a pale ground — a sign that the painter's attention, as always, went first to the faces and hands, and that the world outside was sketched once the figures were secure. The picture is among the last of the small Madonnas Raphael painted entirely himself; after 1512 the workshop took over the type. That alone would make it precious; its quality makes it more. Among the London Raphaels it is the one that specialists most often name as the picture to take home, if one could. One cannot. The Garvagh stays where Eastlake put it.

A pen-and-ink composition study, about 28 by 42 cm, in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, for the left-hand group of the lower zone of the Disputa (Q549953): the figures who stand and sit at the left of the altar — the Doctors, the pointing youth, the man at the balustrade — drawn in quick, searching pen strokes over a chalk underdrawing, with several figures tried in alternative positions. The Städel sheet is one of the some forty surviving drawings for the fresco, the largest group for any Raphael composition, and it belongs to the middle stage of the design, when the lower half was being reorganised from the Peruginesque rows of the first ideas into the animated groups of the finished wall; it shows the painter working out how the figures at the left would turn towards the altar and how the pointing youth at the edge would carry the eye upward. The drawing is a characteristic example of Raphael's Roman pen style — rapid, economical, the figures indicated by a few strokes and the drapery by hatching — and of his method of designing by variation, several solutions crowding one sheet. The Städel's collection of Raphael drawings, formed in the nineteenth century, includes also studies for the Sala di Costantino; this sheet is among its most important.

The picture

A tondo, 94.5 cm in diameter, transferred from panel to canvas, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington (Andrew W. Mellon Collection): the Virgin, seated on the ground in a wide landscape, her body turned to the left and her legs extended to the right, holds the naked Christ Child on her lap with her left arm and rests her right hand on an open book; the Child, leaning across her, reaches with both hands for a slender reed cross held up by the infant Baptist, who kneels at the left in his camel-skin and looks up; the Virgin, in profile, looks down at the cross with a grave, absorbed expression. She wears a red dress, a blue mantle drawn over her legs, and a white veil wound round her head like a turban; the landscape is an open, level country — a lake, fields, a line of low hills, a few buildings, a great sky with pale clouds — that fills the circle's upper half. The composition is a broad pyramid set in a circle, and the three figures are bound into one continuous movement by the Child's reach and the Virgin's turn.

The name and the history

The picture takes its name from the Dukes of Alba, the Spanish grandees in whose Madrid collection it hung from the seventeenth century until 1802, when it was sold to the Danish minister in Spain, and thence to the London dealer Coesvelt, who sold it in 1836 to Tsar Nicholas I for the Hermitage, where it was transferred to canvas and hung for a century as one of the gallery's greatest treasures. In 1931 the Soviet government, needing foreign currency, sold it with twenty other Hermitage masterpieces to Andrew Mellon, for a price (about $1,166,000) that made it the most expensive painting ever sold; Mellon gave it to the National Gallery he founded, and it has been in Washington since the Gallery opened in 1941. Its earlier history is unknown; Vasari does not mention it; it is usually said to have been painted for Paolo Giovio, the humanist, for a church at Nocera de' Pagani, though the evidence is thin. It was painted in Rome, around 1510, in the years of the Segnatura.

The composition

The Alba Madonna is the first of Raphael's Roman Madonnas and the one in which the problem of the tondo — how to fill a circle — is solved with complete mastery. The Florentine Terranuova had set a rectangular composition inside the round; the Alba is composed for the round from the start: the Virgin's extended legs and her turning body make a diagonal that follows the curve of the frame, the Child's reach and the Baptist's kneeling figure carry the movement back along the other side of the circle, and the three heads — the Baptist's raised, the Child's turned, the Virgin's lowered — form a compact group at the centre-left that the circle encloses; the landscape, with its horizon set a little above the Virgin's shoulders, fills the upper segment and gives the group air. The drawings at Lille (Q93263689) — a red-chalk sheet with the composition tried in the round, the figures in the nude, and on the verso studies for the Virgin's drapery — show the group being rotated into the circle, the Virgin's legs extended further, the Child brought across her lap, until the movement locked. Wölfflin took the Alba as the type of the classical tondo: a composition that could be turned on its axis and would hold.

The Virgin

The Virgin of the Alba is a new figure in Raphael's work — monumental, classical, seated on the ground like an antique river-goddess, her body full and her drapery heavy, her head wound in a white turban-like veil of a kind the Roman Madonnas would make a signature, her profile grave. She is the first of his Madonnas to show the influence of the Sistine Sibyls and of the antique sculpture of the Belvedere; and she is the first to be sad. The Florentine Madonnas are serene; this one looks at the cross her son reaches for and knows what it means. The book under her right hand — the book of hours, open — and the reed cross, the Baptist's attribute and the Passion's sign, carry the meaning; the Child's grasp of the cross, and the Virgin's lowered gaze, make it felt. The Baptist, kneeling and looking up with a child's eagerness, is the innocent in the scene; the landscape — wide, level, luminous — is the world in which the Passion will happen.

The landscape and the colour

The landscape is among the grandest in Raphael's easel painting: not the feathery Umbrian valley of the Florentine Madonnas but a broad Roman campagna, with a lake, level fields, a distant town and a range of low blue hills under a sky of banked cloud, painted in a cool, clear light that gives the picture its air of morning. The colour is the classic triad — the Virgin's red and blue, the Baptist's brown, the flesh — against the greens and blues of the landscape and the white of the veil and the cloud; the whole is cool, and the coolness is the picture's mood. The flowers at the lower left — anemones and violets — are painted with the botanical care of the Belle Jardinière's meadow.

Technique and condition

The picture was painted on a panel and transferred to canvas in St Petersburg in 1837, a year after its arrival; the transfer was well done, and the paint film is intact, though the surface has the slight flatness that transfers produce. The handling is the broader, more fluent oil of the first Roman years — the flesh modelled in soft gradations with warm shadows, the draperies in full-bodied colour with glazes, the landscape in a freer touch than the Florentine panels; the Virgin's veil and the Child's body are the best-preserved passages. The picture was cleaned in Washington in the twentieth century and is in good condition; the blue of the mantle, in natural ultramarine, has held its depth.

The drawings

The Lille sheet is the principal study, and it is one of the most discussed of all Raphael's drawings: on the recto, in red chalk, the three figures in the round, the Virgin's pose tried with her legs extended and the Child reaching, with a second study of the Child's head and a sketch of a standing figure; on the verso, drapery studies and a first idea for the composition in pen. The sheet shows the red chalk that Raphael had adopted from Leonardo being used, for the first time at full power, to model the nude figure in soft light; it shows the circular composition being found; and it shows, in the marginal sketches, the painter's habit of using every corner of a sheet. A second study, in pen, is in the British Museum. The picture's design, from these sheets to the panel, is one of the clearest cases of Raphael's Roman method: the group conceived in movement, studied in the nude, draped, and then set in its landscape.

Reception

The Alba Madonna was famous in the Hermitage as the greatest Raphael in Russia and, after 1931, famous in Washington as the greatest in America; its sale — secret, for a record price, by a government that needed tractors — is one of the set pieces of twentieth-century art history, and the picture's arrival at the National Gallery was among the events that made the Gallery, overnight, a collection of the first rank. Among scholars it has been, since Wölfflin, the classic instance of the Roman tondo and of the "classic" style in the formal sense — the balanced, enclosed, self-sufficient composition; and its Virgin has been taken as the type of the Roman Madonna, grave, monumental, veiled. Its Russian century is not forgotten: the Hermitage keeps a copy, and Russian writers from Benois onward wrote of it as a national loss. It hangs in Washington in the Italian galleries with the Small Cowper, the Niccolini-Cowper and the Saint George — the finest group of Raphaels in the New World, and the Alba is its centre.

What to look at

The Child's two hands on the reed cross; the Virgin's profile and her lowered eyes; the turban of white veil; the line of her extended leg following the curve of the frame; the Baptist's upturned face; the book under her hand; the anemones; and the great sky, which fills the top of the circle like the sky of the Roman campagna on a clear morning. Then the Lille drawing, if one can find it reproduced — the picture's first form, in red chalk, with the figures naked and the circle already drawn.

The Alba, Paolo Giovio and the question of origin

The tradition that the tondo was painted for Paolo Giovio — the humanist historian and collector of portraits, then a young physician at the papal court — and sent by him to the Olivetan church at Nocera de' Pagani near Naples, where it is said to have hung until the seventeenth century, rests on a note in a Neapolitan source and on the picture's later appearance in the collection of the Spanish viceroys, from whom the Alba may have acquired it. None of this is secure, but it would fit: a learned patron, a Neapolitan church, a Spanish grandee — the route by which many Roman pictures reached Madrid. What is certain is that the picture was in the Alba palace by the seventeenth century, that it was engraved there, and that its sale in 1802, in the dispersals of the Napoleonic wars, began the wanderings that ended in Washington.

The Sistine and the Alba

The Alba is the first of Raphael's easel paintings to show, unmistakably, the effect of the Sistine ceiling. The Virgin's seated pose — the body turned, the legs extended, the heavy drapery over the knees — is the pose of Michelangelo's Sibyls and ignudi, seen in the autumn of 1511 or anticipated from the drawings that circulated before; the fullness of the figure and the gravity of the face are new, and they belong to the Rome of 1510–12 rather than to the Florence of 1506. What Raphael did with the Michelangelesque figure is characteristic: he gave it a tondo, a landscape, a Child and a mood, and the result is a Madonna — not a prophet. The Alba is, in that sense, the picture in which the two great styles of the High Renaissance meet most directly on a small panel: the Sistine's monumental figure, the Florentine Madonna's tenderness, and the Roman landscape's air.

The 1931 sale

The Mellon purchase deserves a paragraph, because it is one of the decisive events in the history of American museums. In 1930–31 the Soviet government, through the Antikvariat agency, sold some of the Hermitage's greatest pictures to raise hard currency for industrialisation; Mellon, then Secretary of the Treasury, bought twenty-one of them secretly through the dealer Knoedler, for about $6.6 million in all — among them the Alba, Botticelli's Adoration, van Eyck's Annunciation, Titian's Venus with a Mirror, and Velázquez's Innocent X study. The Alba's price, $1,166,400, was the highest ever paid for a single picture. Mellon kept the purchases quiet until he announced, in 1937, the gift of his collection and of a building to the nation; the National Gallery of Art opened in 1941 with the Hermitage pictures as its core. The Alba Madonna thus became an American national possession by way of a Russian industrial plan, and the Hermitage, which still shows its empty frame in some accounts, has never quite reconciled itself to the loss. Washington, for its part, has made the tondo the heart of its Italian rooms, and the picture that began as a Roman humanist's gift and passed through Spanish, Danish, English and Russian hands is now, by the accident of a Soviet budget, the most-visited Raphael in the Western hemisphere. It deserves the visits. Of all the Madonnas, it is the one in which the circle and the figures are most completely one thing.

A drawing in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (from the Tessin/royal group): a study of architecture with several arcades — an elevation or perspective of arched bays — catalogued under Raphael. Architectural studies circulated through the workshop and its successors in quantity (the survey of Rome generated hundreds), and the Stockholm sheet belongs to that tradition, whether by the master, the shop, or a later hand working in its manner; the entry records the museum's traditional attribution as Wikidata transmits it. Sheets of this kind, whatever their authorship, are the working papers of the Renaissance's architectural revolution, and Stockholm's — filed under the most famous name available — is one among the thousands by which the antique's grammar travelled north.

