The fresco

A fresco, about 295 by 225 cm, on the wall of the ground-floor loggia — the Loggia of Galatea — of the Villa Farnesina in Trastevere, Rome, the suburban villa built by Peruzzi for the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi between 1506 and 1510: the sea-nymph Galatea, in a red mantle, stands in a shell-chariot drawn by two dolphins, holding the reins and turning her head up and to the left, away from the scene; around her in the water, a riot of marine figures — a triton carrying off a nereid at the left, a sea-centaur blowing a conch, another triton with a nymph at the right, a putto riding a dolphin in the foreground — and above, in the sky, three cupids aiming their bows at her, with a fourth, behind a cloud, holding his arrows in reserve. The composition is a wheel of movement around the still, turning figure of the nymph; the colour is bright — the red mantle against the blue sea and sky, the flesh of the nymphs and tritons — and the light is the clear daylight of the Segnatura.

The subject

The subject is from Poliziano's Stanze per la giostra, the Florentine humanist's poem of the 1470s, which describes the nymph Galatea riding over the waves in a shell drawn by dolphins, surrounded by a rout of sea-gods, while the Cyclops Polyphemus, who loves her in vain, sings to her from the shore; Sebastiano del Piombo painted the Polyphemus in the adjoining bay, seated on his rock, and Raphael's Galatea turns her head away from him — towards heaven, or towards the ideal. The loggia's programme, which Peruzzi's ceiling of Chigi's horoscope and Sebastiano's scenes from Ovid complete, was an astrological and mythological celebration of the banker's fortune, and the Galatea was its centrepiece; it was painted around 1512 (Wikidata's 1513–14 reflects an alternative dating), in the interval between the Segnatura and the Eliodoro, and it is the first of Raphael's full mythologies — the first picture in which he painted the pagan nude for its own sake.

The letter

The Galatea is the occasion of the most famous sentence attributed to Raphael. In a letter to Castiglione, dated 1514 and surviving in a copy (its authorship has been questioned — it may be Castiglione's composition, or a humanist exercise — but its substance is not doubted), the painter thanks his friend for praising the fresco and answers his question about the model: "To paint a beautiful woman I should need to see many beautiful women, and with the condition that you were with me to choose the best; but since there is a shortage both of good judges and of beautiful women, I make use of a certain idea that comes into my mind [io mi servo di certa idea che mi viene nella mente]. Whether it has any excellence in art I do not know; but I labour to have it." The certa idea would become, through Bellori's lecture of 1664, the foundation of academic classicism — the doctrine that the artist paints not nature but an idea formed from the selection of nature's best — and Panofsky's Idea (1924) traced the whole history of the concept from that phrase. What the letter records, at the least, is that the nymph was not a portrait, and that her beauty was understood, by the painter and his friends, as a construction.

The composition

The Galatea is the most classical of Raphael's mythologies and the one in which the debt to antique sculpture is most direct: the nymph's pose — the turning body, the raised head, the arm across — comes from the antique Venus and from the maenads of the neo-Attic reliefs; the tritons and nereids from Roman sarcophagi of the marine thiasus; the cupids from the Erotes of the sarcophagi and gems; the sea-centaur from the Nereid reliefs. What Raphael made of the borrowings is a composition of wheeling energy around a still centre: the figures in the water turn, struggle, blow and ride in a circle, the cupids above aim inward, and Galatea, at the hub, stands upright with her head turned, the one figure not in motion — so that the whole picture rotates around her and she is its axis. The dolphins' forward rush, the putto in the foreground, the spray — all carry the eye round; the red mantle, the brightest note, marks the centre. Wölfflin used the fresco as the type of the classical composition in motion: everything moves, and everything is balanced.

The nude

The Galatea is Raphael's first extended treatment of the nude, male and female, and it shows what distinguished his nudes from Michelangelo's: the tritons and nereids are muscular and energetic, but their flesh is soft, warm and luminous, their bodies rendered in the full, rounded modelling of the Roman manner, and their movements are graceful rather than strained; the nymph herself is of the slender, long-limbed canon that became the definition of grace, her flesh pale against the red, her body turning without effort. The fresco's nudity, in a banker's villa, was the license of the antique subject and of the private setting, and it opened the way to the Psyche loggia of 1517–18 upstairs.

Technique

The fresco was painted in buon fresco in giornate — the Farnesina's restoration mapped them — from cartoons transferred by pouncing, with the usual secco additions; the colour has held better than in the Stanze, the villa's walls being drier. The fresco was cleaned in the 1990s, when centuries of candle-smoke and varnish were removed and the blues of sea and sky, the red of the mantle and the flesh tones recovered; the surface is in good condition. Drawings for the composition are lost; a sheet in Windsor has been connected with the triton.

Reception

The Galatea was famous at once — Castiglione's praise, and the letter, made it so — and it became the model of the mythological fresco for the sixteenth century: Giulio Romano at the Palazzo Te, Annibale Carracci in the Farnese Gallery (whose Triumph of Galatea is its direct descendant), Domenichino, Albani, and the whole Bolognese school took it as the canon of the pagan subject treated with grace. The Academies taught it as the type of the ideal nude; Bellori and the classicists made the letter its charter. The Romantics cared less; the twentieth century, through Wölfflin's formal reading and Panofsky's intellectual one, made it both a composition and an idea. It is also, in its setting — a loggia in a Trastevere garden, open once to the river — the most pleasurable of Raphael's frescoes to see: Chigi's villa is small, quiet, and full of light, and the nymph in her shell is the reason to go.

What to look at

Galatea's turned head and raised eyes; the red mantle; the dolphins; the triton carrying off the nereid at the left; the sea-centaur's conch; the cupids' bows; the fourth cupid behind the cloud, holding the arrows; and the spray. Then Sebastiano's Polyphemus on the wall beside, singing to her, whom she does not hear.

Chigi and the Farnesina

The villa is the setting, and it matters. Agostino Chigi — the Sienese banker who financed Julius's wars and Leo's pleasures, the richest man in Rome, the patron of Peruzzi, Sebastiano, Sodoma and Raphael — built the Farnesina (so called from its later Farnese owners) as a suburban retreat between 1506 and 1510 on the right bank of the Tiber, with gardens to the river, a ground-floor loggia open to the garden, and an upper floor for living; the Loggia of Galatea, on the ground floor, was the villa's reception room, and its decoration — Peruzzi's astrological ceiling of Chigi's horoscope, Sebastiano's Ovidian lunettes and his Polyphemus, Raphael's Galatea — was the most sophisticated secular programme in Rome. Raphael's fresco was the villa's centrepiece and the beginning of his long service to Chigi: the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, the Sibyls in Santa Maria della Pace, the Psyche loggia upstairs, and the stables, all followed. The banker's taste — learned, pagan, sumptuous — gave Raphael the one context in which he could paint the nude without pretext, and the Farnesina is, in consequence, the place where the mythological Raphael lives.

Poliziano and the text

The literary source deserves quoting in substance, because the fresco follows it closely. Poliziano's Stanze (I, 118–19) describe Galatea "in a chariot drawn by two dolphins," with "a company of nymphs and tritons" around her, "some blowing conches, some carrying off nymphs," while "the Cyclops sings to her from the shore"; Raphael's triton with his conch, his tritons carrying off nereids, his dolphins and his cupids are the poem's inventory, and the nymph's averted head — turned from Polyphemus's song towards the sky — is the poem's point: she does not hear the monster. The picture is, in that sense, an illustration; but it is an illustration that absorbed its text so completely that the text is not needed, and its afterlife as an image of beauty in motion owes nothing to Poliziano and everything to the composition.

The cupids

The three cupids in the sky, drawing their bows at Galatea, and the fourth behind the cloud holding the arrows, have been read as an allegory — earthly love's three arrows aimed at the nymph, and the fourth, divine love, held in reserve — and as a neo-Platonic gloss on the whole: Galatea as the soul, turning away from the bodily (Polyphemus) towards the ideal, pursued by the loves. The reading suits a Chigi programme and the certa idea letter; it is not necessary to the picture's pleasure. The cupids themselves — three small flying bodies in three turning poses, bows bent — are among the most charming inventions of the Roman Raphael, and the fourth, peering from behind his cloud with the arrows in his fist, is a touch of wit that the sixteenth century loved and copied.

Galatea after Galatea

The fresco's descendants are a roll-call of the mythological tradition. Annibale Carracci's Triumph of Galatea on the Farnese ceiling (1597–1600), a few hundred metres away across the river, is the direct homage — the same nymph in the same shell, in a denser Baroque rout; Domenichino's and Albani's Galateas follow; Poussin's Triumph of Neptune in Philadelphia is the composition transposed to the sea-god; and the French Academy's conférences took the fresco as the type of the graceful nude in motion. In the nineteenth century Ingres drew it and Moreau painted his own; in the twentieth the fresco's formal analysis, by Wölfflin and his successors, made it the standard example of "classical" composition in movement — the wheel around a still axis — that every student of the period learns. Its popular life has been quieter than the Madonnas', since it is not reproducible as a devotional image and is harder to see; but the Farnesina's reopening to the public in the later twentieth century, and the restoration of the 1990s, have made it, for those who go, one of the most pleasurable of all Raphael's works to stand in front of — a nymph in a shell, in a garden, in the light. The loggia's other frescoes — Peruzzi's horoscope on the vault, Sebastiano's Ovidian lunettes and his great Polyphemus beside the Galatea — complete the room and should be seen with it; the visitor who has only an hour should spend it here and in the Psyche loggia upstairs, where the Raphael workshop's mythological manner reaches its climax five years later. The fresco's condition, after the 1990s cleaning, is among the best of any Raphael wall-painting; the Farnesina's walls, unlike the Vatican's, were not darkened by candles, and the Galatea's colour — the red, the blue, the flesh — is close to what Chigi saw. A drawing for the nymph's head, in Windsor, shows the certa idea in chalk: a woman's head, idealised, turning up — the face that Castiglione asked about. It is a small sheet; it holds the whole doctrine. The fresco, at three metres, holds it too — and holds, besides, the sea, the wind and the light that the doctrine forgets. Go in the afternoon, when the garden's light comes in.

A third version of the Portrait of Pope Julius II, oil on poplar, 105.6 by 78.5 cm, in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, catalogued as by Raphael and his workshop: the same composition as the London prime, painted, like the Uffizi version, as a replica in Raphael's shop around 1511–12. The Städel acquired the picture in the nineteenth century; it was long regarded as a copy, and the museum's technical examination in the 2010s — infrared reflectography showing an underdrawing of the kind used in the workshop for transferring a finished design, and pigments consistent with the Roman shop — led to its upgrading to "Raphael and workshop," with the suggestion that the master may have intervened in the face. It is the least known of the three versions and the most recently studied; its existence, with the Uffizi's, shows that the portrait was replicated at least twice in the shop, presumably for members of the Pope's family and circle, and it is a document of the Roman workshop's early practice of multiplying a successful image. The Städel shows it in its Italian galleries; it was lent to the Städel's own Raphael drawings exhibition and has been discussed in the literature on the portrait's versions since Gould. The commentary on the composition is under Q686848.

The version of the Portrait of Pope Julius II in the Uffizi, Florence, 107 by 80 cm, on panel, which came to the Medici with the Urbino inheritance of 1631 and which was, until 1970, generally taken as Raphael's original: the same composition as the London prime (Q11918714) — the bearded Pope in red and white, seated in the acorn chair before the green hanging, gripping his handkerchief — painted with great care and smoothness, and of a quality that kept it in the first rank for three centuries. Gould's demonstration that the London picture is the prime reduced the Uffizi's to a workshop replica, probably made in Raphael's shop around 1512 for the della Rovere family (its Urbino provenance supports this), perhaps with the master's hand in the head; the Uffizi catalogues it as "Raphael and workshop." Comparison with London shows the difference: the prime has pentimenti and a freer touch, the Uffizi version follows the finished design exactly and is more evenly finished; the velvet is smoother, the beard less spontaneous. It remains a fine picture and the best of the replicas, and it hangs in the Uffizi's Raphael rooms, where it was, for generations of visitors, the Julius they knew. The Wikidata item types it as "painting, artwork copy"; "workshop replica" is the better description. The story of the two pictures — the copy that was the original for 150 years, the original that was the copy — is one of the cautionary tales of connoisseurship, and it is worth remembering that the Uffizi version's quality was what made the error possible.