A double-sided sheet, about 38.5 by 25 cm, in the Palais des Beaux-Arts at Lille, from the Wicar bequest: on the recto, in red chalk, the composition of the Alba Madonna (Q254923) tried in a drawn circle — the Virgin seated with her legs extended, the Child reaching across her lap towards the cross, the Baptist kneeling — the figures studied in the nude from the model, with a second study of the Child's head and torso and a small sketch of a standing figure in the margin; on the verso, in pen and red chalk, studies of the Virgin's drapery and a first idea for the group. The sheet is among the most famous of Raphael's drawings and the key document of the Alba's design: it shows the tondo being composed for the round — the circle drawn first, the figures fitted to it — and it shows the red chalk that Raphael had adopted around 1507–10 being used, for the first time at this level, to model the nude in soft, warm light; the Virgin's body, drawn from a male model as the workshop practice was, is the first of the red-chalk nudes that would reach their climax in the Farnesina studies. The marginal sketches, which include a figure unrelated to the Madonna, show the painter's habit of using every corner of a sheet. The drawing was acquired by Jean-Baptiste Wicar in Italy in the Napoleonic years and came to Lille with his bequest of 1834, which makes the Lille museum, with Oxford and the British Museum, one of the three great repositories of early Raphael drawings. It is shown in the museum's print room by appointment, and reproduced in every account of the Alba.

A sheet of studies in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm: a writing monk, a reading bishop, a seated figure — motif studies of clerical figures of the kind the Disputa's and the altarpieces' preparation required, catalogued in the Tessin tradition under Raphael. The subjects match the Julian years' needs (the Disputa's theologians write, read and sit exactly so), and the sheet, autograph or school, documents the studio's stock of sacred bureaucracy: the Church's daily postures, drawn for reuse. The Stockholm group's standing is discussed under Q110799440; the same footing applies.

A drawing in pen and brown ink over black chalk, about 40 by 28 cm, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Lucretia, the Roman matron who killed herself after her rape by Tarquin, stands nearly nude but for a drapery, her head turned up and to the side, her right hand raising the dagger to her breast, her left extended — a figure of classical pathos in a spiralling contrapposto. The drawing is Raphael's design for Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving of Lucretia (c. 1510–11), the first of the collaborations between painter and engraver that would make Raphael's inventions available throughout Europe, and it is pricked for transfer — the engraver worked from it directly. Vasari tells the story: Marcantonio, newly arrived in Rome, engraved Raphael's Lucretia so well that the painter "resolved to publish" his designs through him, and the partnership began. The figure's pose — derived from antique statues of Venus and from the spiral of the London Saint Catherine — became, through the print, one of the most copied figures of the century; the drawing's fine, even pen-work, with its parallel hatching in the manner of an engraving, shows Raphael drawing for the burin, adapting his line to the medium that would reproduce it. The sheet came to the Metropolitan in the twentieth century and is among its most important Raphael drawings; it has an English Wikipedia article, which is why it is tiered here as a documented work. Its subject — the Roman woman who died for her honour — was a favourite of the humanists, and its treatment — the nude heroine as an antique statue come to life — is the Roman Raphael's first essay in the classical nude for its own sake.

The print that the drawing served — Marcantonio's Lucretia, one of the most admired engravings of the sixteenth century — is the foundation of the Raphael print enterprise, and the drawing's relation to it tells how the enterprise worked. Raphael supplied a finished design, in pen with parallel hatching that imitated the burin's line, so that the engraver had not only the composition but the tonal system; Marcantonio transferred it, by pricking or tracing, to the plate and cut it with a fidelity that made his prints, for the first time, the reliable carriers of a painter's invention. The partnership produced, over the next decade, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Judgement of Paris, the Quos Ego, the Morbetto and dozens more; it made Raphael the most widely known artist in Europe in his lifetime, and it made the reproductive print a medium of art. The Metropolitan's Lucretia is the earliest surviving drawing made specifically for that purpose, and it is, in that sense, the first page of a long book. Its figure — the statue-like heroine, the raised dagger, the upturned face — was copied by painters and sculptors from Lombardy to the Netherlands, and Dürer's Lucretia of 1518 is, in part, an answer to it. The drawing is shown in the Metropolitan's Drawings and Prints galleries on rotation, and is reproduced in every account of Raphael and the print.

A panel, 120 by 90 cm, in the Musée Condé at Chantilly: the Virgin, seated at three-quarter length in a dim interior, lifts a transparent veil from the naked Christ Child, who lies on a cushion before her, awake, reaching up with both arms towards the veil and looking up at her; she looks down at him; at the right, in the shadow behind, Joseph, grey-bearded, leans on his staff and watches. The Virgin wears a red dress and a blue mantle; the light falls from the left on the Child's body and the Virgin's face and hands; the background is dark. The motif — the Virgin lifting the veil from the sleeping or waking Child, the Madonna del Velo — is an old one, with Eucharistic overtones (the veil as the cloth of the altar, the Child as the Host revealed), and Raphael's version made it famous: the composition was copied more than any other of his Madonnas, some hundred versions being recorded, and the original vanished among them.

The picture's history is one of the great stories of Raphael connoisseurship. It was painted, with the Portrait of Julius II, for the church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, where Vasari saw the two pictures hung on pillars; it was taken from the church by Cardinal Sfondrato in 1591 and sold to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, in whose gallery it hung until the early nineteenth century, when it was sold and disappeared; for a century and a half the picture was known only through copies, among them one at Loreto (hence the name) that was long thought the original. In 1976 Cecil Gould, studying the National Gallery's Julius II and its Borghese provenance, proposed that the Chantilly version of the Madonna del Velo — which the duc d'Aumale had bought in 1854 as a good copy — was the lost Borghese original; cleaning and technical examination confirmed it: the underdrawing showed the pentimenti of an original, and the Borghese inventory number was found painted on the panel. The picture has been recognised as Raphael's since, and Chantilly, which cannot lend, has been its home.

The Madonna of Loreto is the most Leonardesque of the Roman Madonnas in its light — the figures emerging from a dark interior, the Child's body and the Virgin's face lit from the side, Joseph in the shadow — and the most tender in its motif: the mother lifting the veil, the child reaching for it, the play that is also an unveiling. The Virgin's head is the Roman type, full and veiled; her hands, lifting the cloth, are among the most beautiful Raphael painted; the Child, lying on his back with his arms raised, is a study in foreshortening and in the abandon of an infant's body; Joseph, in the dark, is a grave, watching presence, the third figure of the Holy Family reduced to a witness. The composition is a shallow triangle across the panel, the Virgin's body and the Child's forming the two sides, and the veil — a film of white between them — is the hinge.

Technically the panel is in the fluent oil of the first Roman years, over a white ground, with a free underdrawing; the flesh is modelled in warm gradations, the veil a scumble of white over the Child's body, the dark background thinly painted. The picture is in good condition after its 1970s cleaning; the darks have sunk a little, and Joseph is harder to see than he was. The duc d'Aumale hung it in the Santuario at Chantilly with the Three Graces and the Orléans Madonna, and there it remains — the room's grandest picture, and, since 1976, its most famous.

The picture's pairing with the Julius II in Santa Maria del Popolo is worth recalling: the two were painted together, around 1511–12, as a pair of devotional images for the della Rovere church — the Pope's portrait and the Virgin — and they hung together until Sfondrato took them; both passed to the Borghese, both were lost to scholarship for a century, and both were recovered in the 1970s by Gould's work at the National Gallery. The Chantilly Madonna and the London Julius are, in that sense, the two halves of a single Roman commission.

Gould's rediscovery of 1976 is one of the classic demonstrations of how connoisseurship and documents work together. The Borghese inventories recorded the Madonna del Velo and the Julius together from 1693, with inventory numbers; Gould, examining the National Gallery's Julius — long thought a copy of the Uffizi version — found the Borghese number painted on it and proved it the original; he then asked which of the many Madonna del Velo versions carried the matching number, and the Chantilly panel did. The Condé's conservators cleaned the picture and found beneath the surface the pentimenti — changes in the Child's arms, the Virgin's hands — that a copyist does not make; and the picture's quality, freed from its old varnish, settled the rest. The Loreto version, which had carried the title for a century, was shown to be a copy; the Chantilly version inherited the name, and the confusion has been tolerated since. The case is taught as a model of method: the document first, the object second, the eye to confirm.

The picture's devotional content — the veil as the sign of the Incarnation and, in Eucharistic terms, of the Host's concealment and revelation — made it the most copied of Raphael's Roman Madonnas; it hung in a church, on a pillar, where the faithful saw it daily, and the demand for replicas followed. That the original survived its own popularity, unrecognised, in a French château, is one of the pleasanter ironies of the oeuvre. Chantilly's restrictions mean that the picture cannot travel to the Raphael exhibitions and has been absent from every one since its rediscovery; scholars and the public must go to it, which most have not, and the Madonna of Loreto remains — like its two companions in the Santuario — a picture more famous than seen. The journey is worth making.

A panel, 80.7 by 57.5 cm, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington (Andrew W. Mellon Collection), signed and dated on the Virgin's neckline M.D.VIII (the last numerals have also been read as M.D.VIIII or later; 1508 is the usual reading): the Virgin, seated at three-quarter length, holds the naked Christ Child on her lap; he stands on her knee and reaches up to her bodice, one hand at her neckline and the other on her breast, looking up at her; she looks down at him; behind, a wall with a green curtain at the left and an opening onto a landscape at the right. The picture is named after the Niccolini family of Florence, in whose palace it hung until the eighteenth century, and after the third Earl Cowper, who bought it in Florence around 1780 and took it to Panshanger, where it hung with the Small Cowper (Q2607050) until the family sold it in 1913; it passed through the hands of Duveen to Andrew Mellon, who gave it to the National Gallery.

The Niccolini-Cowper is dated 1508 — the year of the move to Rome — and it is the picture that marks the passage: begun in Florence, perhaps, and finished in Rome, or painted in the first Roman months, it has the Florentine structure (the half-length Virgin with the Child standing on her lap, the curtain and the window) and the Roman scale of figure — the Virgin fuller, her drapery heavier, the Child's body more firmly modelled than in the Florentine panels. The motif of the Child reaching for the breast, with his hand at the neckline, is that of the Berlin Colonna Madonna, made tender rather than playful; the Virgin's lowered face is grave; the relation between the two is one of quiet absorption, and the picture has none of the incident of the Colonna or the Pinks. The green curtain, drawn back at the left, and the landscape at the right are the devices of the Florentine interiors, carried into the new manner; the light, falling from the left on the Virgin's face and the Child's body, is the warm, full light of Rome.

The handling is the broader oil of the Roman years — the flesh modelled in fuller gradations, the draperies in richer colour, the red of the dress and the blue of the mantle deeper than the Florentine ones — and the picture is in very good condition, cleaned in Washington in the twentieth century. The signature and date, on the neckline, are original. Infrared examination has shown an underdrawing with small changes in the Child's arm.

The two Cowper Madonnas, the Small of c. 1505 and the Large of 1508, were for a century and a half the pride of Panshanger and among the best-known Raphaels in England — engraved, lent to the great exhibitions, the subject of Waagen's praise — and their sale to America in the same decade was among the losses that moved the British to found the National Art Collections Fund; their presence together in Washington, with the Alba and the Saint George, makes the National Gallery the place where the transition from Florence to Rome can be studied in three panels on one wall. The Niccolini-Cowper is the middle one: the last Florentine Madonna, or the first Roman — the date says both.

The Niccolini provenance connects the picture with one of the Florentine families who were Raphael's patrons in the Florentine years, and it suggests that the panel was commissioned in Florence and completed after the move — or sent back from Rome. The Niccolini palace in Via dei Servi held the picture until the eighteenth century, when it was sold; Lord Cowper, who lived in Florence for most of his adult life and bought with discrimination, acquired it around 1780, and at Panshanger it hung with the Small Cowper in the drawing room, the pair being the house's chief treasures. Waagen described both in the 1850s; the Large Cowper, as it was then called, was engraved and lent, and it was among the pictures the Victorians knew best. The sale of 1913, to Duveen, and the resale to Mellon, took it to America with its companion a year later; the two have hung together in Washington since 1941, reunited after their separate Atlantic crossings.

The picture's date — the inscription on the neckline — has been read in more than one way, and the readings matter for what they imply. M.D.VIII would place the picture in the year of the move, and make it the last Florentine or first Roman work; a reading of M.D.VIIII or M.D.X would make it firmly Roman, contemporary with the Garvagh and the Alba. The picture's style supports either: the structure is Florentine, the figure Roman, and the point of the picture is exactly that it stands between. The Virgin's face, with its lowered eyes and full cheek, is already the Alba's; the Child, standing on her knee with his hand at her neckline, is the Colonna's made grave; the curtain and the landscape are the Orléans's opened out. It is a picture of transition that is complete in itself, which is the mark of a painter who did not transition so much as arrive. The National Gallery of Art's technical study of its Raphaels, published in the 1990s, confirmed the picture's excellent state and the originality of the inscription, and noted the fuller handling of the flesh — the first Roman flesh in Washington's sequence. The panel is shown beside the Small Cowper, and the pairing — two Madonnas from one English house, five years and a city apart — is one of the quiet instructive moments of the Gallery's Italian rooms: the same painter, the same subject, the same format, and the whole of the Florentine education between them. Washington's labels tell the story well; the pictures tell it better. The Niccolini-Cowper, the larger and graver of the two, is the one in which the Roman Raphael first speaks in a Florentine format — and the date on the hem, whichever way it is read, marks the year the voice changed.

A panel, 139 by 91 cm, in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples: a cardinal of about forty, seated in a chair, seen at three-quarter length and turned to the left, in a red mozzetta and biretta over a white rochet, holding a letter in his right hand and resting his left on the chair's arm, before a green curtain and, at the right, a window opening onto a landscape. The sitter is identified as Alessandro Farnese (1468–1549), made cardinal by Alexander VI in 1493 at twenty-five — the brother of the Pope's mistress Giulia Farnese, as the gossip had it — who would be elected Pope as Paul III in 1534 and whom Titian would paint, old, in the famous portraits now in the same museum. The identification rests on the resemblance to Titian's portraits and on the Farnese provenance (the picture came to Naples with the Farnese collection in the eighteenth century); the attribution to Raphael, around 1509–11, has been accepted by most scholars, though some have proposed workshop participation or a later hand, and the picture has been less studied than its importance warrants.

The portrait is the earliest of Raphael's Roman portraits of churchmen and the first of the seated, three-quarter-length formula that the Julius II of 1511–12 would bring to perfection: the sitter in a chair, turned, his hands occupied, before a curtain with a window — the structure of the state portrait for the next two centuries. Farnese is shown as a man of affairs: the letter in his hand, the alert turn of the head, the direct gaze, the sober magnificence of the red; the face — clean-shaven, long-nosed, shrewd — is a real likeness of the man Titian would paint as a wily old pope, seen thirty years younger. The handling is the fuller oil of the Roman years, the red of the mozzetta in vermilion glazed with lake, the white of the rochet in heavy impasto, the face modelled in warm gradations; the landscape through the window is summary.

The picture's condition is fair — it has been cleaned and retouched, and the green curtain has darkened — and its attribution has suffered from the comparison with Titian's Farnese portraits, which hang in the same museum and against which it looks restrained. But restraint was the point: this is the cardinal at forty, ambitious and guarded, and the portrait's sobriety is its truth. It is the only portrait of Paul III as a young man, and it is the link between the Florentine Doni portraits and the Roman Julius: the turn, the hands and the chair are already there.

The sitter's history gives the picture a double interest. Alessandro Farnese, cardinal at twenty-five, was in 1510 a prelate of forty with a reputation for learning, for worldliness (he had four children before his ordination as priest in 1519) and for patience; he waited twenty-five more years for the papacy, survived five popes, and as Paul III (1534–49) convoked the Council of Trent, approved the Jesuits, commissioned Michelangelo's Last Judgement and the Farnese Palace, and sat to Titian for the portraits that show him as a shrewd old man in a fur-lined cape. Raphael's portrait, if it is his, shows the same man a generation earlier — the long nose, the small mouth, the appraising eye already there — and the comparison between the two, which Capodimonte makes possible in adjacent rooms, is one of the most instructive in Renaissance portraiture: the young cardinal in Raphael's clear light, the old pope in Titian's warm shadow.

The formula of the portrait — the seated three-quarter length, the chair, the curtain, the window, the letter — is the formula of the state portrait, and Raphael is usually credited with fixing it in the Julius II of 1511–12; the Farnese, if its date of c. 1509–11 is right, is the formula's first statement, and it shows the elements assembled before the Julius made them canonical. Titian's seated portraits of the 1540s, Velázquez's Innocent X, and every seated prelate and prince down to the nineteenth century descend from these two pictures. The Capodimonte portrait is thus a document of a type's origin as well as a likeness, and its relative neglect — it is rarely lent and little written about — is a gap in the literature.

The picture's condition has not helped it: the green curtain has darkened to near-black, the landscape at the right has sunk, and old retouching in the face has muddied the modelling; a cleaning would settle much, and until one is done the attribution will remain, for some, a question. But the hands — the letter held lightly in the right, the left relaxed on the chair — are Raphael's hands, drawn with the precision he never lost, and the face has the quiet authority of his Roman portraits. It may be added that the portrait's scale — nearly life-size, at three-quarter length — was itself new for Raphael, who had painted only half-lengths before Rome; the Farnese is the first of his portraits to give the sitter the full dignity of a seated figure with room around him, and the enlargement of scale is part of what Rome did to his portraiture. The Capodimonte hangs it in the Farnese galleries, among the family's pictures and near Titian's Paul III; the visitor who stands between the two is looking at the same man at forty and at seventy-five, painted by the two greatest portraitists of the century, and at the whole arc of a Renaissance career in the Church — which is, perhaps, the best reason to seek the picture out. Naples is not on the Raphael pilgrim's usual route; it should be — for this portrait, for the Baronci fragment, and for the Farnese Titians that frame them. The portrait has been lent only once in living memory, to Rome in 2020, where it hung near the Prado Cardinal — two young princes of the Church, one known, one not — and held its own. It is, for the record, the earliest portrait of a future pope by the painter who would portray two of them; and the man it shows would, as Paul III, commission the Last Judgement on the wall of the chapel where Raphael's tapestries hung.

The second version of the Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami, 90 by 62.5 cm, oil on panel, in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, bought by Mrs Gardner in 1898 through Bernard Berenson, who believed it the original: the same composition as the Pitti picture (Q428274) — the fat humanist at his desk in red, pen raised, eyes turned up — with small differences in the handling of the background and the desk. Wikidata calls it the "prime version"; the scholarly consensus has more often favoured the Pitti panel, but the question is open, and the Gardner picture is of a quality that makes it either Raphael's replica or a workshop version made under his eye. It was the first Raphael portrait in America and is the centrepiece of the Gardner's Raphael Room, where Mrs Gardner hung it with the Colonna Pietà and the Renaissance furniture she collected to frame them; it has never left the museum, whose founder's will forbids rearrangement. The two Inghirami portraits, in Florence and Boston, are the clearest case in Raphael's portraiture of a composition existing in two autograph or near-autograph versions, and the comparison — which the Gardner's restrictions make possible only in photographs — is a standard exercise in the literature.

A Wikidata record for the pair of portraits of Tommaso Inghirami — the Pitti panel (Q428274) and the Gardner panel (Q103838699) — as a group, with no image of its own. The entries for the two pictures describe them; this record is retained so that the catalogue accounts for every item returned by the query. The existence of two versions of a Raphael portrait of this date is itself worth a note: in the Roman years the workshop began to produce replicas of successful portraits — the Julius II exists in several, the Leo X was copied by Andrea del Sarto — and the Inghirami pair is the earliest clear case, a sign of the demand for Raphael's likenesses among the humanists of the Julian court and of the workshop's growing capacity to meet it.

A panel, 91 by 61 cm, in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti: a heavy, fleshy man in his forties, seated at a desk in a red cap and a red cape over a white surplice, seen in three-quarter view, his body turned to the right and his head raised and turned up to the left as though in thought or inspiration, a pen in his right hand poised over a sheet, his left hand on an open book; books and an inkstand on the desk; a dark background. The sitter is Tommaso Inghirami (1470–1516), called Fedra from his performance in Seneca's Phaedra at a Roman humanist theatre in 1486 — canon of St Peter's, prefect of the Vatican Library under Julius II, orator, wit, and the man most often named as the author of the Segnatura's programme; he is also, by tradition, a fat man with a squint, and the portrait shows both. Raphael's solution to the squint is famous: he has turned the head upward and to the side, so that the walleye — which looks away from the good eye — reads as the gaze of a man looking up for inspiration, the pen paused; the defect becomes the subject. The picture is among the most psychologically acute of his portraits and the first in which the sitter is shown at work, with the instruments of his trade.

Two versions exist — this one and another in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (Q103838699) — and which is the prime has been long argued; the Pitti's, which came to Florence from the Inghirami family of Volterra in the eighteenth century, has been generally preferred, though the Gardner's is of high quality and has its defenders, and both may be from the workshop under Raphael's hand. The Wikidata group item (Q107094679) records the pair. The date, around 1510–11, places the portrait in the Segnatura years, when Inghirami was librarian and Raphael was painting the library — which is a good reason to think the portrait a gift or a thanks. The handling is the broad, warm oil of the Roman portraits, the red of the cape painted with the fluency of the Julius; the face, with its double chin and its upturned eye, is modelled with an honesty that stops just short of comedy and achieves, instead, dignity. The picture hangs in the Pitti's Sala di Saturno with the other Raphael portraits, where Inghirami's bulk and wit make him the most human presence in the room. Inghirami's career is worth a line: he was the most brilliant Latinist of the Julian court, the orator at Julius's funeral, the man who stage-managed the revival of Roman theatre at the palaces of the cardinals, and — by the most plausible account — the humanist who supplied the Segnatura's learned programme; he died in 1516, run over by a cart in the Borgo. The portrait shows him at the height of his powers, pen in hand, looking up for the word. The Pitti panel was restored in the 1980s; its reds, long dulled, recovered their depth.

A panel, 79 by 61 cm, in the Prado, Madrid: a young cardinal, seen at half-length and three-quarter view turned to the left, in a scarlet mozzetta and biretta over a white rochet, his right hand resting on the lower edge of the picture, his face clean-shaven, long and fine-featured, his eyes looking out with a cool, intelligent, slightly appraising gaze; the background is a plain dark grey-green. The sitter is unknown: Francesco Alidosi, Julius's favourite, murdered in 1511; Bibbiena; Ippolito d'Este; Scaramuccia Trivulzio; Innocenzo Cibo; and a dozen others have been proposed, without proof. The picture was in the Spanish royal collection by the eighteenth century — at Aranjuez, then in the Prado from its foundation — and its earlier history is unknown; it is usually dated around 1510–11, in the Segnatura years, and its attribution to Raphael has never been seriously doubted.

The Cardinal is the most perfect of Raphael's early Roman portraits and one of the most perfect portraits of the Renaissance — a picture in which everything has been reduced to essentials and every essential is exactly right. The composition is a pyramid: the broad scarlet mass of the mozzetta at the base, the white of the rochet rising into it, the pale oval of the face at the apex under the red biretta; the turn of the body and the slight turn of the head against it give the figure life; the hand at the lower edge, drawn with Raphael's precision, anchors it. The colour is three notes — scarlet, white, flesh — against the dark, and the scarlet is painted with a fullness and a depth (vermilion glazed with lake, the shadows in pure lake) that make it the most beautiful red in his portraiture. The face is modelled in soft, cool gradations with a warm shadow under the cheekbone; the eyes, looking out, are watchful and unrevealing; the mouth is firm. It is the portrait of a man of power, young, self-possessed and cold, and the painter has neither flattered him nor judged him — he has simply made him present.