A fresco, about 190 by 155 cm, on the third pier of the left nave of the church of Sant'Agostino in Campo Marzio, Rome, above Andrea Sansovino's marble group of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne: the prophet Isaiah, seated, monumental, turning to his left, holds up a scroll inscribed in Hebrew with his prophecy of the Virgin birth ("Open ye the gates, that the righteous nation may enter"), while two putti above him hold a tablet with a Greek dedication to Saint Anne; his robe is green and violet, his cloak red; the setting is a painted niche. The fresco was commissioned by the Luxembourgeois humanist Johann Goritz (Coricius), a papal official who kept a famous literary circle, for his funerary altar in the church, as the upper part of an ensemble with Sansovino's sculpture below; the inscription and the dedication to Anne are his. It was painted in 1511–12, and it is the clearest evidence in Raphael's work of the impact of the Sistine ceiling: Isaiah is a Sistine prophet — seated, heavy, turning, his drapery in broad folds, the putti behind him Michelangelesque — and Vasari tells the story that Michelangelo, seeing it, said that Raphael had been studying his work, and that Raphael, seeing the ceiling, repainted the Isaiah in the new manner. Whether he repainted it or simply painted it after August 1511, the figure is the first in his work to sit like a Michelangelo. The fresco is in poor condition — it was restored and partly repainted by Daniele da Volterra in the 1550s, and has been cleaned since — and the colour has darkened; but the figure's grandeur survives, and the inscribed scroll and the putti are legible. Goritz's altar was the scene of an annual feast on Saint Anne's day at which the Roman poets hung Latin verses on the pier; the verses were printed as the Coryciana in 1524, and several of them praise the fresco. The church also holds Caravaggio's Madonna of Loreto and Sansovino's marble; the Isaiah is on the pier to the left as one enters, above the sculpture, and is easy to miss. The Hebrew inscription on the scroll — Isaiah 26:2 — and the Greek dedication to Saint Anne on the putti's tablet are both correct, which suggests that Goritz or one of his learned friends supplied them; the combination of Hebrew, Greek and a Latin-humanist context is characteristic of the trilingual scholarship of Leo's Rome, and the Isaiah is, in that sense, a humanist's monument as much as a devotional image. Daniele da Volterra's repainting of the 1550s, done when the fresco was already damaged, has made the attribution of particular passages uncertain; what is Raphael's beyond doubt is the conception — the prophet as a seated colossus, turning, with the scroll — and that conception is the clearest proof, outside the Stanze, of what the Sistine did to him in the autumn of 1511. The fresco has been cleaned twice in the modern period, most recently in the 2010s, and the scroll's Hebrew is again legible.

The two winged child-angels at the lower edge of the Sistine Madonna — one resting his chin on his crossed hands, the other his cheek on his fist, both looking up — as a separate Wikidata item, created because the detail has a life of its own in reproduction and, in some languages, its own article. They are part of the Dresden canvas and were painted with it in 1512–13 (the "1780" in Wikidata is an error, perhaps the date of a print); they lean on the ledge that separates the vision from the viewer, and their bored, dreamy patience is the picture's release from its own solemnity — the two boys at the bottom of a miracle. Vasari does not mention them; the eighteenth century barely did; the nineteenth made them the most reproduced image in European art, detached from the altarpiece and multiplied on cards, porcelain, embroidery and advertising until they became, for millions, "the Raphael angels" — an image of childhood innocence with no memory of the Virgin above them. The story that Raphael painted them from two urchins who leaned on his window, or on the ledge of a bakery, is a nineteenth-century fable. The putti are, in fact, the last of a line that runs from the Baglioni predella's grisaille children through the Madonna di Foligno's angel with the tablet: the child as the spectator's surrogate at the edge of the sacred. Their separate item is retained here because the query returned it; the commentary on the picture is under Q328079. The British copies of the detail — at the Victoria and Albert Museum and elsewhere (see the copies section) — show how far the two boys travelled on their own. They have also become the subject of a small iconographic literature, on the question of what they are: angels, in the tradition of the putti who attend the Virgin; or the souls of the blessed; or simply children, in the way that Raphael's angels, from the Baglioni predella onward, were always children first. Their poses — one with his chin on his crossed arms, the other with his cheek on his fist, both looking up — have been traced to antique reliefs of sleeping Erotes and to Michelangelo's ignudi, and their placement on the ledge, where the picture's illusion meets its frame, is the device that Shearman made central to his reading of the altarpiece: they are where we are, at the edge of the vision, looking in. That is why they have been detachable, and why their detachment loses everything: without the Virgin above, they are just two bored boys. The Dresden gallery sells more reproductions of the two putti than of the whole picture, which is a fact about reproduction and not about Raphael. It should be added that the putti were the passage most admired by the picture's Soviet custodians, whose 1955 exhibition in Moscow drew queues around the Pushkin; and that the children of Dresden, who grew up with them on every surface, have a proprietary feeling about the two boys that the rest of the picture does not quite command.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 269.5 by 201 cm, in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden: the Virgin, standing on a bank of cloud, walks towards the viewer carrying the Child on her arm, her blue mantle blown back, her veil lifted by a wind; at the left Pope Sixtus II, in a gold cope, kneels and looks up at her, pointing out of the picture with his right hand, his tiara set down on the ledge at the lower left; at the right Saint Barbara, with her tower behind her, kneels and looks down, her hands crossed on her breast; a green curtain, drawn back on a rod at the top, frames the vision; and at the lower edge two small winged child-angels lean on the ledge, looking up, one with his chin on his hands, one with his cheek on his fist. The cloud on which the Virgin stands is, on inspection, made of faces — a host of cherubim heads dissolving into the golden light behind her; the Child, held against her, looks out with a strange, wide-eyed gravity; the Virgin's face is young, grave, a little anxious, and her eyes meet ours.

The commission

The picture was painted in 1512–13 at the order of Julius II for the high altar of the Benedictine church of San Sisto in Piacenza — a gift to the city, which had just passed from the French to the papal states, and to the monastery, which had della Rovere connections; Sixtus II, the third-century pope and martyr, was the church's patron and the della Rovere name-saint (the acorns of the family arms are embroidered on the cope), and Barbara's relics were venerated there. The Pope's portrait, in the kneeling Sixtus — the beardless face has Julius's features, by tradition — would make the picture, as well, a memorial to Julius, who died in February 1513, perhaps before it was finished. It stood on the altar of San Sisto until 1754, when the monks sold it to Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, for 25,000 scudi — the highest price paid for a picture to that date — and it went to Dresden, where it has been the most famous picture in Germany ever since. In 1945 it was taken to the Soviet Union with the rest of the Dresden gallery; it was returned in 1955 and rehung in the Zwinger, in its own room.

The vision

The Sistine Madonna is the first altarpiece in which the Virgin does not sit enthroned, or sit on clouds as in the Foligno, but moves — walks, carrying the Child, out of the glory towards the altar and the congregation — and the motion is the picture's invention. Everything serves it: the curtain, drawn back as on a stage, reveals her; the cloud, which is a multitude of faces, is the heaven she comes from; the Pope, kneeling and pointing out of the picture — towards the nave, the congregation, the cross that stood opposite the altar — directs her towards us; Barbara, looking down, directs the viewer's gaze back to the altar; the two putti at the ledge, bored and patient, are the threshold between her world and ours. The Virgin's veil and mantle, blown back by a wind that touches nothing else, are the sign of her motion; her bare feet on the cloud, her direct gaze, and the Child's — who looks out as though at something alarming — give the vision an urgency that no other Madonna of Raphael's has. Shearman, who made the picture the centrepiece of his account of the "transitive mode," argued that it was designed for its position opposite a crucifix at the end of the choir: the Virgin walks towards the cross, carrying the Child to his death, and her anxiety and his wide eyes are what they see. Whether or not the reading is right, the picture's power comes from its address — it is a Madonna that comes to the viewer, not one that waits.

The figures

The Virgin is the grandest of Raphael's — tall, full, young, grave, with the Roman veil wound over her hair and falling to her shoulder, the blue mantle billowing, the red dress beneath; her face, modelled in soft shadow, is a real face, with the slight irregularity of a portrait (the Fornarina, the romantics said; it is the Roman type idealised); her bare feet on the cloud are among the most beautiful feet in painting. The Child is strange: heavy, tousled, with a man's gravity in a baby's face and eyes that look out wide — the Incarnation as a child who already knows. Sixtus, in his gold cope with its acorns, is an old man transfigured by what he sees, his tiara set aside as a sign of humility; Barbara, turning away with a smile, is the one figure who does not look at the Virgin, and her downward glance is the composition's hinge, sending the eye down to the putti and out. The putti — the "Raphael angels," the most reproduced detail in Western art — are two children leaning on a ledge, bored or dreaming, painted with a freedom and a humour that are the picture's release: everything above is vision, and they are the two boys at the bottom of it.

The composition

The composition is a tall triangle — the Virgin at the apex, the two kneeling saints at the base — set against the curtain and the glory, with the putti as a second, smaller base below; the green curtain, pulled back symmetrically, frames the whole as a theatre; the cloud of faces and the golden light behind dissolve the background into depth. The colour is the richest of Raphael's altarpieces: the Pope's gold, Barbara's green and rose, the Virgin's red and blue, the curtain's green, against the luminous grey-gold of the glory — a harmony that has been called Venetian and is, at any rate, the most saturated he ever painted. The light comes from the glory behind the Virgin, so that she is half lit from the back and the figures below from the front.

Technique

The picture is painted on canvas — one of very few large canvases by Raphael, and the only altarpiece on that support — presumably because it had to travel to Piacenza; the ground is a thin layer over the canvas weave, the underdrawing (seen in infrared) free and summary with changes in the Virgin's position and the putti, the paint broad and fluent, with the flesh modelled in warm gradations, the draperies in full-bodied colour with glazes, and the cloud of faces laid in with a loaded brush over the gold. The handling is the freest of Raphael's altarpieces — the brush visible in the curtain, the cope, the cloud — and the picture has been called the most "painterly" of his works. It was cleaned and restored in Dresden several times, most thoroughly in 1957 after its return from Moscow; the surface is in good condition, with some wear in the dark of the glory; the Soviet restorers' care for it — the picture was kept in a special depot and returned in good state — is part of its legend.

Reception

The Sistine Madonna was not especially famous in Piacenza; it became the most famous picture in the world in Dresden. Augustus III's purchase and its installation in the royal gallery in 1754 put it at the centre of the German Enlightenment's encounter with Italian art: Winckelmann described it in 1755 as the supreme example of ideal beauty, Mengs made it the model of expression, Goethe saw it in 1768 and never forgot it, and from the 1790s the German Romantics — Wackenroder, Tieck, the Schlegels, Schopenhauer — made it the object of a cult: the Madonna as the vision of a pure soul, the picture one looked at on one's knees. Dostoevsky kept a print of it above his desk and makes it the emblem of beauty against nihilism in Demons; Nietzsche cited it; Grillparzer wrote a poem on it; the Nazarenes and the Dresden painters copied it; and the two putti at the bottom became, in the nineteenth century, the most reproduced image in European art — on Christmas cards, tea services, embroidery, advertising — so that their detachment from the picture is complete. The twentieth century, which distrusted the cult, found the picture harder: Wölfflin analysed its composition coolly, the formalists preferred the Foligno, and the picture's sentimental afterlife told against it. But the 1955 return from Moscow, celebrated in East Germany as a national restoration, and Shearman's reading of its address to the spectator, restored its seriousness; and seen in its room in the Zwinger, at the right distance, with the cloud of faces resolving and the Virgin walking forward, it is what it was: the grandest and strangest of Raphael's altarpieces, and the one that most completely realised the idea of the sacred image as a vision that comes to meet the viewer.

What to look at

The cloud — look long enough and it becomes faces; the Virgin's eyes, which meet yours; the Child's, which look past you; Sixtus's pointing hand, and where it points; his tiara on the ledge; Barbara's smile and downward glance; the wind in the veil; the bare feet; and the two boys at the bottom, who have seen it all before.

Dresden, 1754–1945–1955

The picture's German life is a history in itself. Augustus III's agents negotiated for two years with the monks of San Sisto and with the papal authorities, who required a replacement copy (still in Piacenza); the picture travelled over the Alps in the winter of 1753–54 and was received, the legend says, by the King pushing his throne aside with the words "Make way for the great Raphael." It hung in the royal gallery in the Stallhof and then in Semper's Gemäldegalerie from 1855, in a room designed for it; it was the picture every German educated person knew, the one Goethe and Schiller and Kleist wrote about, the one Wagner looked at before composing, the object of the Romantic cult of the Madonna as art's highest subject. In 1945 it was found by the Red Army in a railway tunnel in Saxony where the Dresden pictures had been stored, taken to Moscow, kept in the Pushkin Museum's depots and shown there in 1955 before its return — a return that the German Democratic Republic staged as a national event, with the picture's arrival in Dresden on a special train. It has hung since in its own room in the Semperbau, and it remains the single most-visited object in Saxony.

The Child

A word more on the Child, because he is the picture's enigma. He is heavy — a real baby's weight on the Virgin's arm — and tousled, and his face is not a baby's face: the brow is furrowed, the eyes are wide and fixed on something beyond us, the mouth is set. Generations of viewers have found him troubling, and the explanations have been many: that he sees the cross opposite the altar (Shearman); that he is the Incarnate Word who knows his destiny; that Raphael painted him from an unusually solemn child; that the face is the Fornarina's child's. What is certain is that the painter meant the strangeness — the Florentine Madonnas' smiling infants were available to him and he did not use them — and that the Child's gravity, with the Virgin's anxious gaze, is what makes the picture more than a vision of beauty: it is a vision of a mother carrying her son towards what they both, in some way, foresee. That foresight is the picture's gravity, and the reason the Romantics, who came to it for beauty, found something sterner than they expected — and went on looking. The picture has been looked at, since 1754, more than any other Raphael, and it has not been used up. Nor has Dresden's pride in it: the city that lost most of its centre in 1945 got its Madonna back, and treats her accordingly. She hangs alone, at the end of the gallery's enfilade, in a room built to her measure.

A drawing in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm: God blessing Noah after the Flood — the covenant subject of the Eliodoro ceiling's Apparition to Noah (Q3620832) and the Loggia's Noah bays — catalogued under Raphael. The composition's kinship with the workshop's two painted treatments makes the sheet, at minimum, a document of the design-family; its precise place — study, record, derivation — is unestablished. Listed on the Stockholm group's footing; the subject's presence in three media (ceiling, loggia, sheet) is a small instance of how the enterprise's inventions circulated internally, every design a renewable resource.