Technically the panel is in the fluent oil of the Roman years over a white ground, with a light underdrawing and no significant changes; the surface is in very good condition, cleaned in the twentieth century, and the picture is among the best preserved of the Roman portraits. The Prado's technical examination confirmed the date and the autograph status.

The Cardinal has been, since its entry into the Prado, one of the museum's most admired pictures and one of the most reproduced of all Raphael's portraits — the image of the Renaissance prince of the Church, cold and brilliant in his red. It has been compared with Velázquez's Innocent X and Titian's Paul III as one of the three great portraits of Roman churchmen, and it is the earliest of the three; its influence on Velázquez, who studied the Spanish royal Raphaels, is direct. Among Raphael's portraits it stands with the Castiglione as the one in which his art of omission is most complete: nothing is there that does not serve, and what serves is enough. The unknown sitter is part of its power; he has become the type rather than the man.

A word on the red, because it is the picture. The mozzetta — the short cape of the cardinal's dress — fills the lower two-thirds of the panel in a single mass of scarlet, broken only by the white of the rochet at the chest and the sleeve; the biretta, a second red, crowns the composition; and between them the face, pale and cool, is the only passage that is not red or white or dark. Raphael painted the scarlet in vermilion, glazed with red lake in the shadows so that the folds deepen to crimson, and left the lit surfaces almost pure, so that the cape has both the flatness of a colour-field and the depth of a fabric; the effect, in the Prado's light, is of a red that is at once a shape and a substance. No other portrait of his is so dominated by one colour, and none uses the colour so completely as an emblem: the red is the office, and the man is inside it.

The sitter's anonymity has generated a literature of its own. The candidates are chosen from the cardinals of Julius's court who were young in 1510 and whose features are known from medals or other portraits — Alidosi, murdered by the Duke of Urbino in 1511, is attractive because of the date and because he was Julius's favourite; Bibbiena, Raphael's friend, because of the connection, though Raphael's later portrait of him (Q3399492) shows a different face; Ippolito d'Este, the cardinal of Ferrara, because of his youth and arrogance. None fits perfectly, and the picture's quality does not depend on the answer. The Prado catalogues it as Portrait of a Cardinal and leaves it there.

The picture's influence is easiest to see in Spain. It was in the royal collection from at least the reign of Philip V, and at Aranjuez and the Prado it was studied by every painter who served the Bourbon court; Goya's cardinals and Velázquez's Innocent X — painted in Rome, but by a man who knew the Spanish Raphaels — share its structure of a pale face above a mass of red. The portrait is also the ancestor of the modern portrait d'apparat in its economy: a face, a colour, a hand, and nothing else. It was restored in the 1980s and is shown in the Prado's Raphael room with the late Holy Families and the Spasimo; in that company of large and crowded pictures it is the smallest and the stillest, and the one most visitors remember. A copy of the composition, of the sixteenth century, exists in a private collection; the Prado's is the original, and has never been doubted. The picture's fame in the English-speaking world owes much to its reproduction in Berenson's and later in Gombrich's books as the type of the High Renaissance portrait; in Spain it has been, for two centuries, simply el Cardenal, as though there were only one.

A small panel, about 42 by 33 cm, in the Hyde Collection at Glens Falls, New York — the house museum of Charlotte and Louis Hyde, whose collection of old masters, formed in the early twentieth century with Berenson's advice, includes pictures by Botticelli, Tintoretto and Rembrandt — showing a young man in half-length, in a cap and dark dress, against a dark ground, catalogued as Raphael and dated around 1510. The attribution has not been widely accepted in the Raphael literature; the picture is generally regarded as a work of Raphael's circle or of a Florentine-Roman contemporary, and it is listed here because Wikidata records it under his name. It is of interest as an example of the small portraits of young men in the Raphaelesque manner that the Roman workshop and its imitators produced, and of the American collecting of the Berenson era, when such pictures were bought as Raphaels on the strength of an expert's letter. Visitors to the Hyde will find a pleasant portrait; the question of whose it is remains open.

A drawing in pen and ink over pencil or chalk in the Albertina, Vienna: the Virgin, seated in a landscape, reads from a book while the Child, on her lap, turns towards it; at the upper corners, two cherub heads in clouds; the whole a composition study for a small Madonna of the Roman years, related in motif to the Garvagh and the Berlin Colonna — the reading Virgin, the attentive Child — and in its cherubim to the lunette of the Colonna altarpiece and to the Madonna di Foligno's sky. The sheet is one of the Albertina's large group of Raphael Madonna studies, which Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen assembled in the eighteenth century and which, with the Meadow studies, makes Vienna one of the three places where Raphael's Madonna designs can be followed on paper. The drawing is quick and summary, the pen moving over a chalk sketch, and it shows the painter's habit of setting a Madonna in a landscape with a frame of angels — a composition that no surviving painting quite matches, and that may record a lost small panel or an idea never executed. It is undated in Wikidata; the style places it around 1509–11.

A drawing, about 41 by 27 cm, in the Palais des Beaux-Arts at Lille, from the Wicar bequest: a study of the figure of Christ, probably for one of the Roman compositions of the Segnatura years — the Disputa's enthroned Christ, or a Christ for a devotional picture — drawn from the model in the manner of the Roman figure studies, with the body worked in chalk or pen and the drapery indicated. The Lille collection's Raphael drawings, bought by Wicar in Italy, include studies for the Disputa, the Alba Madonna and the Farnesina, and this sheet belongs to the Roman group; its exact destination is uncertain. It is listed by Wikidata as a drawing by Raphael dated 1510; the entry records it as such. The study shows the Roman method — the figure first in the nude or lightly draped, the pose fixed, the drapery laid over — and the quality of Raphael's handling of the male figure in the first Roman years, between the Florentine studies and the red-chalk nudes of the Farnesina.

A panel transferred to canvas, 78.8 by 64.2 cm, in the National Gallery, London, bequeathed by Miss Eva Mackintosh in 1906: the Virgin, standing at three-quarter length, holds the naked Christ Child on her arm, her cheek close to his; he looks out; behind, a wall with a window opening onto a landscape in which a tower — hence the older name, Madonna della Torre — stands on a hill. The composition is of the type of the Florentine Tempi and Granduca Madonnas — the standing Virgin holding the Child close, the two heads together — and the cartoon for it survives in the British Museum, a full-scale black-chalk drawing of the Virgin and Child that is among the finest of Raphael's Roman cartoons. The painting itself, however, is ruined: transferred from panel to canvas in the nineteenth century and so extensively repainted that little of Raphael's surface remains, it is catalogued by the Gallery as "Raphael (much damaged and restored)" and is valued chiefly as the record of a lost original whose design the cartoon preserves. The picture was in Rome and then in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; its date, around 1509–11, is given by the cartoon's style. The type it represents — the Roman Tempi — was much copied, and the Mackintosh's composition is known in several versions. The entry is here because the picture is, at bottom, Raphael's; but the visitor who wants to see what he made should look at the cartoon in the British Museum, where the Virgin's head and the Child's body, in soft black chalk, show the Roman Madonna as he drew it before the panel was spoiled.

The British Museum cartoon is the reason the picture matters. It is a full-scale drawing in black chalk, pricked for transfer, of the Virgin's head and shoulders and the Child — about 70 by 53 cm — and it is among the most beautiful of Raphael's Roman drawings: the Virgin's face, inclined and veiled, modelled in soft, continuous chalk with the transitions of the Alba's Virgin; the Child's body, foreshortened against her, drawn with the full knowledge of the Florentine years; the whole with the breadth of the Roman manner. It shows what the Mackintosh panel was — a Roman Tempi, the standing Virgin with the Child held close, the two heads together — and it shows it in a medium that has not been repainted. The cartoon entered the British Museum in the nineteenth century and is a fixture of its Raphael displays; the National Gallery's panel, across town, is the ghost of the picture it was made for, and the two together are a lesson in what restoration can destroy and what drawings can save. The tower in the landscape, which gave the composition its older name, is visible in the copies; in the London panel it is barely there. The National Gallery shows the picture in its reserve collection rather than the main Raphael room, which is right: it is a document, and a warning.

The fresco

The second of the great walls of the Stanza della Segnatura, about 500 by 770 cm, on the wall under the roundel of Philosophy, facing the Disputa, painted in about 1509–11: the philosophers of antiquity gathered in a vast, light-filled hall of Bramantesque architecture — a barrel-vaulted nave with coffered ceilings, pilasters, niches holding statues of Apollo (left) and Minerva (right), and an opening to the sky — on two levels, a broad flight of steps dividing them. At the centre, at the vanishing point, Plato and Aristotle advance side by side: Plato, white-bearded, holding his Timaeus, points upward; Aristotle, dark-bearded, holding his Ethics, gestures outward with his palm down. Around them some fifty figures, in groups: at the left, Socrates in profile arguing on his fingers with a group that includes a young man in armour (Alcibiades or Alexander); at the upper left, a group around a bearded man writing; at the lower left, Pythagoras writing in a book while a boy holds up a tablet with the musical harmonies, and beside him a turbaned figure (Averroes) and others; at the lower centre, the brooding figure of Heraclitus leaning on a block, writing; on the steps, Diogenes sprawled with his bowl; at the lower right, Euclid (with Bramante's features) bending with his compasses over a slate, surrounded by students; beside him Ptolemy, with a terrestrial globe, and Zoroaster, with a celestial one, seen from behind; and at the right edge, two figures looking out — the young man in the black cap, by tradition Raphael himself, and the white-robed man beside him, Sodoma or Perugino. The architecture recedes to a patch of sky; the light falls from the left; the whole is a single space that one could walk into.

The subject and the programme

The title, School of Athens, is a seventeenth-century label — Bellori's — and the fresco shows not a school but the whole of ancient philosophy gathered in one place, as the Disputa shows the whole of Christian theology. Its programme matches the library's philosophy shelves, as Shearman showed: Plato and Aristotle at the centre, the two great traditions, the idealist pointing up and the empiricist pointing down; around them the schools — the Socratic, the Pythagorean, the Cynic, the mathematical and astronomical — each as a group in conversation; and the two statues, Apollo and Minerva, presiding as the gods of the arts and of wisdom. The identifications of the individual figures have been argued for four centuries; most are reasonable, few are certain, and the fresco does not depend on them. What it depends on is the idea — the ancient philosophers as a community, in a building that is a vision of the new St Peter's, under the Pope's roof — and on the composition that gives the idea its form.

The architecture

The hall is the picture's first invention and its governing one. Vasari says Bramante designed it; whether he did or whether Raphael drew it himself from Bramante's St Peter's plans, it is a Bramante building — the great barrel vaults with their coffering, the massive piers, the crossing under a dome implied but not shown — and it is, in effect, the interior of the basilica then rising a few hundred metres away, seen before it existed. The perspective is constructed so that the vanishing point falls exactly between Plato and Aristotle, at the level of their heads, so that all the architecture's lines lead to the two principals and the eye, following the vaults back, arrives at the philosophers and then passes through the opening behind them to the sky. The figures are placed on the two levels so that the upper group stands in the architecture's nave and the lower group on the steps before it, and the steps themselves — a broad flight with figures sitting and lying on them — are the device that joins the two levels and lets the eye move between them. The whole is the most complete demonstration in Renaissance painting of the idea, learned in Urbino, that a picture is an architecture before it is a scene; and the hall's grandeur — its scale, its light, its coffered depth — has made it the image of "the Renaissance" for every subsequent century.

The figures

The figures are disposed in groups, each a small drama of teaching, learning, argument or solitude, and each group is linked to its neighbours by a glance, a gesture or the turn of a body, so that the eye travels from group to group without break. Socrates, counting his argument on his fingers to a circle of listeners; Pythagoras writing, with the boy holding the tablet of harmonies; the young man in white who leans over Pythagoras's shoulder; Euclid bent over his slate with the compasses while his students follow the proof at four different stages of understanding (one bends to see, one watches, one points, one has understood and turns away); Ptolemy and Zoroaster with their globes; Diogenes alone on the steps; Heraclitus alone at the front. The poses are taken from the antique — the Apollo in the niche, the seated philosophers from sarcophagi, the standing figures from the statues then being excavated — and from Michelangelo, Leonardo and the Florentine drawings; but they are integrated into a single movement that is Raphael's own. Plato is given Leonardo's features, by long tradition; Euclid is Bramante; Heraclitus is Michelangelo; the man in the black cap at the right is Raphael; and the figure beside him is Sodoma, who had painted the ceiling before Raphael arrived and whom, perhaps, he thanked this way. The portraits are not the point, but they are a sign of what the fresco is: a gathering of the ancient thinkers, painted by a young man who wanted his own world in it.

Heraclitus and the Sistine

The figure of Heraclitus — the melancholy philosopher at the lower centre, seated alone on the steps, leaning on a marble block, his head on his hand, writing — is not in the Ambrosiana cartoon (Q72004972), and the Vatican's examination of the wall has shown that he was painted on a separate patch of plaster, inserted into the finished fresco: an afterthought, added in 1511 or 1512, after the first half of Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling had been unveiled a few rooms away in August 1511. He has Michelangelo's face, Michelangelo's boots, and a pose — the heavy, brooding, introverted seated figure — that comes from Michelangelo's prophets; and he is painted in a broader, more sculptural manner than the rest of the wall. He is Raphael's homage, and his admission that the ceiling had changed what painting could be. Nothing on the wall is more famous, and nothing is more revealing of Raphael's character: the painter of harmony saw the Sistine, went back to his finished fresco, and cut a hole in it to put Michelangelo in.

The cartoon

The full-scale cartoon for the main group of figures survives in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan — some 285 by 800 cm of charcoal and black chalk on joined sheets, heightened with white, the only complete High Renaissance fresco cartoon in existence — and it shows that every figure except Heraclitus was fixed on paper before the plaster was laid; it shows, too, that the architecture was not in the cartoon but drawn directly on the wall by incision, from a separate construction, and that the cartoon was transferred partly by pouncing (pricked holes) and partly by incising. The Vatican's restoration mapped the giornate — about fifty, worked from the top down — and the pounce-marks and incisions, and published a complete technical record. The fresco was painted in buon fresco with a few secco additions; its condition, after the 1994–97 cleaning, is good, with the warm stone colour of the architecture and the clear colours of the draperies recovered.

Meaning

What does the School of Athens mean? At the simplest, it means what its position says: facing the Disputa, under Philosophy, it shows the other half of knowledge — reason's half — gathered as the theologians are gathered, in a building as noble, under the same roof. The humanist Rome of Julius II believed that Athens and Jerusalem could be reconciled, that Plato and Aristotle and Christ and the Doctors could face one another across a library without contradiction, and the two frescoes are that belief made visible. That is why Ruskin hated the room, and why the nineteenth century's secular historians loved it: it is the image of the synthesis that the Renaissance thought it had achieved and that the Reformation, within a decade, would deny. Gombrich read the fresco as a painted argument, in which the figures' gestures — Plato's up, Aristotle's out, Socrates's counting, Euclid's proving — are the argument's steps; Shearman read it as the catalogue of a library; Wölfflin read it as the perfect classical composition, the group of groups; Hegel saw in it the spirit of Greek philosophy made sensuous. It can bear all these readings and more. What it cannot be reduced to is a portrait gallery of famous Greeks; that is the tourist's fresco, not Raphael's.

Reception

The School of Athens is the most reproduced secular image of the Renaissance and among the most reproduced of all paintings — engraved by Giorgio Ghisi in 1550, by Volpato in the eighteenth century, by a hundred others; copied at full scale for the French Academy and the Royal Academy (the copies in British collections listed in Wikidata are a sample); photographed, posterized, parodied. It has been the model for every painted assembly of great men from Ingres's Apotheosis of Homer to the murals of the nineteenth-century universities; it has been the emblem of philosophy on the covers of a thousand textbooks; and it has been, for the Vatican, the room's centrepiece and the image by which the Stanze are known. Among scholars it has been the central case for every account of Raphael's classicism — Burckhardt's, Wölfflin's, Freedberg's — and the subject of some of the best writing on him. It survives all that. Seen in the room, from the centre, in morning light, it is still the thing it was: a space full of people thinking, into which one could walk.

What to look at

Stand at the centre of the room and look at the vanishing point, between Plato and Aristotle; then at their hands; then at Heraclitus, and the join in the plaster around him; then at Euclid's students, one by one; then at the young man in the black cap at the right, who is looking at you. Then turn round.

The giornate and the making

The Vatican's mapping of the School of Athens's giornate — the patches of plaster laid and painted in a single day — has given a precise picture of how the wall was made. Some fifty giornate, worked in horizontal bands from the top of the vault down, so that drips fell on unpainted plaster; the architecture first, from the incised construction, then the figures from the cartoon, the heads in the smallest patches (a head a day, sometimes two); the secco additions — some blues, some highlights, the gold of Apollo's lyre — at the end; and then, in a separate campaign, the Heraclitus on his inserted patch. The pounce-marks are visible on the heads in raking light; the incisions, on the architecture and some draperies; and the joins between giornate run through the composition in a pattern that the restoration published, so that the visitor with a diagram can see, on the wall, the order in which the philosophers appeared. The whole took perhaps a year of working days spread over 1509–11, alongside the Disputa and the ceiling; the painter was twenty-six when he finished it. It is worth saying, plainly, that no one else of that age has done anything comparable, before or since. The room's visitors, who mostly do not know how old he was, sense it anyway. The fresco's youth is part of its authority: it is the work of a man at the height of his powers who did not yet know that heights could be descended.

One of the four scenes on the vault of the Stanza d'Eliodoro, painted in fresco as though on a tapestry hung across the ceiling's field, about 390 cm wide: God the Father, in a rush of drapery and surrounded by cherubim, appears in the sky to Noah and his sons, who kneel and look up among the animals and the ark's timbers — the covenant after the Flood, in which God promises never again to destroy the earth. The four ceiling scenes — this one, the Burning Bush (Q3941955), Jacob's Ladder (Q3951391) and the Sacrifice of Isaac (Q3944652) — are four Old Testament theophanies, God's appearances to the patriarchs, and they match the walls below: divine intervention in the Covenant, as on the walls it is in the Church. The ceiling was begun before the walls, around 1511–12, and its framework — the painted tapestries with their borders, the corners with their ornament — has been attributed in part to Baldassare Peruzzi, who worked in the room before Raphael took it over, and to the French glass-painter Guillaume de Marcillat, who is documented there; the figures are Raphael's in design and partly in execution, with the workshop's help. The Noah is the most energetic of the four: God sweeping down with his arms spread, the patriarch and his sons below in a compact kneeling group, the ark and the animals behind; it is related in type to the Creation scenes of the Sistine ceiling, which Raphael had seen by the time the Eliodoro vault was painted, and the flying God with his spread cloak is a first response to Michelangelo's. The scene was cleaned with the room in the 2000s; its colours — the blue sky, God's violet and red — are clear, and the tapestry illusion, with its painted fringe, is legible. The four ceiling scenes are the least-known parts of the Eliodoro and the ones most worth a craned neck: they show Raphael adapting the Sistine's language of the divine apparition to the small scale of a vault, and they prepare the flying apostles of the Attila below. The tapestry illusion itself — the four scenes painted as though woven hangings were stretched across the vault, with their fringes and rings — is a device that Peruzzi had used in the Farnesina's Sala delle Prospettive and that looks forward to the real tapestries Raphael would design for the Sistine a few years later; it is one of the small ways in which the Eliodoro's ceiling, usually ignored, connects to the rest of the oeuvre. The Noah is the scene above the Heliodorus wall, and the God who descends on the patriarch is the counterpart of the horseman who descends on the robber — the same divine intervention, in covenant and in defence. The four scenes are the only part of the Stanze in which Raphael worked within a framework he had not designed, and the result is instructive: the figures are his, the frame is another's, and the slight mismatch of scale between them is the mark of a room taken over in mid-course.

The second of the four ceiling scenes of the Stanza d'Eliodoro, painted as a fictive tapestry about 390 cm wide: God the Father appears in the flames of the burning bush to Moses, who kneels at the left, removing his sandals, with his flock behind him in a landscape; the bush burns at the right, and God leans out of the fire, in a glory of cherubim, to speak. The scene is the call of Moses — the theophany that began the Exodus — and its place on the vault above the Mass at Bolsena links the fire that does not consume with the Host that bleeds: God's presence in a material sign. The composition is simple and strong: the kneeling Moses at one side, the blazing bush at the other, the flock and the landscape between; God's figure, emerging from the flames with outstretched arm, is of the type of the Noah's, and Moses, with his sandal in his hand and his face raised, is a grand kneeling figure in the Roman manner, close in type to the patriarchs of the Disputa's heaven. The painted flames, in red and gold over the blue sky, are among the more striking passages of the ceiling, and the tapestry border, with its fringe and its painted rings, is carried round the scene as it is round the others. The attribution of the execution is shared, as in the rest of the vault, between Raphael and his assistants, with Peruzzi's name attached to the framework; the design is Raphael's. The scene was cleaned in the 2000s. It is visible from the floor, above the Bolsena wall, and a visitor who has looked at the Swiss Guard should look up: the fire above the altar is the ceiling's answer to the miracle below. The flock of sheep at Moses's back — a few animals painted with the easy naturalism of the Roman workshop — is a pastoral note rare in the Stanze, and the landscape's hills, under the blue, are continuous with the campagna of the Alba Madonna; the ceiling, for all its collaborative execution, belongs to the same moment as the tondo, and the design of the kneeling prophet with his lifted face is among the sheets the workshop learned from. Seen from the floor the scene reads as a blaze at one corner and a kneeling man at the other, which is the story; the detail — the sandal, the sheep, the cherubim in the fire — is for the binoculars. It is the quietest of the four theophanies and the one most directly tied, in subject, to the sacramental theme of the room. Moses's pose, kneeling with one knee raised and the sandal in his hand, was studied from the model in the Roman manner; a drawing in Oxford has been associated with it, though the connection is not certain. The scene's God, leaning from the flames, is the most Michelangelesque of the four — the outstretched arm and the billowing cloak are the Sistine Creator's — and the ceiling as a whole is the first place where that influence, absorbed in 1511–12, can be seen entire.

The fresco

The fourth wall of the Stanza della Segnatura, under the roundel of Justice, painted in 1511, the last of the four: a lunette about 660 cm wide above the room's second window, showing three seated female figures — Fortitude at the left, in armour, holding an oak branch (the della Rovere emblem) with a lion at her side; Prudence at the centre, with two faces (a young one looking forward into a mirror held by a putto, an old bearded one looking back), a torch behind her; Temperance at the right, holding reins — attended by putti who carry the attributes of the three Theological Virtues (Faith, Hope and Charity), so that the lunette shows, in six figures, the cardinal and theological virtues together, as the foundation of law. Below, on either side of the window, two scenes of the giving of law: at the left, the Emperor Justinian receiving the Pandects (the civil law) from Tribonian; at the right, Pope Gregory IX (with the features of Julius II) handing the Decretals (the canon law) to a jurist, attended by cardinals (among them the future Leo X and Paul III). The wall is thus the room's statement of the fourth faculty, Jurisprudence, in two registers: the virtues above, the laws below.