The fresco

The second wall of the Stanza d'Eliodoro, about 500 by 660 cm, painted around the room's window in 1512: the miracle of 1263, in which a Bohemian priest who doubted the doctrine of transubstantiation saw, as he said Mass at Bolsena, the Host bleed onto the corporal — the event that gave rise to the feast of Corpus Christi and to the relic venerated at Orvieto. The composition is organised around the window, which occupies the lower centre: above it, on a raised platform reached by steps, the altar stands under a canopy, and the priest, kneeling, holds the bleeding Host while the acolytes and the congregation react; at the left, on the steps, a crowd of the faithful — women, children, men craning to see — in agitated poses; at the right, Julius II kneels at a prie-dieu, calm, in his white and gold, attended by cardinals behind him (Raffaele Riario and Tommaso Riario among them) and, on the steps below, by the Swiss Guard — a group of five guardsmen in their striped uniforms, kneeling and standing, who look on with grave attention. The architecture is a marble screen with a view of sky; the light falls from the left.

The subject and its use

The Bolsena miracle was an Umbrian story — Orvieto's cathedral was built to house the bloodstained corporal — and Julius, who had visited Orvieto on his way to war in 1506 and venerated the relic, chose it for the room as the second of his four protections: the Church defended in its sacrament against doubt. The Pope's kneeling presence, facing the priest across the altar, is an act of witness and a claim: the successor of Peter sees the miracle that confirms the doctrine, and the French and the Pisan schismatics are, by implication, the doubters. His calm, against the agitation of the crowd at the left, is the composition's moral.

The composition and the window

The window presented a problem — it is off-centre, and it cuts the lower part of the wall — and Raphael's solution is among the most admired pieces of design in the Stanze: he raised the altar onto a platform above the window, made the window's arch the base of the platform, and disposed the two groups on steps at either side that descend from the altar to the floor, so that the wall reads as a single architectural stage with the window as its base. The left-hand group is agitated, turning, pressing forward; the right-hand group is still — the Pope, the cardinals, the guards — and the contrast is the picture: doubt and faith, commotion and certainty, on the two sides of the miracle. The priest, at the centre top, kneels with his back half-turned and the Host in his hand, and the bleeding corporal is the small white-and-red point on which the composition turns, as the Host is in the Disputa.

The Swiss Guard

The group of Swiss guardsmen at the lower right is the most famous passage in the fresco and one of the most famous in Raphael's work: five men in the striped red, yellow and blue of the new papal guard (founded by Julius in 1506), kneeling and standing on the steps, seen from behind and in profile, painted in broad, saturated colour with a freedom — the stripes laid in with a full brush, the faces modelled in warm light — that is the most Venetian thing in the Stanze. They are portraits, or studies from the guards themselves; the one at the right, kneeling with his halberd, looking across at the Pope, is among the great figures of Renaissance fresco. The group has been called the first passage of pure colore in Roman painting, and its influence on the Venetians who later saw it — and on every painter of soldiers since — is direct.

Colour and technique

The Bolsena is the most richly coloured of the Stanze walls: the Pope's white and gold, the cardinals' red, the guards' stripes, the crowd's reds and greens at the left, against the grey-white marble and the blue sky, in a harmony that the restoration of the 2000s recovered after centuries of darkening. The technique is buon fresco in giornate, with the usual secco additions; the guards were painted in a few large giornate, which accounts for their breadth. Drawings survive in Oxford and elsewhere for the crowd at the left and for the Pope's group.

Reception

The Bolsena has always been prized for its colour and its guards; Vasari described the Swiss "in their liveries" and the Pope "with such reverence that he seems alive"; the Venetians — Titian, who saw the Stanze in 1545, and his followers — took the guards as evidence that Raphael could colour; the Academies cited the wall's management of the window as a model of design. Among modern writers it has been the exhibit for the argument that Raphael's Roman colour owed something to Sebastiano and Venice, and for the counter-argument that he arrived at it himself. It is, in any case, the wall in the Stanze where the painter's pleasure in paint is most evident, and where the visitor, tired of iconography, can simply look.

The Riario cardinals and the court

The cardinals kneeling behind the Pope are portraits — Raffaele Riario, the great builder of the Cancelleria, is the one nearest Julius, and Tommaso Riario and others have been named — and their presence makes the right-hand group a record of the Julian court at prayer, as the Disputa's lower zone records the Church and the School's the philosophers. Raphael's gift for the grave, observed portrait, which the Julius II would bring to its height a few months later, is visible here in each kneeling face; the guards below are its popular counterpart. The fresco is thus two kinds of likeness in one wall — the prelates in their dignity, the soldiers in their colour — and the combination, the Church's princes and its servants kneeling together before the miracle, is part of the wall's argument about the Church's unity in the face of doubt.

What to look at

The guards — each face, each stripe, the halberd; the Pope's profile and his hands on the prie-dieu; the priest's turned head and the Host; the woman at the left with the child on her shoulder, turning; and the steps, which make the window into a stage.

A drawing in pen over stylus in the Uffizi: the interior of the Pantheon, seen from within the rotunda — the coffered dome, the attic, the columns and aediculae of the great niche — among the earliest measured interior views of the building to survive, and a key document of Raphael's architectural study of the antique. The sheet's dating is debated (an early Roman date, c. 1506 on a first visit, or the 1510s with the antiquities survey); its purpose is plain: the Pantheon was the touchstone of the centralised architecture Raphael pursued from the Marriage of the Virgin's temple to the Chigi Chapel — itself a small Pantheon — and the drawing is the study behind that lineage. That he chose the building for his tomb closes the circle: the draughtsman of this sheet lies in the monument it records, beneath the second aedicule on the left. The drawing is reproduced in every account of Renaissance architectural draughtsmanship; the original is shown in the Uffizi's rotations.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 82 by 61 cm, in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti: a young woman, seen at half-length and three-quarter view, turned to the left, her dark eyes looking directly at the viewer, her dark hair parted at the centre and drawn back under a white veil that falls from the top of her head over her shoulders; she wears a white silk dress with a bodice embroidered in gold and an enormous puffed sleeve of white and gold silk, slashed and gathered, and a fine necklace with a small pendant; her right hand rests on her breast, the fingers slightly spread, and her left is lowered; the background is a plain dark grey-green. The face is oval, pale, with a slight flush in the cheeks, a straight nose, a firm mouth, and eyes of great steadiness and intelligence; the expression is composed and a little grave. The veil — the velo that gives the picture its name — is the sign of a married woman or a bride, and it has been read as the attribute of a wedding portrait.

Identity and date

The sitter is unknown. Vasari, describing a portrait by Raphael "of the woman he loved until he died," which was in the house of Matteo Botti in Florence, has led most writers to identify La Velata with that picture and the sitter with the "Fornarina" — the baker's daughter of legend — and to compare her with the half-naked woman of the Barberini Fornarina (Q153441), whose features she is thought to share; the comparison is suggestive and not conclusive, and the picture's character — a grand, formal, fully dressed portrait — argues for a lady of standing rather than a mistress. The date is usually placed around 1512–16: the handling, broader than the Florentine portraits and close to the Castiglione (c. 1514–15), and the costume, of the Roman fashion of the mid-1510s, point to the middle Roman years. The picture was in the Botti collection in Florence by the mid-sixteenth century, passed to the Medici (Cosimo II bought the Botti pictures in 1619) and has been in the Pitti since.

The portrait

La Velata is the greatest of Raphael's female portraits and one of the greatest of the Renaissance, and its greatness is of a particular kind: it is a portrait in which the painter's attention is divided, equally and without strain, between the face and the dress — between a person and a piece of silk — and in which the two are made one image. The sleeve is the most famous passage: a great puff of white silk, slashed to show gold, gathered at the elbow, painted with a breadth and a freedom of brush — the folds laid in with loaded strokes, the highlights dragged, the shadows glazed — that had no precedent in Raphael's work and few in anyone's before Titian; it has been called Venetian, and it is at least the most painterly thing he had done. But the face above it is painted with the opposite care — the modelling soft and exact, the eyes drawn with the precision of the Doni portraits, the mouth firm — and the veil, a film of white over the dark hair, mediates between the two: the woman is both the face and the silk, and the picture's subject is her composure in the midst of her splendour.

The pose is the Florentine three-quarter with one hand — the Gravida's hand on the breast, the Doni hands — brought to Roman scale, and the background, plain and dark, is the Muta's; the portrait stands at the end of the line that runs from the Lady with a Unicorn through La Muta and makes it monumental. The gaze — direct, steady, unsmiling — is the Muta's gaze enlarged, and it gives the picture its presence: this is a woman who is looking at the painter as hard as he is looking at her, and who is not troubled by the exchange.

Technique and condition

The picture is on canvas — unusual for Raphael's portraits, most of which are on panel — and the canvas's texture is part of the handling's breadth. The ground is a thin priming; the underdrawing is summary; the paint of the dress is thick and free, with impasto in the highlights of the sleeve, and the flesh is modelled in soft, warm gradations with glazes; the background is thinly painted. The picture was cleaned in the 1980s and again for the exhibitions of the 2010s, and it is in excellent condition; the sleeve's whites and golds have their original brilliance, and the veil's transparency is intact.

Reception

La Velata has been, since it entered the Pitti, one of the most admired portraits in Florence and, since the nineteenth century, one of the most famous of Raphael's works — the image of the Roman lady, grave and splendid, that every account of his portraiture reproduces. The Fornarina legend attached itself to the picture in the Romantic period and has coloured its reception since: Ingres painted "Raphael and the Fornarina" with La Velata's face; the Victorians saw in her the painter's beloved; the twentieth century, more cautious, treated her as a sitter and the picture as a demonstration of what Raphael could do with silk. Among scholars it has been the exhibit for the "Venetian" breadth of Raphael's middle Roman manner and for his sense of the sitter as a social being; among painters it has been the model — for Ingres, for Sargent, for every painter of a woman in white — of how to paint a sleeve. It hangs in the Pitti's Sala di Giove, near the Castiglione's companion pictures, and it was the centrepiece, with the Fornarina, of the Roman exhibition of 2020, where the two were hung side by side for the first time in centuries and the question of their sitter was, again, not settled.

What to look at

The sleeve — every fold of it; the veil where it crosses the forehead and falls over the shoulder; the hand on the breast, with its spread fingers; the pendant at the throat; the eyes; and the edge of the face against the dark, which is drawn with the precision of the Florentine years inside the breadth of the Roman ones.

The Fornarina question

The question of La Velata's identity has dominated her literature, and it is worth setting out. Vasari's two sentences — that Raphael "made a portrait of the woman he loved, which is now in Florence in the house of Matteo Botti" and, elsewhere, that he loved "a woman" until his death — are the only early evidence; the identification of the Botti picture with La Velata rests on the Botti-Medici provenance, which is sound, and on the sitter's beauty, which is a matter of taste. The further identification of the woman with the "Fornarina" — Margherita Luti, the baker's daughter of Trastevere — is a seventeenth-century elaboration, and the comparison with the Barberini Fornarina (Q153441) turns on a resemblance of features (the dark eyes, the oval face, the hairline) that some see clearly and others not at all. What the picture itself says is that its sitter was a lady: the costume — white silk, gold embroidery, the great sleeve, the pearl — is the dress of a woman of wealth and standing, and the veil is the veil of marriage or betrothal; the portrait is formal, public and grand, not an intimate likeness of a mistress. The 2020 Rome exhibition hung La Velata and the Fornarina side by side and left visitors to judge; most found the two faces alike, and the question where it was. It may be that the same woman sat for both, once dressed and once not; it may be that the resemblance is the type — the Roman beauty Raphael painted for a decade; the pictures do not tell.

The sleeve

The sleeve deserves its own paragraph, because it is the passage on which the picture's reputation as "painterly" rests. It is a manica of the Roman fashion of the 1510s — a great puffed upper sleeve of white silk, slashed to show the gold lining, gathered at the elbow into a tighter lower sleeve — and Raphael painted it as no one had painted silk before him: the folds laid in with loaded strokes of white and grey, the highlights dragged across the ridges, the slashes and the gold glazed over the white, the shadows in thin warm glazes, the whole built up in a dozen layers so that the fabric seems to have volume and weight and to catch the light as silk does. Titian's sleeves, Rubens's, Van Dyck's, Sargent's — the whole tradition of the painted sleeve — descend from this one; and its presence in a portrait by the painter whom the Academies made the champion of disegno against colore is the standing refutation of that opposition. Raphael could paint like a Venetian when he wished; here he wished.

Botti, the Medici and the Pitti

Matteo Botti was a Florentine merchant and courtier who owned, in the mid-sixteenth century, a small collection of Raphaels — La Velata, the Madonna dell'Impannata and others — which Cosimo II de' Medici bought in 1619; the pictures went to the Pitti, and La Velata has hung there since, first in the grand-ducal apartments and then in the Palatina's rooms. Its position in the Sala di Giove, away from the main Raphael room, has kept it slightly apart from the Madonnas and the Doni portraits, which is perhaps right: it is a picture of a different order, and it holds its wall alone.