The programme

The Jurisprudence wall completes the library's four faculties — theology, philosophy, poetry, law — and its arrangement, with a lunette of allegorical figures above and two narrative scenes flanking a window below, was dictated by the wall's shape; the Parnassus opposite, around the other window, is its counterpart in form. The virtues in the lunette are an unusual combination: the three cardinal virtues of the active life — Fortitude, Prudence, Temperance — as seated figures, with the fourth cardinal virtue, Justice, supplied by the roundel above, and the three theological virtues reduced to attributes in the putti's hands (Faith's — a pointing putto; Hope's — a torch; Charity's — a putto shaking fruit from a tree). The programme was the adviser's; the solution, which puts the whole of virtue into one lunette without overcrowding it, was the painter's. The two scenes below, of civil and canon law, assert the Pope's double authority — heir of the emperor's law and source of the Church's — and the portrait of Julius as Gregory IX makes the assertion personal.

The figures

The three seated virtues are among the grandest figures of the Segnatura and the first in which the influence of the Sistine ceiling, then half unveiled, is plain: they are large, heavily draped, monumental, seated in the relaxed contrapposto of Michelangelo's sibyls, and their draperies fall in the broad, deep folds of the Roman manner rather than the crisp Florentine ones. Fortitude, in her armour with the lion and the oak, is a martial figure of real weight; Prudence, with her double face and her mirror, is the most inventive — the Janus-head, young forward and old back, is an antique conceit given a new grace; Temperance, with her reins, is the most relaxed. The putti, playing with the attributes, have the lightness of the ceiling's; the whole lunette, with its clear colours against the blue sky, is a composition of great balance, the three seated figures making a broad, low triangle under the arch. The two scenes below are narrower and more ceremonial — the emperor and the pope enthroned, receiving and giving books, attended by their courts — and they are the first of the Stanze's many images of authority seated; the Gregory/Julius portrait, with its cardinals, is a first sketch for the great Julius II of the same year.

Technique and date

The wall was painted in 1511, after the Parnassus and before the Eliodoro was begun, in buon fresco in giornate from cartoons; a drawing for Fortitude is in Oxford, and studies for the putti in Vienna. The lunette was cleaned in the 1990s; its colours — the blue sky, the reds and greens of the draperies — are clear. The Justinian scene below is thought to have been executed largely by an assistant (Lorenzo Lotto's name has been raised, from his documented presence in the Stanze in 1509, though the evidence is thin); the Gregory scene is Raphael's. The wall thus marks the first appearance, in the Segnatura, of the workshop participation that would grow through the Eliodoro and dominate the Incendio.

Reception

The Jurisprudence wall has always been the least discussed of the four, being the least pictorial — a lunette of virtues and two scenes of ceremony, without the crowd and the drama of its neighbours — but its lunette has been admired since Vasari for the beauty of the three figures, and it is, for the student of Raphael's development, the most instructive wall in the room: the place where the Florentine Raphael of 1508, who painted the ceiling, becomes the Roman Raphael of 1511, who had seen the Sistine. Fortitude, Prudence and Temperance are the first of his figures to sit like Michelangelo's and look like his own; the Eliodoro's drama begins with their weight.

The lunette's management of the window is worth noticing. Like the Parnassus opposite, the Jurisprudence wall is cut by a window, but where the Parnassus rises over its window like a hill, the Jurisprudence wall places its three virtues in the lunette above and its two scenes in the narrow fields at either side, so that the window becomes a void between two ceremonies and beneath a court of virtues — a solution that accepts the architecture rather than disguising it. The two scenes, seen from the room's centre, are narrower than the window, and their enthroned figures — Justinian at the left, Gregory at the right — face inward, towards the void and towards each other, as the civil and canon laws face each other in the Pope's library. The wall is the quietest of the four and the most architectural; it was painted last, in 1511, when the painter's attention was already turning to the Eliodoro next door, and it has the slightly summary quality of a conclusion. It is also, in the Prudence figure, the home of one of the wall's best inventions.

The third ceiling scene of the Stanza d'Eliodoro, painted as a fictive tapestry about 340 cm wide: Jacob, asleep on the ground at Bethel with his head on a stone, dreams of the ladder set up to heaven, on which angels ascend and descend, and of God the Father at its top, who promises him the land; the ladder rises diagonally across the scene, the angels on it in a rhythm of climbing and descending figures, and God leans from the sky above. The scene is the third theophany and the one with the most graceful invention: the ladder as a diagonal of light with its traffic of angels is an old motif (Bible illustration, the Sistine's Lunettes) given a Raphaelesque order, and the sleeping Jacob, stretched out with his arm under his head, is a figure of the Agony in the Garden's family — the sleeper whose sleep is revelation. Its place above the Liberation of Saint Peter is apt: the sleeping patriarch who sees heaven opened, above the sleeping apostle whom the angel wakes; the ceiling's ladder and the wall's angel are the same light from above. The execution, as elsewhere on the vault, is shared between Raphael and the workshop within Peruzzi's framework; the design — the diagonal, the angels' rhythm, the sleeper — is Raphael's. The scene was cleaned in the 2000s and its blue sky and the angels' white recovered. It is the most often reproduced of the four ceiling scenes, for its motif, and the one most visitors manage to see, being above the wall that draws most attention. The angels on the ladder, ascending and descending, are paired in a rhythm — one climbing, one coming down, alternating up the diagonal — that is the painter's way of making the text's 'ascending and descending' visible as a pattern; it is a small instance of the Raphaelesque habit of turning narrative into design. The sleeping Jacob's pose, with his head on the stone and his body stretched along the ground, was studied from the model — a sheet in Vienna has been connected with it — and it is the direct ancestor of the sleeping guards in the Liberation below, painted a year or two later, as though the ceiling had rehearsed the wall. The Vatican's restoration recovered the ladder's pale gold against the blue, which had all but vanished under the grime; the scene now reads as it was meant to, a diagonal of light across the dark of the vault. The subject had a papal resonance that Julius would have relished: Jacob's ladder was the standard image of the Church as the way between earth and heaven, and the stone on which he slept — Bethel, 'the house of God' — was read as the foundation of the Church; above the wall that shows Peter, the Church's rock, freed by an angel, the ladder to heaven is exactly placed. The scene is the best preserved of the four. It is also the most often photographed, for obvious reasons: a ladder of angels is a gift to any lens.

The picture

A panel transferred to canvas, 308 by 198 cm, round-topped, in the Vatican Pinacoteca: the Virgin and Child seated on clouds in a glory of gold and cherubim, high above a landscape; below, on the ground, the donor Sigismondo de' Conti kneels at the right in his red robe, presented by Saint Jerome, who lays his hand on his head and looks up at the Virgin; at the left the Baptist, in his camel-skin, points up, and Saint Francis kneels with his stigmata showing, looking out at the viewer and gesturing towards the Virgin; at the centre, between the groups, a small naked angel stands holding a blank tablet; behind, a landscape with a town under a stormy sky in which a meteor or thunderbolt falls on a house — the miracle the picture commemorates. The Virgin is the Roman type, full and veiled; the Child, on her lap, turns to look down; the glory around them is a disc of golden light against the blue, ringed with cherubim heads.

The commission

Sigismondo de' Conti of Foligno (1432–1512), papal secretary and historian, commissioned the altarpiece around 1511 as an ex-voto, in thanks for his escape when a bolt (a meteor, or lightning, or a cannonball — the accounts vary) struck his house in Foligno without harming him, and had it placed on the high altar of Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome, where he was buried in February 1512; the picture was probably finished just before or after his death. In 1565 his family moved it to the convent of Sant'Anna in Foligno, where his niece was a nun — hence the name; in 1797 the French took it to Paris, where it was transferred from panel to canvas; it returned in 1815 and was placed in the Vatican. Vasari describes it at Aracoeli and names the figures.

The composition

The Madonna of Foligno is the first of Raphael's Roman altarpieces and the first in which the Florentine sacra conversazione — saints and donor around an enthroned Virgin — becomes a vision: the Virgin is not enthroned on earth but seated on clouds in the sky, and the saints and donor, on the ground, look up at her. The division is the Disputa's — heaven above, earth below, joined by gesture and glance — transposed to an altarpiece, and the Virgin's golden glory is the Disputa's heaven compressed into a disc. The lower group is a sacra conversazione of four figures and an angel, bound by glance: the Baptist points up, Francis looks out and gestures up, Jerome looks up and presents the donor, the donor looks up; the angel at the centre, holding the tablet on which, presumably, an inscription was to go and never went, looks out with a child's gravity. The composition is a tall triangle — the Virgin at the apex, the saints at the base — against the landscape and the sky, and the round top follows the glory's curve.

The figures

The Virgin and Child are of the Roman type of the Alba and the Sistine Madonna — the full, grave, veiled mother, the turning Child — and the Child, looking down with his hand on his mother's breast, is among the most natural of Raphael's infants. The Baptist, gaunt and pointing, is a figure of new energy, derived from the Florentine Baptists and from Michelangelo; Francis, kneeling and gesturing, with his face turned to us, is the picture's most affecting figure — the saint as intercessor, looking at the viewer and pointing to the Virgin, in the "transitive" mode that Shearman analysed; Jerome, bearded, with his hand on the donor's head, is a grand old man; and the donor, Sigismondo, in profile, with his red robe and his lined face, is one of the most vivid portraits in Raphael's altarpieces — a real old man, devout and a little frightened, presented to the Virgin by his patron. The angel with the tablet, standing at the centre, is the picture's signature figure: a naked child, alone, looking out, holding an empty panel — a motif that the Sistine Madonna's two putti would develop.

The landscape and the meteor

The landscape is the most atmospheric in Raphael's altarpieces: a town on a hill under a sky of dark cloud, with a rainbow, and the bolt falling on the house at the right — the miracle painted as a meteorological event, in the manner of the Venetian landscapes that Sebastiano had brought to Rome. The storm light, the rainbow, the town's towers against the cloud are painted with a freedom that looks forward to the Liberation of Saint Peter's night and back to Giorgione's Tempest; and the contrast between the stormy earth and the golden heaven is the picture's emotional structure.

Technique and condition

The picture was painted on panel and transferred to canvas in Paris around 1800 by Hacquin, the restorer who transferred the Oddi altarpiece; the transfer cost it some surface, and the picture has a slightly flattened quality; a restoration in the 1950s and another in the 2000s have stabilised it and recovered the colour — the Virgin's red and blue, the donor's red, Francis's brown, the gold of the glory. The handling is the full, warm oil of the Roman years, the flesh modelled broadly, the draperies in rich colour, the landscape free. Studies for the figures are in the British Museum, Chatsworth and Frankfurt; a drawing for the donor's head shows him studied from life.

Reception

The Madonna of Foligno was famous at Aracoeli and famous in Paris, where it hung in the Louvre's Grande Galerie and was engraved; its return to Rome in 1815 and its placement in the Vatican rather than Foligno was one of the decisions that made the Pinacoteca. Among scholars it has been the exhibit for the transition from the Florentine to the Roman altarpiece — Fra Bartolomeo's enthroned Virgin becoming the Virgin in glory — and for the Venetian influence on Raphael's landscape; Shearman made its Francis the central example of the figure who addresses the spectator. It hangs in the Vatican Pinacoteca's Raphael room with the Oddi Coronation and the Transfiguration, the middle term between the Umbrian beginning and the Roman end, and it is, for many, the most humane of the three: an old man's thanksgiving, painted with tenderness by a young man at the height of his powers.