Technique, again, and what the restoration showed

The Pitti's cleaning of the 1980s and the examinations of the 2010s — infrared, X-ray, pigment analysis — clarified the picture's making. The canvas is a fine weave, primed thinly; the underdrawing is minimal, a few lines for the face and the edge of the veil; the flesh was painted first, in thin layers of a warm mid-tone with cooler half-lights and glazed shadows, the eyes and mouth drawn with a small brush at the last; the dress was painted over a pale underlayer, the white silk in lead white with grey and warm glazes, the gold embroidery in lead-tin yellow and ochre over the white, the sleeve's highlights in pure white impasto applied last; the background, a thin grey-green, was laid in around the figure. There are no significant pentimenti — the picture was painted, it seems, at a stretch and with certainty. The veil's transparency is achieved by a scumble of white over the dark hair and the grey ground, so thin that the hair reads through it. The handling is, in short, that of a painter in full command of oil on canvas, and the picture's Venetian look is not a borrowing but a mastery: Raphael had learned what the medium could do, and here he did it. The picture's place in the Pitti, among Raphaels that are mostly on panel, makes the difference of support visible: the Velata's surface has a grain and a breadth that the Granduca's and the Seggiola's enamelled panels do not, and the contrast is part of what the room teaches. It is the portrait in which Raphael comes closest to Titian, and the one Titian, who saw it in Florence in 1545, would have understood best. It was lent to Rome in 2020 and hung beside the Fornarina; the two women, one dressed and one not, faced the crowds together, and the room was the exhibition's most visited. What the pairing showed, beyond the question of the sitter, was the range of Raphael's handling in a single decade: the Velata's silk, painted with the brush loaded, and the Fornarina's flesh, painted with it dry; the one a public image, the other a private one; and in both the same eyes. Whether or not they are the same woman, they are the same painter at the two poles of his art, and the room made that plain. It is the best argument, in paint, against the old opposition of drawing and colour.

A panel, 158 by 125 cm, in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti: the Virgin, seated at the centre, receives the naked Christ Child from Saint Elizabeth, who sits at the left holding him under the arms; a young woman — Saint Catherine, or the Magdalen, or an unnamed saint — stands behind, looking on; at the right the infant Baptist, seated on a rock, points at the Child and looks out at the viewer; behind, a window covered with a cloth — the impannata, the oiled-linen window covering of Italian houses, which gives the picture its name — and a landscape at the right. The picture was painted, Vasari says, for Bindo Altoviti, the Florentine banker in Rome whom Raphael also portrayed (Q2528106), and it passed to the Medici in the sixteenth century; it has been in the Pitti since. It is usually dated around 1513–14, in the middle Roman years, and its execution has long been recognised as largely the workshop's — Giulio Romano and Penni have been named — on Raphael's design, with the master's hand in parts; the drawings for it, in Windsor, Berlin and elsewhere, show the composition changing (an early version had a second child in place of the Baptist, and the Baptist himself was added late), and the finished picture's rather heavy, crowded quality reflects the collaboration. Its interest is as a document of the Roman workshop's production of large Holy Families for private patrons — the type that the Prado's late Holy Families would develop — and of the changes a composition underwent between Raphael's drawings and the assistants' panel; the infant Baptist, pointing out at us, is the picture's best passage and the one most likely to be Raphael's own. The impannata itself — the cloth-covered window, painted as a luminous screen behind the figures — is a domestic detail without parallel in his work, and it gives the picture's light its soft diffusion. The panel was restored in the 1980s; it hangs in the Pitti's Sala di Ulisse, less visited than the Sala di Saturno, and is among the Pitti Raphaels that the public passes. The drawings for the picture deserve a word, since they are the best evidence of its making: the Windsor sheet shows the group with a second infant in the Baptist's place; a Berlin sheet develops Elizabeth's gesture; a study in the British Museum is for the young woman behind; and the sequence shows the composition being altered in the shop, the Baptist introduced as a late idea and the group enlarged to fill the panel. The picture is a document of a process — Raphael's design, passed to the assistants and changed in passing — that the Prado's Late Raphael exhibition made the centre of its argument about the late workshop. The panel's size — over a metre and a half high — is unusual for a Holy Family, and it suggests a chapel or a palace wall rather than a bedchamber; Bindo Altoviti's Roman house, where Vasari saw it, was one of the city's richest. Bindo's taste — he also owned the Raphael portrait of himself now in Washington — was for the Roman Raphael at scale.

The picture

A tondo, 71 cm in diameter, oil on panel, in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti: the Virgin, seated in a chair whose turned and gilded post is visible at the left — the seggiola that gives the picture its name — holds the Christ Child on her lap, her arms wrapped round him, her cheek pressed to his head, her body turned towards the viewer and her eyes meeting ours; the Child, plump and heavy, sits across her lap with his back half-turned to us, his head against her breast, looking out with a sidelong glance; at the right the infant Baptist, with his reed cross, presses in with his hands joined, looking up at them; the background is dark. The Virgin wears a green shawl with a fringe over a red dress and a blue mantle, and a striped silk scarf wound round her head like a turban; the Child wears a shift of gold; the whole is a knot of three bodies, wound tightly into the circle.

History

The picture's early history is unknown — it was presumably painted in Rome around 1513–14 for a private patron, perhaps Leo X himself, and it is first recorded in the Medici collections in the later sixteenth century; it passed to the Pitti with the grand-ducal pictures, was taken to Paris in 1799 and returned in 1815, and has been in the Pitti since. The legend that Raphael painted it on the lid of a wine-barrel, having seen a peasant mother and her children and having no other support to hand, is a nineteenth-century fable, of the kind that attached itself to the Fornarina stories; Gombrich's essay of 1955 on the picture — his Charlton Lecture, reprinted in Norm and Form — used the legend as a point of departure for an account of how the composition was actually arrived at, through the long study of the tondo problem, and it is the best thing written on it.

The circle

The Madonna della Seggiola is the most perfect of Raphael's tondi and, for many, the most perfect tondo ever painted: a composition that does not merely fit the circle but is a circle — the figures wound round each other and round the frame so that the round form seems to have been generated from within. The Virgin's body, turning towards us, her arms round the Child, her head bent to his; the Child's body, turned the other way, his head against her breast; the Baptist pressing in from the right — the three make a spiral that turns into the picture, and every line in it, the curve of the Virgin's back, the Child's rounded limbs, the fringe of the shawl, the chair's post, follows the circle. Wölfflin's analysis is the classic one: the figures fill the round as if it had been shaped to them, and the slight compression — the Virgin's knee pressed against the frame, the Child's foot at the bottom — gives the picture a fullness, a sense of contained energy, that no rectangular Madonna has. The dark background, which has never been questioned here as it has in the Granduca, throws the group forward; the chair's post, at the left, is the only straight line, and it anchors the spiral.

The Virgin and the Child

The Virgin of the Seggiola is unlike any other of Raphael's: not the idealised Roman type but a woman of the people, with a broad face, dark eyes, a direct gaze and the striped scarf of a Roman contadina wound round her head — a Trastevere mother, the nineteenth century said, and the Fornarina legend attached itself to her too. She holds the Child not with the formal tenderness of the Florentine Madonnas but with a grip — both arms wrapped round him, her cheek on his head — and she looks at us over his head with an expression that is possessive, protective, almost wary. The Child is the heaviest and most physical of Raphael's infants — plump, tousled, his back to us, his cheek squashed against his mother, his sidelong look out of the picture half-curious and half-sullen; he is, for once, simply a baby, and the picture's tenderness is in that. The Baptist, pressing in with joined hands and upturned face, is the adoring third, and his cross, at the right edge, is the one sign of what the embrace means.

Colour and technique

The colour is the richest of Raphael's Madonnas — the green shawl with its fringe, the red dress, the blue mantle, the gold of the Child's shift, the striped scarf — against the dark, in a harmony that is warm and saturated and has been called, like the Velata's sleeve, Venetian; the light falls from the left on the Virgin's face and the Child's body, and the modelling is full and soft. The panel is in the fluent oil of the middle Roman years, over a white ground, with a summary underdrawing (infrared has shown small changes in the Child's position) and a broad, confident handling; the surface is in excellent condition, cleaned in the twentieth century, and the picture is among the best preserved of Raphael's panels. The chair's post, turned and gilded, is painted with the same care as the figures; it is a real chair of the period, and its presence — a piece of furniture in a devotional image — is part of the picture's domesticity.

Drawings

Few drawings for the Seggiola survive — a sheet at Lille has been connected with it, and a study of a seated woman with a child in the British Museum — but Gombrich's essay showed how the composition grew from the tondo studies of the Florentine years (the Terranuova, the Holy Family with the Palm) and the Alba, and how the final spiral was the solution to a problem the painter had been working at for a decade: the "norm" of the classical tondo was not given but found.

Reception

The Madonna della Seggiola has been, since it entered the Pitti, one of the best-loved pictures in Florence and, through reproduction, one of the most familiar images in the world: engraved by Raphael Morghen in 1793 in a print that sold by the tens of thousands, copied for every provincial gallery and convent (the British copies listed in Wikidata — at Lambeth Palace, Glasgow, Brighton, Exeter, Dover, Armagh, Towneley Hall, the V&A — are a sample of hundreds), photographed by Alinari, reproduced on every kind of object; it was, with the Sistine Madonna, the nineteenth century's Raphael. Its popularity told against it in the twentieth — the sentimentalists had loved it too well — and it took Gombrich's essay, and the formalists' analysis of its circle, to restore it to serious regard; it is now valued both as the supreme tondo and as the Madonna in which Raphael came closest to painting a mother and child as they are. It hangs in the Pitti's Sala di Saturno, in the company of the Granduca, La Velata and the Doni portraits; it was lent to Rome in 2020, and it is, of all the Pitti's Raphaels, the one that visitors stand in front of longest.

What to look at

The spiral: follow the Virgin's back from the chair-post round to her bent head, down the Child's body to his foot, and round again; the Virgin's eyes, over the Child's head; the Child's sidelong glance; the striped scarf; the fringe of the shawl; the Baptist's joined hands; and the chair-post, which is the one thing in the picture that does not curve.

Gombrich's essay

Gombrich's Charlton Lecture of 1955, Raphael's Madonna della Sedia, is worth summarising because it changed how the picture is seen. He began with the legends — the wine-barrel, the peasant mother, the Fornarina — and asked why a picture of such perfection should have attracted stories that make it an accident; his answer was that the legends express, in narrative form, the intuition that the picture looks found rather than made — that its composition seems inevitable, as if it had always existed. He then showed, through the tondo studies of the Florentine years and the Alba, that the inevitability was the result of a long labour: the classical "norm" that the Seggiola embodies was not a starting point but an achievement, arrived at by trial and rejection over a decade. The essay's larger argument — that classical art's apparent effortlessness is always won — is the best single statement of what Raphael's whole career demonstrates, and the Seggiola is its text.

The Roman Madonna and the people

The Seggiola's Virgin has been called a Trastevere mother, and the description, though romantic, points to something real. Raphael's Roman Madonnas of 1512–14 — the Seggiola, the Tenda, the Candelabra, the Impannata's Elizabeth — share a type that is broader, darker, more physical than the Florentine ideal: the striped scarf wound round the head, the full face, the direct gaze, the heavy arms; and the type has been traced to the Roman women of the period as the painter saw them in the streets of the Borgo, and to the Roman portrait sculpture he was studying. Whether or not a particular woman sat for the Seggiola, its Virgin is a Roman woman, and the picture's power — its sense of a real embrace, a real child, a real chair — comes from that. It is the Madonna in which the ideal and the observed are most completely one, and it is no accident that it was the one the nineteenth century, which wanted its Madonnas human, loved best.

Morghen's print

Raphael Morghen's engraving of 1793, made in Florence for the Grand Duke and sold throughout Europe, was the instrument of the picture's fame: one of the most successful reproductive prints ever published, it put the Seggiola into every drawing room that aspired to taste, and it fixed the image — the round, the embrace, the scarf — in the visual memory of the century. The painted copies followed; the photographic reproductions of the later nineteenth century multiplied it further; and by 1900 the Madonna della Seggiola was, with the Sistine, the most familiar of all Raphael's works and among the most familiar of all pictures. Its subsequent eclipse in critical esteem was the price of that familiarity; its recovery, through Gombrich and the formalists, was the recognition that a picture can survive its own popularity.

The chair

The seggiola itself deserves its sentence. It is a chair of the type called a sedia camerale — a papal chamber chair, with a turned and gilded post and a red velvet seat — of the kind used in the Vatican apartments, and its presence in the picture has been taken as evidence that the tondo was painted for Leo X or his household, perhaps for the papal apartments themselves; the chair's post, the only straight and gilded element in the composition, is painted with a precision that suggests a real object observed. Whether or not the Pope commissioned the picture, the chair places the Virgin in a palace rather than a cottage, and the Trastevere reading of the Virgin sits oddly with it — which is perhaps the point: a woman of the people in a chair of state, holding the Child like any mother. The picture's domesticity and its grandeur are both in that chair. It is also the one object in the tondo that can be dated by itself: chairs of this pattern were made for the Vatican in the 1510s, and the picture's date of c. 1513–14, inferred from style, is confirmed by its furniture. Nothing else in Raphael's Madonnas is so exactly of its place and year, and nothing else has travelled so far from it. It was painted, by the best guess, for a pope; it has hung, in reproduction, in a million parlours; and it has lost nothing in the journey. The Pitti hangs it at eye level, which is right; it is a picture that looks back, and one should be able to meet its eye — the Virgin's, over the Child's head, watchful and calm — at the height she painted it.