The picture

The Wikidata item records the portrait as a group — "three portrait versions by Raphael" — and this entry treats the composition and its history; the London prime version (Q11918714), the Uffizi workshop version (Q19516146) and the Städel version (Q64788403) have their own entries. The composition is this: Julius II, bearded, in a red velvet cap and mozzetta over a white rochet, sits in a chair whose finials are gilded acorns (the della Rovere emblem), seen at three-quarter length and turned to the left, his head bowed in thought, his eyes lowered, his right hand gripping a white handkerchief on the chair's arm and his left resting, with its rings, on the other arm; behind, a green hanging embroidered with the papal keys and tiara. The Pope is an old man — he was sixty-eight — and the portrait shows him so: the beard he had vowed not to cut until Bologna was retaken, the sunken cheeks, the heavy lids, the gripping hand.

The commission and the history

Vasari says the portrait was made for Santa Maria del Popolo, the della Rovere church, where it hung on a pillar with the Madonna of Loreto (Q2427320) on feast days and where, he says, "it was so lifelike and true that it made everyone who saw it tremble as though it were alive"; both pictures were taken from the church by Cardinal Sfondrato in 1591 and passed to Scipione Borghese, in whose inventory of 1693 the portrait is numbered. The Borghese sold it in the early nineteenth century, and it disappeared; the Uffizi version, which had come to Florence with the Urbino inheritance, was taken for the original, and the Pitti and other versions for copies. In 1970 Cecil Gould, cleaning the National Gallery's version — bought in 1824 with the Angerstein collection as a copy — found under the green hanging the Borghese inventory number, and beneath the paint a pentimento (the hanging was originally painted with a different pattern) that no copyist would have made; the London picture was recognised as the prime, and the Uffizi and Städel versions as workshop replicas. The date, 1511–12, is given by the beard (grown in 1510, shaved in March 1512) and by the picture's connection with the Bolsena fresco, where the Pope appears in the same state.

The portrait

The Julius II is the first modern state portrait — the first image of a ruler shown not in profile or in ceremony but seated, in thought, seen slightly from above and from the side, as a man — and its influence on the portraiture of power is beyond reckoning: Titian's Paul III, Velázquez's Innocent X, and every seated pope, king and president since descend from it. What Raphael did was to take the Florentine formula of the seated three-quarter-length with hands — the Doni portraits, the Farnese — and turn it on a pope: the chair is the papal throne reduced to furniture, the hanging with the keys is the only sign of office, the face is lowered and inward, and the hands — one gripping the handkerchief, one loose with its rings — carry the tension of an old man who has been at war for nine years and is tired. The portrait is not a likeness of power but of a person who holds it; and its psychological depth, in the bowed head and the gripping hand, was without precedent in the portraiture of rulers.

The versions

The London picture is the prime, painted by Raphael; the Uffizi picture, of the same size and on panel, is a workshop replica of high quality, perhaps with the master's participation in the head; the Städel picture, also on poplar, is a second workshop replica; the Pitti picture, once thought Raphael's, is a copy, perhaps by Titian's circle; and others — the copies in the Rhode Island School of Design, in Munich, in Lille — record the composition's fame. The replicas were made, it seems, for the della Rovere family and for the Pope's admirers, and the demand for them is the first instance of the Roman workshop producing multiple versions of a portrait — a practice that the Leo X and the Bibbiena would continue.

Technique

The London prime is on poplar, with a white ground, and its underdrawing (revealed by infrared) shows changes in the chair's finials, the position of the hands and the pattern of the hanging — the pentimenti that settled the attribution; the paint is the full, warm oil of the Roman years, the velvet of the mozzetta rendered in layers of red with lake glazes, the white of the rochet in impasto, the face modelled in soft, warm gradations with the beard painted hair by hair. The Uffizi version is thinner and smoother, the Städel version similar; comparison shows the prime's freedom and the replicas' care.

Reception

The Julius II has been, since Vasari, the model of the papal portrait and one of the most famous of all Raphael's pictures — copied, engraved, imitated; the image of the warrior-pope in old age that every history of the period reproduces. Its rediscovery in London in 1970 was among the events of twentieth-century connoisseurship, and Gould's account of it is a classic; the National Gallery's technical bulletin published the evidence. Among scholars it is the exhibit for Raphael's invention of the state portrait and for the question of the workshop's replicas; among the public it is simply Julius — the old man in red, gripping his handkerchief, thinking about war.

The beard and the date

The beard is the portrait's clock. Julius grew it in the autumn of 1510, during the siege of Mirandola, as a vow that he would not shave until the French were driven from Italy and Bologna retaken; he kept it through the disasters of 1511 and the battle of Ravenna, and he shaved it in March 1512 — the first pope in centuries to wear a beard, and the last until Clement VII grew his after the Sack. The portrait, which shows the beard full, must have been painted between those dates, and its mood — the bowed head, the gripping hand — is the mood of a pope whose wars were going badly; the Mass at Bolsena, painted in the same months, shows him with the same beard, kneeling. The portrait is thus not merely a likeness but a dated document of a particular year in an old man's life, and its power comes partly from that: this is Julius at the lowest point, before the victory that let him shave.

The prime version of Raphael's Portrait of Pope Julius II, oil on poplar, 108.7 by 81 cm, in the National Gallery, London: the old Pope, bearded, in his red cap and mozzetta and white rochet, seated in the acorn-finialled chair with the green hanging behind, his head bowed, his right hand gripping the handkerchief, his left resting with its rings on the chair's arm. The picture came to the Gallery in 1824 with the Angerstein collection, catalogued as a copy; it hung for a century and a half as one, overshadowed by the Uffizi version that was taken for the original; and in 1970 Cecil Gould, examining it during cleaning, found the Borghese inventory number under the hanging and the pentimenti beneath the paint — the hanging's pattern, the finials, the hands had all been changed during execution — that proved it the original from Santa Maria del Popolo and the Borghese collection. It has been recognised as Raphael's since, and it is the centre of the National Gallery's Raphael room. The painting itself is described under Q686848; what may be added here is the quality of the surface, which the 1970 cleaning revealed: the velvet of the mozzetta, painted in deep red with lake glazes and a texture that suggests the nap; the beard, painted hair by hair over the soft flesh; the handkerchief, a few strokes of white; the rings, small points of colour; the hanging's keys and tiara, embroidered in gold over green; and the face — lowered, inward, modelled in warm, soft gradations with the shadow under the cap's brim — which is the portrait. The picture was shown at the 2004 London exhibition and lent to Rome in 2020; it is in very good condition. That Wikidata records it without a Wikipedia article of its own, while the group item carries the articles, is an accident of how the databases were built; the London panel is the picture Vasari saw on the pillar of the Popolo, and the picture that changed portraiture.

The fourth ceiling scene of the Stanza d'Eliodoro, painted as a fictive tapestry about 340 cm wide: Abraham, with the knife raised, is stopped by an angel who swoops from the sky and seizes his arm, as Isaac kneels bound on the altar and the ram waits in the thicket; God the Father, in a glory above, looks on. The scene is the fourth theophany — God's intervention to stay the father's hand — and its place above the Attila wall pairs the staying of Abraham's knife with the turning-back of the barbarian's sword: violence averted by a heavenly hand. The composition is the most dramatic of the four: Abraham's raised arm and the angel's descending one cross at the centre, Isaac's bound body is foreshortened on the altar, and the whole has the energy of the walls below; the angel, sweeping down with drapery flying, is of the type of the Peter and Paul of the Attila, and the kneeling Isaac is a study of the youthful nude that the Farnesina would develop. The ceiling's four scenes, taken together, form a programme of the Covenant — Noah, Moses, Jacob, Abraham — that the walls' four protections answer, and the Isaac is its climax. The execution is shared, as in the other scenes; the design is Raphael's, and the angel and the patriarch are of his quality. The scene has a Portuguese as well as an Italian Wikipedia article, which is why Wikidata tiers it among the documented works. It was cleaned in the 2000s and is in good condition; its reds and blues are clear, and the tapestry illusion — the painted cloth with its border, stretched across the vault — is the most convincing of the four. The angel's grip on Abraham's wrist — the moment of the staying hand — is the scene's dramatic centre, and it is drawn with the precision that Raphael gave to every gesture of interruption; the ram in the thicket at the right, small and patient, completes the story. The Isaac has been less reproduced than the Jacob, but among the four it is the one that most directly anticipates the Incendio's energy, and it shows that the ceiling's programme, begun under Peruzzi's framework, was brought by Raphael to the same dramatic pitch as the walls. A red-chalk study for the angel, in the British Museum, shows the figure drawn from a model and then winged; the practice — the body first, the attribute after — is the Roman workshop's, and the drawing is one of the few securely connected with the Eliodoro ceiling. The scene's placement above the Attila wall also carries a Leonine reading — Leo X, whose portrait replaced Julius's below, could see in the staying of the knife an image of the Church's mercy — and it is possible that the ceiling was completed, like the wall, under the new pope. The four theophanies are in any case a Julian programme, and the Isaac is its dramatic summit. Few visitors see it; it is directly above the wall they like least, and they have already turned away.

The second of the Stanze to be painted and the first to be entered in the Vatican Museums' itinerary: a room of the same size as the Segnatura, next to it, which served Julius II as an antechamber and audience room, and which Raphael and his workshop decorated between 1511 and 1514 with four frescoes of divine intervention on behalf of the Church — the Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple (Q2294201), the Mass at Bolsena (Q2529969), the Liberation of Saint Peter (Q2719737) and the Meeting of Leo the Great and Attila (Q2716974) — and a ceiling of four Old Testament scenes of God's appearances to the patriarchs (Q3620832, Q3941955, Q3951391, Q3944652). The programme was Julius's: chosen in 1511, in the year of his war with France and the schismatic Council of Pisa, it shows the Church protected — its treasure from the robber, its sacrament from the doubter, its first pope from the prison, its city from the barbarian — and the Pope himself appears in two of the four, watching the Heliodorus and kneeling at the Bolsena altar. The room is the place where Raphael became a dramatic painter: after the balanced assemblies of the Segnatura, the Eliodoro's walls are full of action, violent light and asymmetric composition, and the change owes something to the Sistine ceiling, unveiled in 1512, and something to the arrival in Rome of Sebastiano del Piombo and the Venetian manner in 1511. The ceiling, begun first, has been attributed in part to Peruzzi and Guillaume de Marcillat; the walls are Raphael's, with workshop help increasing from the Heliodorus to the Attila. The room was restored in the 2000s and 2010s, when its colours — darkened by centuries of smoke — were recovered and the technical record (giornate, transfer, the experiments with oil on the wall in the Liberation) published. The entries for the four frescoes describe them; this entry stands for the room. Its name is the Italian for Heliodorus.

The room's later history is briefly told. Leo X, who succeeded Julius in 1513, kept the programme but had himself painted into the Attila in place of Julius — the pope on horseback is Leo's portrait — and the fresco's completion under the new pontiff is the room's visible seam. The dado below the frescoes was painted with caryatids and monochrome scenes by Perino del Vaga in the 1540s; the floor and the window embrasures are later. The room became, after Julius, a passage between the Segnatura and the papal apartments, then a museum; its windows look onto the Belvedere court and, from the Liberation wall, westward. Vasari's description is the first; the literature since has concentrated on the Heliodorus and the Liberation as the turning-points of Raphael's manner, and on the workshop question in the Attila; Shearman's study of the room's programme, and the Vatican's restoration reports, are the foundation. The room is the one in which the visitor, arriving from the Costantino's vastness, first meets Raphael's own hand, and the shock of the Heliodorus on the right wall — its void, its horseman, its Pope borne in from the edge — is, for most, the moment the Stanze begin.