A panel, 65.7 by 51.3 cm, in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich: the Virgin, seated at three-quarter length before a curtain — the tenda that names the picture — holds the Christ Child on her lap, her cheek close to his head, her eyes lowered; the Child, seated across her lap, turns to look at the infant Baptist, who stands at the right with his hands joined; the curtain, green, falls behind them; the light falls from the left. The composition is a variant of the Madonna della Seggiola's (Q966681), made at about the same time — the same embrace, the same turning Child, the same Baptist at the right, in a rectangle instead of a circle and before a curtain instead of a dark ground — and it is generally regarded as a workshop production on Raphael's design, with the master's participation in the Virgin's head; Giulio Romano has been proposed for the execution. The picture was in the Escorial in the seventeenth century, passed to England, and was bought by Ludwig I of Bavaria in 1819 for his new gallery; it has been in Munich since, with the Canigiani and the Tempi. The Virgin's face, with its lowered eyes and its striped scarf, is close to the Seggiola's, and the picture's interest lies in the comparison: the same group, stated once in the round by Raphael and once in the rectangle by his shop, and the difference — the Seggiola's spiral against the Tenda's frieze — is the difference between the master's composition and its transcription. The handling is the fuller oil of the workshop's Roman manner; the curtain and the Baptist are summary, the Virgin's head careful. The panel was restored in the twentieth century and is in good condition. It has Wikipedia articles in eight languages, which places it among the documented works; it deserves its place as the Seggiola's sibling. The Escorial provenance is of interest: the Tenda was one of the Raphaels the Spanish Habsburgs acquired in the seventeenth century, and its export to England and sale to Bavaria in the Napoleonic years were part of the great movement of Spanish royal pictures northward; the Alte Pinakothek's Raphaels — the Canigiani, the Tempi, the Tenda — came from Düsseldorf, Florence and the Escorial respectively, and they show the three types of the oeuvre — the Florentine Holy Family, the Florentine Madonna, the Roman workshop Madonna — in one room. The Tenda is the least of the three and the most instructive. The green curtain behind the figures — the tenda — is the device that the Seggiola omits and the Impannata transforms into a window; its presence here, flat and decorative, shows how the workshop translated the master's dark ground into something it could paint. The Munich panel was cleaned in the 1990s; the curtain's green recovered, and the Virgin's head proved finer than the catalogue had allowed. It is a picture to see after the Seggiola, not before. Munich shows it so. The Baptist at the right, pressing in with his hands joined, is the workshop's; the Virgin's head is the one passage where the master looked over the assistant's shoulder.

A tondo, 65.7 by 64 cm, oil on panel, in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore: the Virgin, seated at half-length, holds the Christ Child on her lap, her head inclined to his, her eyes lowered; he looks out; at either side, behind them, a candelabrum — a tall standing candlestick of gilt metal, of the kind that stood on Roman altars — and at the edges the heads of two angels, cut by the frame; the background is dark. The picture takes its name from the candelabra, which have been read as a reference to the altar and thus to the Child as the Eucharist, and which were, according to some, added by another hand; the composition is a workshop production of the middle Roman years, around 1513–14, on Raphael's design and with, perhaps, his hand in the Virgin's head, and it has been attributed variously to Raphael, to Raphael and Giulio Romano, and to the workshop. It was in the Borghese collection in Rome, then in England (the Lucca, Bridgewater and Munro collections), and was bought by Henry Walters in 1901; it has been in Baltimore since. The Virgin's type — the full face, the striped scarf, the lowered eyes — is that of the Seggiola and the Tenda, and the picture belongs with them to the group of Roman Madonnas of 1513–14 in which the master's design was multiplied by the shop; the angels at the edges, cut by the circle, are a device the Sistine Madonna's cloud of faces had made possible. The handling is the workshop's, fuller and smoother than Raphael's own; the Child, looking out with a grave face, is the picture's best passage. The Walters shows it as Raphael and workshop; it is the only Raphael-circle tondo in an American museum, and it has Wikipedia articles in eight languages. Its condition is good; the candelabra, whoever painted them, are intact. Henry Walters bought the tondo from the Munro collection's dispersal, as a Raphael, in the confident years of American collecting; the attribution was questioned soon after, and the Walters' own scholarship in the later twentieth century settled on 'Raphael and workshop.' The picture's relation to the Seggiola — the same Virgin, the same scarf, the same embrace, in a tondo of similar size — is close enough to suggest that it was designed as a companion or a variant for another patron; the angels at the edges and the candelabra are what distinguish it, and they give it an altar-like formality the Seggiola does not have. It is shown in Baltimore among the Walters' Italian pictures, near the Baltimore Museum's Emilia Pia across town — the city's two Raphaels, a portrait and a Madonna, a decade and a workshop apart. The tondo's composition — the Virgin's head inclined to the Child's, the Child looking out — was copied at Baltimore by the Walters' own restorers for study, and the copy is a lesson in how hard the master's Virgin is to reproduce: the shop could not quite do it either.

A panel transferred to canvas, 215 by 158 cm, in the Prado, Madrid: the Virgin, enthroned under a green curtain at the right, holds the Christ Child on her lap; at the left the archangel Raphael presents the young Tobias, who kneels holding the fish — the fish whose gall cured his father's blindness, in the Book of Tobit — and looks up; at the right Saint Jerome, in his cardinal's red, kneels with an open book, his lion at his feet, and reads; the Child turns to the left towards Tobias and the angel while reaching with his other hand towards Jerome's book; the Virgin looks down at Tobias. The picture was painted around 1513–14 for the chapel of the Del Duca family in San Domenico at Naples, where it was an ex-voto for the cure of eye disease (Tobias's fish was the remedy); it was taken by the Spanish viceroy in 1638 and sent to Philip IV, who placed it in the Escorial; it passed to the Prado in the nineteenth century. It is signed neither, and its execution is shared: the design is Raphael's, the Virgin and Child and the angel are of his quality, and Jerome and the curtain have been given to the workshop — Giulio Romano, or Penni.

The Madonna of the Fish is the first of the Roman sacre conversazioni of the middle years — the first altarpiece after the Foligno to set the Virgin enthroned on earth among saints, in the Florentine manner — and it is the most graceful of them. The composition is asymmetric: the throne at the right, the angel and Tobias entering from the left, Jerome kneeling at the right edge; the curtain, drawn across the upper right, closes the space on one side and the landscape opens on the other; the Child, turning one way and reaching the other, binds the two groups. The angel Raphael — the painter's name-saint, and a figure of great beauty, with his spread wings and his hand on Tobias's shoulder — is the picture's most admired passage, and the young Tobias, kneeling with the fish and looking up, is of the tenderness of the Florentine Baptists; Jerome, with his book and his lion, is the grand old man of the Disputa's Doctors. The Virgin is the Roman type, grave and full, her head inclined; the Child, turning, is of the Foligno's family.

The picture's transfer to canvas, in Paris in the Napoleonic years (it went to France in 1813 and returned in 1822), flattened the surface somewhat, and the workshop passages are drier than the master's; but the angel, Tobias and the Virgin and Child are well preserved, and the colour — the Virgin's red and blue, the angel's violet and green, Jerome's red, the green curtain — is rich. A drawing for the composition, in pen, is in the Uffizi; a study for Tobias in the British Museum.

The Madonna of the Fish was famous in Naples and in the Escorial, where it was one of the Spanish Habsburgs' prized Raphaels, and it has been in the Prado's Raphael room since the museum's foundation, with the Cardinal, the Spasimo and the late Holy Families; among them it is the gentlest, and the angel with Tobias has been the favourite of Spanish painters — Murillo's angels descend from it. It is a picture of healing, painted for a family that hoped for one, and its tenderness is the tenderness of a votive.

The workshop question in the Madonna of the Fish is instructive because the division is so legible. The angel and Tobias — the left-hand group — are painted with the full softness and precision of Raphael's own hand: the angel's face, the wing's feathers, the boy's upturned eyes and the fish in his hands are of the Foligno's quality; the Virgin and Child are his in design and largely in execution; Jerome, at the right, is heavier, his red robe and his lion painted with a drier, more schematic touch that the Prado's technical examination has associated with Giulio Romano; and the curtain and the landscape are the shop's. The picture thus shows, on one panel, the master and his principal assistant side by side — the first clear instance of the collaboration that the late altarpieces would make standard — and the Prado's 2012 exhibition used it as an exhibit for that argument. What is remarkable is how little the division disturbs the whole: the composition's grace holds the two hands together, which is the point of a workshop run by a designer.

The Neapolitan commission places the picture in the circle of the Spanish viceroyalty and its Dominican church; San Domenico Maggiore, where it stood, was the church of Thomas Aquinas's order in Naples and the burial place of the Aragonese kings, and the Del Duca chapel's ex-voto — a cure for blindness, with Tobias's fish and Jerome's learning as the two remedies, bodily and spiritual — was a characteristic piece of devotional logic. The viceroy's removal of the picture in 1638, over the Dominicans' protests, to send to Philip IV was of a piece with the Borghese's removal of the Deposition: the powerful took the Raphaels, and the churches kept copies. The Prado's, in its room with the Cardinal and the Spasimo, has been the museum's Raphael altarpiece since 1819. A copy remained in San Domenico at Naples, where the chapel's dedication to the cure of the eyes survived the original's removal; the Neapolitans, like the Perugians, kept the copy and the grievance. The Prado's Madonna of the Fish was restored in the 1990s and shown in the 2012 Late Raphael exhibition, where it opened the sequence of the late altarpieces and the argument about the workshop; it was, in that context, the picture that showed how the collaboration began — gently, with the angel in the master's hand and the saint in the pupil's. It remains the gentlest of the Prado's Raphaels and the one Spanish visitors have loved longest. The angel Raphael, the painter's namesake, leading the boy with the fish, is the passage they come back to.

A panel, about 72 by 56 cm (Wikidata's dimensions are reversed), formerly in the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków, missing since 1945: a young man, seen at half-length and three-quarter view, seated with one arm resting on a ledge, in a fur-lined coat over a white shirt and a wide-brimmed hat over long hair, looking at the viewer with an expression of calm, slightly arrogant ease; behind, a landscape seen through a window. The picture — the most famous lost Raphael — was bought in Venice in 1798 by Princess Izabela Czartoryska, who formed at Puławy the first Polish museum; it hung with Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine and Rembrandt's Landscape with the Good Samaritan as the "three great pictures" of the Czartoryski collection, in Paris during the Polish exile and in Kraków from 1876; in 1939 it was seized by the Germans, taken to Hans Frank's residence at Wawel and then to his house in Bavaria, and it vanished in the chaos of 1945; it has not been seen since, and the Polish government keeps it on the list of losses and an empty frame in the museum. It is known from black-and-white photographs and from copies.

The portrait has been identified as a self-portrait — the young man's features have been compared with the Uffizi Self-portrait and the figure in the School of Athens — and as a portrait of Francesco Maria della Rovere, or of Bindo Altoviti, or of a Roman humanist; none is certain, and the picture's attribution to Raphael, while generally accepted from the photographs, could not be confirmed by examination. Its date, around 1513–14, is given by its style — the breadth of the handling in the fur and the shirt, the ease of the pose, are of the Velata's moment — and its composition — the seated figure with the arm on the ledge, the hat, the window — is among the most relaxed of Raphael's portraits, an image of a young man at his ease that anticipates the Bindo Altoviti.

The loss is among the heaviest in the history of Raphael's oeuvre — the only major portrait to have disappeared in modern times — and it has generated a literature of its own: reports of sightings, claims of rediscovery (none substantiated), and a continuing Polish campaign for its return, which has made the empty frame in Kraków a symbol. The photographs show a picture of high quality: the face soft and luminous, the fur painted with breadth, the hand on the ledge drawn with Raphael's precision. Whoever the young man was, he has become, in absence, one of the best-known faces in the painter's work. The Wikidata item, which records it as a "lost painting," is correct; the Czartoryski Museum keeps its place.

The picture's history is a compressed history of Poland. Izabela Czartoryska bought it in Venice in 1798, during the partitions, for the "Temple of Memory" she built at Puławy to house the relics of the nation's past and the masterpieces that would dignify them; the collection fled to Paris after the uprising of 1831, returned to Kraków in 1876, was hidden in 1939, and was found by the Gestapo; Hans Frank, the Governor-General, hung the Raphael, the Leonardo and the Rembrandt in his apartments at Wawel Castle and then took them to his villa at Schliersee in Bavaria, where the Leonardo and the Rembrandt were recovered in 1945 and the Raphael was not — whether stolen by a subordinate, sold, destroyed or hidden, no one knows. Reports that it survives in a private collection have surfaced periodically, most recently in the 2010s, and have not been confirmed; the Polish Ministry of Culture lists it first among the country's wartime losses, and the Czartoryski Museum, reopened in 2019 after the state's purchase of the collection, shows an empty frame in the room where the Lady with an Ermine hangs.