A drawing in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt (SM 1797Z), c. 1511–12: a warrior on horseback, studied in connection with the Stanza d'Eliodoro's equestrian inventions — the Heliodorus's heavenly horseman above all, whose rearing charge the sheet's motif serves. The drawing belongs to the group of horse-and-rider studies of the Julian years, when the Heliodorus, the Attila and the lost Conversion of Saul made the charging horse a workshop staple; its handling is the master's Roman manner, and the Städel keeps it under his name. With the Frankfurt Disputa study (Q114697141) and the Caryatid (Q114697788), it makes the Städel's small Raphael group a compressed tour of the Roman years — assembly, action, ornament — three sheets, three registers, one decade.

A second Wikidata record for the lunette of the Cardinal and Theological Virtues in the Stanza della Segnatura (Q2568776), catalogued under the Apostolic Palace as a fresco without date. It is the same work — the three seated virtues with their putti above the Jurisprudence wall's window, painted in 1511 — and the commentary on the principal entry applies; the duplicate is retained so that every item the query returned is accounted for. The existence of two records for one fresco is a reminder that Wikidata's coverage of the Stanze was built up piecemeal, from several languages' Wikipedias and from museum databases, and that the catalogue's apparent count of "works" overstates the number of distinct objects by a small margin; the reader should weigh the 324 accordingly.

The fresco

The first wall of the Stanza d'Eliodoro, about 500 by 750 cm, painted in 1511–12: the scene, from the Second Book of Maccabees, of the Syrian treasurer Heliodorus, sent to plunder the Temple at Jerusalem, struck down at the moment of the theft by a heavenly horseman and two youths who run at him with rods, while the high priest Onias, at the distant altar, prays. The composition is divided: at the right, Heliodorus sprawls on the pavement, his sack of spoil spilling, as the horseman in gold armour rears over him and the two angelic youths, flying, raise their rods; at the left, a crowd of women and children watch in terror, and Julius II, seated on his sedia gestatoria borne by his chair-bearers (one of them with the features of Marcantonio Raimondi, by tradition), is carried in from the edge to witness the miracle; at the centre, far back under the Temple's vaults, Onias kneels at the seven-branched candlestick. The Temple is a great Bramantesque interior of domes and arches, receding in perspective to the altar; the light falls from the left, and a golden glow surrounds the horseman.

The subject and the Pope

The story was chosen by Julius in 1511 as a warning: Heliodorus, the agent of a foreign king who laid hands on the Temple's treasure, is the French, the schismatic cardinals of Pisa, anyone who threatened the patrimony of Peter; the horseman is the divine protection the Pope claimed; and Julius himself, carried in to watch, is the Church's guardian seeing its enemies punished. The fresco is the most directly political of the Stanze, and its composition enacts its politics — the Pope at the left, calm and borne aloft, the robber at the right, prostrate; between them, the void of the Temple and the distant priest. Julius's portrait — bearded (he had grown the beard in 1510 as a vow, and would not shave until Bologna was retaken), grave, watching — is the first of Raphael's great images of him, a year before the London portrait.

The composition

The Heliodorus is the fresco in which Raphael broke the symmetry of the Segnatura. The two great walls of the first room are centred; this one is violently asymmetric — the action explodes at the right, the witnesses crowd the left, and the centre is empty, a corridor of vaults leading back to the small kneeling priest. The void is the point: the eye, drawn to the horseman and the fallen man, is pulled back to the altar where the prayer that caused the miracle is being said, and then across to the Pope who watches it; the three groups — the miracle, the prayer, the witness — are held together by the architecture and by the diagonal of the horseman's charge. Nothing in the Segnatura had prepared for this: it is a composition of drama, not of assembly, and it was the model for every Baroque scene of divine intervention from Caravaggio's Conversion of Paul to Rubens.

The figures

The horseman and the two flying youths are among the most energetic figures Raphael painted — the horse rearing, the rider in golden armour leaning forward, the youths in mid-flight with their rods raised — and they show the lesson of Michelangelo's ceiling and of the antique equestrian reliefs (the horseman derives from the Dioscuri of the Quirinal and from Roman battle sarcophagi). Heliodorus, sprawling with his arm raised to shield himself, is a Michelangelesque nude in armour, foreshortened; his two companions flee. The women at the left, clutching their children and turning to look, are a group of real pathos — the kneeling woman seen from behind, with her arm outstretched, is the ancestor of the Fire in the Borgo's women; and the chair-bearers who carry Julius, straining under the weight, are studies from life. The Pope himself, seated, in his white and gold, is a still point among the commotion.

Colour, light and the Venetian question

The Heliodorus marks a change in Raphael's colour. The Segnatura's palette is clear and cool; here the draperies are richer and warmer, the shadows deeper, the golden glow around the horseman a new effect of painted light, and the whole has a saturation that has been attributed to the arrival of Sebastiano del Piombo, and through him of Giorgionesque Venetian colour, in Rome in 1511. The Vatican's restoration of the 2000s recovered this colour — the reds, golds and greens of the left-hand group, the warm stone of the Temple — and showed how far the fresco had moved from the first room's tonality. The technique is buon fresco in giornate, with secco additions in the gold of the armour and the candlestick; the transfer was by cartoon, with pouncing on the heads and incision in the architecture.

Drawings

Studies for the fresco are in Oxford, Vienna and elsewhere — a red-chalk study for the kneeling woman at the left, a sheet for the chair-bearers, studies for the horseman — and they show the Roman method: figures drawn from the model, in red chalk, then draped; the composition fixed in a modello; the cartoon lost. The kneeling woman, seen from behind, was studied from a garzone and then dressed; the horse from the antique.

Reception

The Heliodorus has been, since Vasari, the fresco that showed Raphael could do what Michelangelo did — action, violence, the body in motion — and do it with order; Vasari's description of the horse "as though it were alive" and the youths "who seem to fly" set the tone. The Carracci and Poussin studied it as the model of the istoria; Rubens, who drew it, made its horseman the ancestor of his own; the Academies made the composition's asymmetry a lesson in how to organise a crowd around an action. The twentieth century, interested in the change of manner, made it the first picture of the "second" Roman style; Freedberg called the room the birthplace of the dramatic High Renaissance. It remains, with the Liberation opposite, the wall in the Stanze where the visitor feels most directly the energy of a painter discovering that he could make a wall move.

What to look at

The empty centre, and the small priest at the altar; the horseman's golden armour and the horse's forelegs; the two flying youths; Heliodorus's arm; the kneeling woman at the left with her outstretched arm; the Pope on his chair, and the faces of the men who carry him. Then the wall opposite, where the same energy is turned to light.

The fresco

The third wall of the Stanza della Segnatura, about 670 cm wide, on the wall under the roundel of Poetry, painted in about 1510–11 around the room's window: Apollo, seated on the summit of Mount Parnassus under laurel trees, plays a lira da braccio — a Renaissance bowed instrument, not the antique lyre — with his head raised in inspiration; around him, seated and standing, the nine Muses; and on the slopes on either side, descending to the window's arch, the poets of antiquity and of Italy — Homer, blind, declaiming with his head raised, at the upper left, beside Dante in his red robe and laurel crown and Virgil turning towards him; Sappho, seated at the lower left with a scroll bearing her name; Petrarch, Boccaccio (perhaps), Ariosto (perhaps), Horace, Ovid, Pindar and others, identified with varying confidence. A spring — the Castalian — flows at Apollo's feet; the laurels frame the summit; the sky is blue. The window cut into the wall is incorporated: the poets stand on the slopes that rise from its arch, and the composition curves over it like a hill over a cave.

The subject

Parnassus, the mountain of Apollo and the Muses, was the humanist emblem of poetry, and the wall's programme is Poetry as the third faculty of the library — the poets' shelves, as the Disputa is the theologians' and the School the philosophers'. The gathering of ancient and modern poets together — Homer beside Dante, Sappho beside Petrarch — makes the same claim as the School of Athens: that the tradition is one, and that Rome under Julius is where it gathers. The Italians are given equal honour with the ancients — Dante is at Homer's side, laurelled; Sappho, the one named figure, holds her scroll at the front — and the inclusion of living or recently dead poets (Ariosto? Sannazaro? Tebaldeo?) is a compliment to the Pope's court.

The composition

The Parnassus is the smallest and the most lyrical of the four walls, and the one in which Raphael's gift for the graceful group is purest. The window forced a composition that rises from the sides to a summit, and he made the constraint a virtue: the poets on the lower slopes, seated and standing, lead the eye up to the Muses and to Apollo at the apex, so that the wall reads as a single ascent to the god. The figures are disposed in loose, conversational groups — Homer's trio, Sappho's, the group at the right — linked by turning bodies and the slope of the ground; the Muses around Apollo are a garland of seated and reclining women in classical drapery, their poses taken from the antique (the seated Muse with her back to us, from a sarcophagus; the standing ones, from the statues of the Belvedere); and Apollo himself — seated, playing, his head thrown back — is a figure of inspired abandon unique in Raphael's work. The colour is bright and varied, the draperies in clear reds, blues, yellows and greens against the green of the hill and the blue of the sky, and the light is the even daylight of the Segnatura.

The instrument and the antique

Apollo's lira da braccio — a contemporary instrument, held at the shoulder and bowed — has been much discussed: it makes the god a musician of Raphael's own day, and it may refer to the improvising poet-musicians of the papal court, or to the Orphic tradition of sung poetry, or simply to the painter's preference for a real instrument over an archaeological one. Marcantonio's engraving of the composition, made from a drawing, shows Apollo with an antique lyre — either an earlier design or the engraver's correction — and the difference is a small instance of how Raphael's designs moved between the antique and the modern. The Apollo Belvedere, installed in the Vatican courtyard in 1511, is echoed in the statue-niche of the School of Athens and, some think, in the Parnassus Apollo's upturned head; the Muses draw on the Belvedere's sculptures and on the sarcophagi then in Roman collections. The wall is, with the School, the place where the Roman antique first enters Raphael's figure vocabulary at scale.

Drawings and technique

Drawings for the Parnassus survive in Oxford, Windsor, Lille and Vienna — studies for the Muses, for Homer's head, for groups of poets — and Marcantonio's engraving records an earlier state of the design. The fresco was painted in buon fresco in giornate, from cartoons, with the usual secco additions; it was cleaned in the 1990s restoration and its colour is now bright. The wall is in good condition; the window's embrasure below carries grisaille scenes by Raphael's design.

Reception

The Parnassus has always been the most loved of the Segnatura walls by those who prefer grace to grandeur: Vasari praised its "sweetness"; the Nazarenes copied its Muses; Ingres's Apotheosis of Homer is its direct descendant, Homer enthroned among the poets; Wölfflin admired its management of the window. It has been less written about than its two great neighbours, being less a statement than a song, and its iconography — which poet is which — has generated a literature out of proportion to the question's importance. What it shows, beyond its subject, is Raphael's capacity to make a company of figures into a single rhythm, and to turn an architectural obstacle into the shape of a hill. It is the Segnatura's lightest wall, and the one a visitor tends to remember with most affection. The Parnassus was also, through Marcantonio's engraving, the first of the Segnatura walls to circulate in print, and its Muses and poets supplied the decorative painters of the sixteenth century — in Fontainebleau, in the Palazzo Te, in the villas of the Veneto — with a repertory of graceful figures on a hillside that they drew on for a hundred years. Its Sappho — the only woman named on the wall, seated at the left with her scroll — has been, for the last half-century, the figure most often singled out, as the room's single acknowledgement that poetry had a woman among its founders.