What the photographs show is worth recording, since they are all we have. The young man sits turned to the right, his left arm resting on a ledge or parapet, his right hand — its fingers visible — laid on his coat; the coat is fur-lined, its collar thick, and beneath it a white shirt is open at the neck; the hat, broad and soft, sits on long hair that falls to the shoulders; the face is oval, smooth, with a slight smile and a direct, self-possessed gaze; the window at the upper right shows a landscape with a building. The handling, so far as a monochrome photograph records it, was broad in the fur and the shirt, fine in the face and hand — the manner of the Velata and the Castiglione; and the composition, with its ledge and window, is the Florentine portrait formula in Roman ease. If it was a self-portrait, it is the only one in which the painter showed himself as a gentleman at leisure; if it was a sitter, he was young, rich and pleased with himself. Either way he is gone, and his absence is felt. Polish scholarship has continued to work on the picture from the photographs, and a monograph of the 2010s assembled everything known — provenance, copies, the reports of sightings — in the hope of recognition should it surface; the museum's empty frame is the most eloquent label in Kraków. If it returns, it will be the most studied Raphael of the century; until then it is the one everyone has seen in a photograph and no one alive has seen on a wall. The Czartoryski frame waits; so does the literature. It is worth adding that the young man's pose — the arm on the ledge, the body turned, the hat — was taken up by Titian in the 1520s and became a type of the Venetian portrait; whether Titian saw the picture in Venice, where Raphael's work was known through Sebastiano and through prints, or whether both derive from a common Roman source, the kinship is clear, and the lost Kraków panel stands at the head of a line that runs through the Man with a Glove to Van Dyck. Its disappearance is thus a loss to the history of portraiture as well as to Raphael's oeuvre.

A panel, 154.5 by 114 cm, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna: the Holy Family — the Virgin seated with the Child, Joseph behind, the infant Baptist at the side — in a landscape, in the manner of the Roman Holy Families of the middle years; the picture is generally regarded as a workshop production on Raphael's design, of the type of the Madonna dell'Impannata and the Prado Holy Families, and it has been attributed to Giulio Romano and Penni under Raphael's supervision. It came to Vienna with the Habsburg collections and has been in the Kunsthistorisches Museum since its foundation, where it hangs near the Madonna of the Meadow — the contrast between the two, the Florentine original and the Roman shop picture, being instructive. The Virgin's type, the Child's pose and the landscape are of the workshop's Roman manner; the composition's pyramid and the Baptist's adoration are Raphael's stock; the execution is competent and smooth. The picture has a single Wikipedia article (in Czech), which places it among the documented works; it is listed here as Wikidata lists it, with the caveat that the master's hand is at most in the design. Its interest is as a specimen of the workshop's large Holy Families, the type that the shop produced for Roman and foreign patrons in quantity from about 1513 onward, and that the late Prado pictures would bring to a higher pitch. The Habsburg provenance connects the panel with the imperial collections' acquisitions of Italian pictures in the seventeenth century, when workshop Holy Families of this type were catalogued as Raphael's and valued as such; the Kunsthistorisches Museum's own research has since placed it among the shop's works, and its hanging near the Meadow — the one unquestioned, the other a production — is an honest display of the distinction. The picture's composition, a broad pyramid with Joseph leaning in from behind and the Baptist pressing at the side, follows the Roman formula exactly; its landscape, with a town and hills, is summary; and its figures, competent and smooth, lack the inflection of the master's hand. It is, nonetheless, a large and handsome picture, and it shows what the workshop could do when it was left to itself — which is a thing worth knowing. The picture was restored in the twentieth century and is in good condition. Its Czech article — the only one Wikidata records — is a reminder that the Habsburg collections were, for a long time, catalogued and studied from Vienna and Prague, and that the workshop pictures of the Vienna gallery have a Central European literature of their own. The panel is large, handsome and anonymous, which is what the late workshop's Holy Families mostly are. Seen after the Meadow, across the room, it is a lesson in what the master's hand added — and what, without it, a design of his still retained. The design retained a good deal. That, in the end, is the argument of the late workshop: a Raphael design, competently carried out, is still more than most painters' inventions.

A detached fresco in lunette form, about 140 by 283 cm, in the Louvre (RF 48): God the Father, half-length, bearded, blessing with his right hand and holding the orb in his left, among cherubim and flanked by two adoring angels, against a sky — the type of the lunette above an altarpiece, of which the Oddi and Colonna altarpieces' upper parts are the Umbrian examples. The fresco is said to come from the chapel of the papal hunting villa of La Magliana, outside Rome, which Julius II and Leo X used and which was decorated by Raphael's workshop around 1514–16 with scenes of the martyrdom of Saint Cecilia and other subjects (the other Magliana frescoes, by Lo Spagna and others, are in the Vatican Pinacoteca); it was detached in the nineteenth century and acquired by the Louvre in 1873. The design is generally given to Raphael — the God the Father is of the type of the Disputa's and the Madonna of Foligno's, the angels of the Roman workshop's — and the execution to the workshop, with Lo Spagna or Penni proposed; the Louvre catalogues it as Raphael. It is the only fresco by or after Raphael in a French public collection, and it is displayed in the Grande Galerie above the easel pictures. The lunette's condition is fair, the detachment having flattened and abraded the surface; the figure of God, with his spread arms and heavy beard, is legible, and the angels' poses are of the graceful Roman type. It is listed by Wikidata as "fresco, painting" with French and Italian articles; the visitor will find it, if they look up, near the Belle Jardinière. The Magliana villa, on the road to Fiumicino, was Julius's favourite hunting lodge and Leo's, and its decoration in the 1510s — a chapel with scenes of Saint Cecilia and the Apostles, a loggia with the Muses, by Lo Spagna, Raphael's assistants and others — was one of the workshop's lesser commissions; the villa decayed in the nineteenth century, its frescoes were detached and dispersed, and the Louvre's lunette is the piece that travelled furthest. The God the Father's type — frontal, bearded, arms spread in blessing — is the type of the Baronci and Oddi upper registers brought to Roman scale, and the two angels who flank him are close to those of the Madonna of Foligno's glory; whether Raphael painted any of it himself is doubtful, but the design is his manner at its most official. The Louvre acquired it at a moment when the museum was building a representation of Italian fresco — the Botticelli Villa Lemmi frescoes came in 1882, the Luini lunettes in the same decade — and the Raphael-school lunette was part of that programme; it is rarely discussed, but it is the only place outside Italy where a lunette of this type, from Raphael's circle and in his idiom, can be seen in a public gallery. It deserves a label that says so. The lunette's shape — a half-circle nearly three metres wide — is the one Raphael used for the Jurisprudence wall and the Sibyls, and it was the shape of the chapel's altar-wall at La Magliana.

The fresco

The third wall of the Stanza d'Eliodoro, about 500 by 660 cm, painted around the room's second window in about 1513–14: the scene, from the Acts of the Apostles, of Peter freed from Herod's prison by an angel. The composition is in three parts, divided by the painted architecture of the prison: at the centre, above the window, the cell, seen through a barred grille — the angel, in a blaze of light, bends over the sleeping Peter and touches him to wake him, while two guards in armour slump asleep on either side; at the right, the angel leads the dazed Peter, still in his chains, past more sleeping guards down the steps and out; at the left, on the steps outside, a guard with a torch rouses his sleeping companions, who start awake under a moonlit sky with clouds. The light is the subject: the angel's radiance in the cell, the moon breaking through the clouds at the left, the torch at the left, and the dawn beginning at the right, each lighting the armour of the guards differently.

The subject and the Pope

Peter in chains was Julius's own saint — before his election he had been cardinal of San Pietro in Vincoli, the church of Peter's chains, where his tomb by Michelangelo now stands — and the story of the first pope's miraculous release was the third protection: the Church freed from its prison by God's messenger. It has also been read as a reference to Julius's own escape from the French after the battle of Ravenna in 1512, and the fresco's date — begun under Julius, perhaps finished under Leo — makes the reading plausible. Leo X, too, had been a prisoner of the French after Ravenna, and had escaped; the fresco served both popes.

The night

The Liberation of Saint Peter is the first great nocturne of Italian painting — the first large-scale picture to take the representation of light at night as its whole subject — and it has no precedent in Raphael's work or, at this scale, in anyone's. There are four sources of light: the angel's supernatural glow, which fills the cell and throws the grille's shadow across the guards; the moon, half-hidden by clouds at the upper left, casting a cold light on the steps; the torch held by the waking guard, casting a warm one; and the faint dawn at the right, behind the escaping Peter. Each light falls on armour — the polished steel of the guards' breastplates and helmets — and the reflections are painted with a precision that shows Raphael studying, for the first time, the behaviour of light on metal at night: the torch's orange on one helmet, the moon's silver on another, the angel's white on the sleeping guards' backs. The effect was unprecedented, and it was recognised as such at once; Vasari called it "a miracle of art" and described the lights one by one. The Northern painters who reached Rome in the next generation — and through them the Caravaggisti, Honthorst, La Tour — took from this wall the idea that a picture could be made of light and dark; the Baroque nocturne begins here.

The composition and the window

The window, at the centre of the wall, is the most intrusive of the room's openings, and Raphael's solution is the boldest: he made the window the base of the prison and set the cell directly above it, behind a painted grille, so that the miracle happens in a barred chamber over the real light of the room, and the two narratives — the waking at the left, the escape at the right — are placed on flights of steps that descend to the window's sill on either side. The wall is thus three pictures in one architecture, read in sequence from centre to right (the angel wakes Peter; the angel leads Peter out) and from left as counterpoint (the guards wake to find him gone). The narrative in three moments, within one frame, is a medieval device made Renaissance by the unity of the setting.

Technique

The fresco was painted in buon fresco in giornate, with the angel's glow and the highlights on the armour in secco and, the Vatican's restorers have found, with passages in oil on the wall — an experiment, following the Venetian practice Sebastiano brought to Rome, in getting the saturated darks that fresco cannot give. The experiment was not fully durable: some of the oil passages have darkened, and the wall is among the more restored in the room. The restoration of the 2000s recovered the lights and published the technical findings. Drawings for the guards are in Vienna and Florence.

Reception

The Liberation has been, since Vasari, one of the two or three most praised of all Raphael's frescoes, and the one most often cited as evidence that his range was wider than the "classical" label suggests; it is the wall that Romantic and realist painters, who had no use for the School of Athens, admired. Its influence on the Baroque nocturne is a commonplace; its influence on the Northern painters of the seventeenth century — Elsheimer, who was in Rome, and through him Rembrandt — is traceable. Modern writers have made it the exhibit for Raphael's experimental side: the painter who, having perfected the daylight assembly, turned to the night and invented a genre.

What to look at

The grille and its shadow; the angel's light on Peter's face; the sleeping guard at the left of the cell, his head fallen on his arm; the moon in the clouds; the torch-bearer and the waking guards; the dawn behind Peter at the right; and, everywhere, the armour, catching four different lights. It is best seen with the room's own window — the one under the fresco — darkened, or late in the day. The Vatican's restorers have calculated that the angel's glow and the armour's highlights were among the last passages painted, in secco and oil over the finished fresco — the light added to the night, as it were, at the end — and the fragility of those passages is why the wall has needed the most care. It repays the care: there is no other fresco of its date in which the painter's subject is so plainly the act of seeing in the dark.

A fresco, about 615 cm wide, in lunette form over the arch of the Chigi Chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Pace, Rome: four Sibyls — the Cumaean, Persian, Phrygian and Tiburtine, by the usual identification — seated and standing on either side of the arch, receiving from angels the tablets and scrolls of their prophecies of Christ, with putti and inscriptions in Greek and Latin; above them, in the upper register (painted by Timoteo Viti on Raphael's design), four Prophets. The fresco was commissioned by Agostino Chigi for the chapel he built in the church — the chapel's altar was to hold a bronze relief and a Resurrection that were never completed — and painted around 1514, in the middle Roman years; it is the most Michelangelesque of Raphael's frescoes outside the Stanze, the Sibyls being direct responses to the Sistine's, and the most graceful: the four women, turning on their seats, leaning to receive the angels' tablets, with their draperies in heavy folds and their faces of varied age, are disposed around the arch in a rhythm of curves that follows the lunette's shape, and the angels who bring them their prophecies are of the Roman workshop's most elegant type. The fresco was famous at once — Vasari says Chigi paid Raphael five hundred scudi on account and that the painter, asked for the balance, named a sum that made the banker send for a Pope's opinion; the story is probably a fable — and it was much copied and engraved; it was damaged by damp and restored in the nineteenth century, and cleaned in the 2000s, when its colour recovered. The Prophets above, by Viti, are weaker; the Sibyls are Raphael's own, and they are among the most beautiful of his seated figures — the Cumaean, old and turning, with her open book, and the young Phrygian, leaning back to the angel, especially. The chapel is the first on the right as one enters the small church near Piazza Navona; the fresco is high, in poor light, and best seen with binoculars or at the morning hour when the door is open. Its relation to the Sistine Sibyls is the classic comparison of the two painters' treatment of the same subject: Michelangelo's are colossal and solitary, Raphael's are graceful and in conversation, and the difference is the whole difference between them. The fresco's Greek and Latin inscriptions, on the Sibyls' tablets and scrolls, are the prophecies of Christ attributed to them in the medieval tradition (the Sibylline Oracles as the Renaissance read them), and they were almost certainly supplied by one of Chigi's humanists; the angel who hands the Cumaean Sibyl her tablet, leaning down with drapery flying, and the putto who holds a torch between the two central figures, are among the workshop's most graceful Roman inventions. Vasari records that Michelangelo, shown the fresco by Chigi's agent, pronounced each head worth a hundred scudi — the story is a fable, but it records the fresco's early reputation as the place where Raphael answered the Sibyls of the Sistine on Michelangelo's own terms.

The picture

A panel transferred to canvas, 220 by 136 cm, in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna: Saint Cecilia, the patron of music, stands at the centre in a gold dress, holding a small portable organ whose pipes are slipping from her hands, her face raised to the sky, where a choir of six angels sings from a book on a cloud; at her feet lie broken and discarded instruments — a viol, a tambourine, a triangle, pipes, a lute with broken strings; around her four saints: Paul at the left, leaning on his sword, deep in thought, his head bowed; John the Evangelist beside him, young, looking across at Augustine; Augustine, in bishop's robes, at the right, looking back at John; and the Magdalen at the right edge, in a grey dress with her ointment jar, looking out at the viewer. The landscape behind is plain, the sky opening above; the light falls from the left.

The commission

The altarpiece was commissioned by Elena Duglioli dall'Olio, a Bolognese noblewoman of reputed sanctity, for her chapel of Saint Cecilia in the church of San Giovanni in Monte, through the agency of Cardinal Lorenzo Pucci and his nephew Antonio, who paid; Vasari says it was painted around 1514 and sent to Bologna, and that the instruments were painted by Giovanni da Udine — the workshop's still-life specialist — and that Francesco Francia, the leading Bolognese painter, died of despair on seeing it (a fable). It stood in the chapel until 1796, when the French took it to Paris; there it was transferred to canvas; it returned in 1815 and was placed in the Bologna gallery, where it has been since.

The subject

The picture's subject is not Cecilia's martyrdom but her ecstasy — the moment, as the legend tells, when, hearing the music of heaven, she let fall the instruments of earth; the broken instruments at her feet, the slipping organ, the upturned face and the angels' choir make the story, and the four saints around her are witnesses and commentators: Paul, the theologian of the spirit, meditates; John and Augustine exchange a glance of understanding; the Magdalen, the penitent, looks at us as if to ask whether we have heard. The theme — earthly music silenced by heavenly — was a Renaissance commonplace with a neo-Platonic edge (Ficino on the music of the spheres), and it suited a patron who was herself a visionary; the picture is, in that sense, a portrait of Elena's aspiration.

The composition

The Saint Cecilia is the most static of Raphael's Roman altarpieces and, in its way, the most radical: five standing figures in a row, on a bare ground, under an open sky, with the instruments at their feet — a sacra conversazione reduced to its elements, with no throne, no architecture, no landscape to speak of, and the drama entirely in the faces and the gestures. The figures are bound by glance — Cecilia looks up, Paul down, John and Augustine at each other, the Magdalen out — so that the four directions of attention make a cross with Cecilia at its centre; the upward movement of the saint's face and the angels' choir, and the downward fall of the instruments, give the vertical; the row of figures gives the horizontal. It is a composition of great economy, and it was the model for the Bolognese sacre conversazioni of the Carracci and Reni, who had it in their city and studied it.

The figures

Cecilia, in her gold dress with its sleeves, her face raised and her hair bound, is among the most beautiful of Raphael's standing saints — the London Saint Catherine's upturned ecstasy made monumental; Paul, leaning on his sword with his brow furrowed and his mantle in heavy folds, is a grand Michelangelesque figure, the most impressive of the four; John, young and fair, and Augustine, grave in his cope, make a pair of glances; the Magdalen, turning to look at us with a faint smile, her jar in her hand, is the picture's most sensuous figure and its direct address. The angels above, singing from their book, are a choir of real grace; the instruments at the foot — Giovanni da Udine's — are a still life of precise observation, each instrument identifiable, the lute's strings broken.

Technique and condition

The picture was transferred to canvas in Paris around 1800, and the transfer, with earlier damage, has left its mark: the surface is somewhat flattened, the sky and the ground have been retouched, and the colours — the gold of Cecilia's dress, Paul's red, Augustine's blue and white — are less brilliant than they were; a restoration in the 1980s stabilised it. The handling of the figures is the broad Roman manner of 1514–16, the flesh modelled warmly, the draperies in full colour; the instruments are in Giovanni da Udine's tighter touch. A study for the composition, in pen, is in the Petit Palais in Paris; Marcantonio's engraving, made from a drawing, records an earlier design with differences in the angels.

Reception

The Saint Cecilia was famous in Bologna from the day it arrived, and it shaped the Bolognese school: the Carracci, Reni, Domenichino and Guercino grew up with it, and the sacra conversazione of standing saints under an open sky, with the drama in the glances, is their inheritance from it; Reni's Saint Cecilia and Domenichino's are its daughters. The Academies admired its Paul as a model of the pensive figure; Goethe, who saw it in Bologna in 1786, wrote of it at length in the Italian Journey — the first picture by Raphael he had seen in Italy, and one he found "beyond all praise"; the Romantics loved the angels; Ruskin, characteristically, thought the instruments the best part. Modern writing has concentrated on the programme, the patron and the workshop — how much is Raphael's, how much Giovanni da Udine's — and on the picture's position between the Foligno and the Transfiguration. It hangs in Bologna's Pinacoteca in a room of its own, the city's one great Raphael, and it is the reason, with the Carracci, to visit the gallery.

The fresco

The principal wall of the Stanza dell'Incendio, about 500 by 670 cm, painted in 1514–17: the miracle of 847, recorded in the Liber Pontificalis, in which Pope Leo IV extinguished a fire raging in the Borgo — the quarter before St Peter's — by making the sign of the cross from the loggia of the old basilica. The composition is a piazza seen in depth: at the back, raised on a flight of steps and framed by the columns of Old St Peter's façade, the Pope, small, stands in the benediction loggia with his court and blesses the crowd below; in the middle distance a throng of supplicants kneels and raises its arms towards him; in the foreground, on either side, the fire and its victims — at the left, a burning house from whose wall a naked youth lowers himself, a young man carries an old man on his back (Aeneas and Anchises, with Ascanius beside them and Creusa behind, out of Virgil), a woman with her back to us cries out; at the right, a group of women and children, one passing a baby over the wall to a man below, a woman carrying a jar of water on her head, a mother with her child, a woman kneeling with her hair loose — in a frieze of heroic and Michelangelesque figures; and in the centre a great void of pavement between the drama and the small, distant Pope who ends it.

The subject and the pope

The Stanza dell'Incendio was Leo X's dining room, and its programme — four acts of his two namesakes, Leo III and Leo IV — was chosen to glorify the new pope by his predecessors: the Fire (Leo IV), the Battle of Ostia (Leo IV), the Coronation of Charlemagne (Leo III) and the Oath of Leo III. Leo IV, shown in the loggia with Leo X's features, saves the Borgo; the scene is set before the old basilica, whose demolition Raphael as architect was then overseeing, and the façade in the fresco is a record of it. The choice of the fire — a miracle of protection, like the Eliodoro's — continues Julius's programme under the new name; the style does not.

The composition

The Fire in the Borgo is the most Michelangelesque of Raphael's frescoes and the one in which the foreground figures overwhelm the subject: the miracle happens at the back, small, and the front is given over to a display of the nude and draped body in action — the youth hanging from the wall, the carrier with the old man, the woman with the jar, the woman passing the child — each a demonstration of the figure in motion, of the kind the Battle of Cascina had made the Florentine ideal and the Sistine the Roman one. The composition is a stage: the foreground frieze, the middle-distance crowd, the Pope at the back in his loggia, framed by the columns and the smoke; the void at the centre, as in the Heliodorus, pulls the eye back to the point where the miracle is. The women of the right-hand group — the one with the jar on her head, a caryatid; the one passing the baby; the kneeling one with loose hair — are among the grandest figures Raphael designed, and the Aeneas group at the left is the most famous quotation of Virgil in Renaissance painting.

The workshop

The Fire is the last wall on which Raphael worked extensively himself and the first on which the workshop's share is large. The design is his throughout — the Albertina's red-chalk study for the young man carrying the old man (Q18688656) shows the Aeneas group drawn from two models in the studio, and studies for the women at the right, the youth on the wall and the kneeling figures survive — and the principal foreground figures are his in execution; the middle-distance crowd, the Pope's loggia and the architecture are the assistants' (Giulio Romano, who was about sixteen, and Penni), and the other three walls of the room are workshop pictures on his sketches. The division has been the fresco's critical problem since Vasari, who praised the figures and said little of the rest; the Vatican's restoration of the 2010s mapped the hands, and the current view is that the left-hand group and the women at the right are Raphael's, the rest directed.

The figures

The youth hanging from the wall — naked, his body stretched along the masonry, lowering himself by his arms — is a figure of pure athletic display, derived from the antique and from Michelangelo; the carrier with the old man — Aeneas with Anchises, the old man's arms round the youth's neck — is the studio pose of the Albertina sheet given Trojan meaning; the woman with the jar, walking with her back to us, her drapery blown, is a caryatid in motion; the woman passing the baby over the wall, seen from the side with her arms raised, is among the most reproduced figures of the Stanze; and the kneeling woman at the right, arms outstretched, hair loose, is the Heliodorus's kneeling woman made frantic. They are all, in a sense, exercises — the body shown doing something difficult — and the fresco's slightly academic quality, the sense of a demonstration, is the price of its ambition; it is the picture in which Raphael most wanted to be Michelangelo, and the one in which he came closest and remained himself.

Technique and condition

The fresco was painted in buon fresco in giornate from cartoons, with the usual secco additions; the smoke and fire are painted with a freedom the room's other walls lack. The restoration of the 2010s cleaned it and published the giornate; it is in good condition, the foreground figures especially.

Reception

The Fire in the Borgo was the most admired of the Stanze walls in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — the Academies made its figures the canon of the heroic nude in action, the Aeneas group was copied by every student in Rome, and Poussin, Le Brun and David took it as the model of the history picture with a foreground of heroic bodies; Reynolds discussed it in the Discourses as the supreme example of "borrowing" made invention. The nineteenth century, which wanted the Raphael of the Madonnas, found it cold; Ruskin hated it; the twentieth saw it as the beginning of Mannerism — Giulio's Palazzo Te is its child — and as the first workshop picture. It is now valued as the last great design of Raphael's own in the Stanze and the hinge between his art and his school's: the figures are his, the future is theirs.

What to look at

The youth on the wall; Aeneas and Anchises; the woman with the jar; the woman passing the baby; the kneeling woman's hair; the old basilica's façade; the Pope in the loggia, small; and the void between.

The fresco

The fourth wall of the Stanza d'Eliodoro, about 500 by 750 cm, painted in 1513–14: the legend of Pope Leo I, who in 452 rode out from Rome to meet Attila the Hun and turned him back by the apparition, in the sky, of Saints Peter and Paul with drawn swords. At the left, Leo — with the features of Leo X, who succeeded Julius in March 1513 and for whom the fresco was completed — rides forward on a white mule, mitred, with his cardinals and attendants behind him, calm and blessing; above him, in the air, Peter and Paul sweep down with swords; at the right, Attila on a black horse rears back in terror, and his army — horsemen, standard-bearers, foot-soldiers — recoils in confusion; behind, a landscape with Rome's walls, the Colosseum and an aqueduct (the scene is moved from the Mincio to the gates of Rome), and a burning building. The composition is the room's most crowded, and its two halves — the Pope's calm procession at the left, the Huns' panic at the right — are the Heliodorus's contrast of order and rout, reversed.

The two popes

The fresco was begun under Julius II, who chose the subject as the fourth protection — the Church's city defended from the barbarian by its pope and its apostles — and who intended, by the evidence of a drawing in the Louvre, to appear as Leo himself; Julius died in February 1513, and Leo X, elected in March, had his own portrait substituted. The Louvre modello shows the composition with Julius's bearded profile on the mule; the fresco shows Leo's plump, clean-shaven face. Leo, as it happened, had his own reason for the subject: as a cardinal he had been taken prisoner by the French at Ravenna in 1512 and had escaped, and the Pope who turns back the invader suited him; the fresco is thus the room's seam, and the point where Julius's programme became Leo's.

The composition and the workshop

The Attila is the weakest of the four walls and the one in which the workshop's hand is most evident. The left-hand group — the Pope on his mule, the cardinals, the attendants — is Raphael's in design and largely in execution, and the Pope's profile and the two apostles in the sky are of his quality; the right-hand group — the Huns, their horses, their standards — is crowded, repetitive and stiff, and has been given to assistants (Giulio Romano's name, though he was very young; Penni's; others). The composition as a whole lacks the Heliodorus's void and the Bolsena's stage: it is a frieze of two processions meeting, with the apostles above as the hinge, and its energy is in the horses — Attila's black horse rearing, the white horses behind, the standards — rather than in the figures. The landscape, with its Roman monuments and its burning building, is a new element in the Stanze: the city as the scene of its own defence.

What is good in it

The Pope's group is good: Leo on his mule, calm and heavy, blessing, with the cardinals' red behind him and the cross-bearer before, is a grand image of the papacy in procession, and the apostles in the sky — Peter with the keys and sword, Paul with the sword, sweeping down in a rush of drapery — are the first of Raphael's flying figures of real power, ancestors of the angels of the Transfiguration and of the whole Baroque repertory of descending saints. Attila's terror — the hand raised, the head turned, the horse recoiling — is well found. And the landscape, with the aqueduct and the Colosseum, is the painter's first use of Rome's own monuments as a setting, a theme the Incendio would take up.

Technique and condition

The fresco was painted in buon fresco in giornate, in 1513–14, with the secco additions usual in the room; the restoration of the 2000s cleaned it and clarified the division of hands. The wall has suffered less than the Liberation and is in good condition; the colours of the Pope's group are fresh.

Reception

The Attila has never been loved; Vasari praised the horses and the apostles and passed on; the Academies used the left-hand group as a model of the procession; the nineteenth century, which preferred the Heliodorus and the Liberation, found it heavy; and the twentieth made it the first exhibit in the case about the workshop. Its interest now is partly documentary — the two popes, the Louvre modello, the seam between two reigns — and partly that it shows what happened when the Eliodoro's energy was handed to assistants: the forms stayed, the life went. It is also, in its landscape, a first sign of the Roman antiquarian interest that would occupy Raphael's last years. The visitor should look at the Pope's group, at the apostles, and at the Colosseum, and forgive the Huns.

The Louvre modello deserves a word for what it shows of method. A finished composition drawing in pen, wash and white heightening, squared for enlargement, it gives the whole design with Julius's profile on the mule and the Huns' group already in place; it is the kind of drawing Raphael made for the workshop to work from, and its survival — together with the fresco's departures from it (Leo's head, changes in the right-hand group) — lets the division between master and assistants be followed step by step. It is the earliest surviving modello for a Stanze wall and one of the documents on which the reconstruction of the late workshop's procedure rests. The fresco's Leo, plump and clean-shaven on his white mule, is also the first portrait of the new pope by Raphael — painted within months of the election of March 1513 — and it is, in its way, a sketch for the great Uffizi portrait of 1518: the same heavy face, the same small eyes, the same calm. It was also the first time the workshop painted a pope's face on Raphael's design; the Coronation of Charlemagne in the next room would repeat the exercise.

A red-chalk drawing in the Albertina, Vienna: a nude young man, seen from behind and slightly to the side, carries an old man on his back, the old man's arms round his neck and legs held at the young man's hips — the study, from the model, for the group at the left of the Fire in the Borgo (Q2531790) in which a youth carries his father from the flames in the pose of Aeneas carrying Anchises from Troy. The drawing is among the most beautiful of Raphael's red-chalk figure studies: the two bodies drawn from life (two garzoni, one on the other's back), the young man's musculature modelled in soft chalk with the light from the left, the old man's weight felt in the bend of the carrier's back; it shows how the Incendio's Virgilian quotation was built from a studio pose, and how the Roman manner — the nude studied first, then draped, then placed — worked in the workshop. The sheet is one of the Albertina's finest Raphael drawings and is regularly exhibited; it is the best evidence that the Fire in the Borgo, whatever the share of the assistants in its execution, was designed figure by figure by the master. The Albertina's collection, formed by Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen in the eighteenth century, includes studies for the Meadow, the Disputa, the Transfiguration and the Farnesina; this is among its best known.

A print in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris, lettered Cesar Borgia. Raphael pinxit — an engraved portrait of Cesare Borgia claiming a lost Raphael original. No painted portrait of Borgia by Raphael is documented — Cesare fell in 1503, before Raphael's Roman years, and the connection is chronologically strained — but the tradition of a "Borgia by Raphael" ran through the old collections (a portrait long in the Borghese carried the identification), and prints like this one manufactured and transmitted it. The sheet is catalogued here as Wikidata returns it: not a work by Raphael, but a document of the market in his name — the pinxit inscription doing, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, what optimistic labels did in the twentieth, and what database inheritance does now. The catalogue's excluded and copies sections are full of the practice's results; this print is the practice itself, lettered and framed.

The second cartoon, about 340 by 530 cm, distemper on paper, in the V&A on loan from the Royal Collection: Christ, standing at the left, points with one hand to the kneeling Peter and with the other to the flock of sheep beside him — "Feed my sheep" (John 21) — while Peter, on his knees, holds the keys he has received (Matthew 16); behind him the ten other apostles stand in a row, turning, gesturing, reacting, and behind them a landscape with a lake and a city. The cartoon combines two texts — the giving of the keys and the charge to feed the flock — into one image of Peter's commission, the foundation of the papal claim, and its position in the chapel, near the altar and the Draught, made it the series' doctrinal centre: the Pope's authority, painted on the Pope's wall. The design is a frieze — Christ isolated at the left, Peter kneeling, the apostles ranged to the right in a line that advances and recedes — and its figures, in long heavy draperies, are the most monumental of the set; the apostles' heads, each a study of a type (the young John, the bearded Andrew, the turning Thomas), are among the cartoon's glories and among the passages where Raphael's own brush is most evident. The sheep at the right are Giovanni da Udine's. The tapestry woven from it is in the Vatican (Q131290623), and the design was among the most copied of all the cartoons — the Mortlake weavings and the engravings made it the standard image of the Tu es Petrus. The cartoon was restored in 2019–20; it is in good condition, with some losses along the old strip-joins. Its composition, a row of standing figures in conversation before a landscape, is the ancestor of the Bolognese sacra conversazione and of every painted apostolic assembly since. The keys in Peter's hands — enormous, gold and silver, the spiritual and temporal powers — are the tapestry set's most doctrinally loaded object, and the cartoon gives them a prominence that the chapel's position amplified: the kneeling Peter with the keys knelt directly below the fresco cycle of Moses and Christ that Sixtus IV had painted, and the papal succession — law, gospel, Peter, pope — ran down the wall in one line. Christ's white-robed figure, isolated at the edge with both arms extended, one to the man and one to the flock, is among the most economical inventions of Raphael's maturity: the whole commission in two gestures. The cartoon's landscape, with its round-towered city across the lake, is among the passages given to the shop; the flock of sheep at Christ's side — literal illustration of the charge — troubled classicist critics from Dolce onward, who thought sheep beneath the dignity of history; Raphael, who had painted the Ansidei's coral and the Solly's goldfinch, did not share the scruple. The cartoon's history in England has one more turn worth recording: at Mortlake in the 1630s the Charge was among the designs most often rewoven, and the English sets — at Chatsworth, at Belvoir, in the royal palaces — spread the composition through the country houses, so that the image of Christ, Peter and the keys was, for the English seventeenth century, a domestic sight; the cartoon itself, at Hampton Court and then the V&A, became the schoolroom of English history painting, and there is hardly a Royal Academy history picture of the eighteenth century that does not somewhere quote it.

A red-chalk drawing, about 40 by 28 cm, in the Albertina, Vienna: three nude men, studied from the model — two standing, seen from the back and the side, one seated or kneeling — in poses that served for the Saracen prisoners in the Battle of Ostia (Q2564496) of the Stanza dell'Incendio; the figures are drawn with the soft, full modelling of Raphael's Roman red-chalk studies, the light from the left, the anatomy exact but not insisted on. What makes the sheet famous is an inscription, in Dürer's hand, at the lower edge: "1515 / Raffahell de Urbin der so hoch peim Pobst geacht ist gewest hat der hat dyse nackette bild gemacht und hat sy dem albrecht dürer gen nornberg geschickt im sein hand zu weisen" — "Raphael of Urbino, who was held in such high esteem by the Pope, made these nude figures and sent them to Albrecht Dürer at Nuremberg to show him his hand." The drawing is thus a document of the exchange between the two greatest artists of their generation, Italian and German, who never met: Raphael sent Dürer a sample of his draughtsmanship, and Dürer — who recorded elsewhere that he sent Raphael his self-portrait on canvas in return (lost) — kept it, inscribed it, and left it to be the first recorded gift between them. The sheet passed through Dürer's estate and Imhoff's collection to Vienna, and it has been one of the Albertina's treasures since; it is among the most reproduced of all Raphael's drawings, for its story, and among the finest of his nude studies, for itself. It is also a key piece of evidence for the Ostia's design: the prisoners on the wall are these men, draped and bound, and the drawing shows how the workshop picture was built on the master's studies. It has an English Wikipedia article and is tiered accordingly; it deserves it. The exchange between the two artists is otherwise documented only by Dürer's own note, in his Netherlandish diary of 1520, that he had given away “Raphael's things” — prints, presumably — and by the tradition, recorded by Vasari, that Raphael kept Dürer's self-portrait on canvas and admired his prints; that the two greatest draughtsmen of their age knew each other's hands across the Alps is a fact the Albertina sheet makes tangible. The drawing itself is a model of the red-chalk figure study: three bodies, lit from the left, the muscles indicated by soft gradations rather than contour, the poses natural — one man turning, one standing with his weight shifted, one crouching — and the paper's tone used as the middle value. Studies of this kind, made in the shop from the garzoni, were the raw material of the Stanze and the Farnesina, and the sheet shows the material at its best; that it was chosen to represent the painter's hand to the greatest printmaker in Europe is a measure of what Raphael thought his drawing was worth. It has been shown in every major Dürer and Raphael exhibition since the war, and it is among the most frequently reproduced sheets in the Albertina's collection.

The picture

Oil on canvas, 82 by 67 cm, in the Louvre: a man of about thirty-six, seen at half-length and nearly full-face, seated, his hands folded in his lap at the lower edge, wearing a black velvet doublet over a grey fur-trimmed coat, a white shirt whose gathered collar shows at the neck, and a black beret with a grey turban-like band wound round it; his beard is full and brown, his hair short, his eyes grey-blue and looking directly at the viewer; the background is a plain grey-green with a soft shadow at the left. The palette is reduced to black, grey, white and the warm flesh; the light falls softly from the left; the expression is attentive, grave, a little tender — the look of a man listening to a friend.

The sitter

Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), Mantuan by birth, courtier at Urbino under Guidobaldo and Francesco Maria, diplomat, soldier, poet, later papal nuncio to Spain, where he died, and the author of Il libro del Cortegiano (written 1508–18, published 1528), the dialogue set in the palace of Urbino that defined, for Europe, the ideal of the courtier — learned, graceful, a soldier and a scholar, practising sprezzatura, the art that hides art. He was Raphael's friend from the Urbino years; he carried the Saint George to England in 1506; he was the recipient of the Galatea letter and the collaborator on the letter to Leo X about the ruins of Rome; and he sat for this portrait in Rome around 1514–15, when he was the Duke of Urbino's ambassador to the Pope. He wrote, in a Latin elegy in the voice of his wife Ippolita, that she consoled herself in his absence by looking at the portrait, which "only lacks a voice"; the picture was in Mantua with his family, then in the collection of Lucas van Uffelen in Amsterdam, where Rembrandt drew it at the sale in 1639; it passed to Cardinal Mazarin and to Louis XIV, and has been in the Louvre since.

The portrait

The Castiglione is the greatest of Raphael's male portraits and among the two or three greatest portraits of the Renaissance, and its greatness is of the same kind as its sitter's book: it is a demonstration of sprezzatura — of the highest art made to look like none. Everything is restrained: the colour, reduced to black, grey and white; the pose, the Florentine three-quarter with folded hands, so settled that it seems not a pose at all; the background, empty; the expression, mild. And everything is exact: the velvet of the doublet, the fur of the coat, the gathered linen of the collar, the soft wool of the beret's band, each rendered with a touch that distinguishes the materials without insisting; the beard, painted hair by hair; the eyes, grey-blue, moist, alive; the hands, folded, drawn with the precision of all Raphael's hands and painted with a new softness. The portrait's subject is a man's character as it shows in his composure, and the composure is the painter's as much as the sitter's.

The comparison with Leonardo is instructive. The Mona Lisa, which Raphael had studied in Florence, gives the formula — the seated figure, the folded hands, the direct gaze — and the Castiglione is its male counterpart; but where Leonardo's sitter is an enigma in a wilderness, Raphael's is a friend in a room, and the difference between mystery and candour is the difference between the two painters' conceptions of what a portrait is for. Castiglione looks at us as his courtier would look at a prince: with attention, with respect, without servility, and with the faint warmth of a man who expects to be understood.

Technique and condition

The picture is on canvas — like La Velata, unusually for Raphael's portraits — and the canvas's weave contributes to the softness of the handling; the ground is a thin warm priming; the underdrawing is minimal; the paint is thin in the face and flesh, built up in soft gradations with glazes, and fuller in the costume, where the black velvet is painted over a warm underlayer with the highlights dragged, the fur in short soft strokes, the white of the collar in a few touches of impasto; the background is thinly laid in, with the shadow at the left a deliberate softening. The picture was restored in the 1980s and examined by the Louvre's laboratory, which confirmed the autograph status and the canvas support; it is in excellent condition, the one loss being a slight flattening of the black from old relining. A sheet in the Louvre with the sitter's head has been connected with it.

The influence

The Castiglione's influence on the history of portraiture is as great as the Julius II's and more intimate. Rembrandt, who sketched it at the van Uffelen sale in 1639 (the drawing, with his note of the price, is in the Albertina), took its pose and its beret for his etched self-portrait of that year and his painted self-portrait of 1640 (National Gallery, London), and through Rembrandt the seated, sober, direct half-length became the standard of the serious portrait; Titian's Man with a Glove is its Venetian cousin; Velázquez knew it in the Spanish royal collection's copies; Ingres copied it; Matisse painted a version; and the portrait's restraint — the grey and black, the folded hands, the level gaze — has been the model, for four centuries, of how a painter shows a thinking man. It is also the picture in which the ideal of the Cortegiano found its image: the courtier as the book describes him, painted by the friend who embodied the book's ideal of the artist.

Reception

The Castiglione was prized in Mantua and in Amsterdam (Rembrandt's drawing records a price of 3,500 guilders); it was a treasure of Mazarin's and of Louis XIV's; it hung in the Louvre's Grande Galerie from the Revolution and was, for the French Academy, the model of the portrait; the nineteenth century made it the image of the Renaissance gentleman; and the twentieth, which distrusted Raphael's Madonnas, never distrusted this — it is the Raphael that modern taste has found easiest to love. It hangs in the Louvre's Grande Galerie near the Belle Jardinière and the Saint Michael, and it was lent to Rome in 2020, where it hung with the Leo X and the Velata and was, by most accounts, the room's centre.

What to look at

The eyes; the beard against the collar; the beret's grey band; the folded hands; the fur; and the edge of the shadow at the left, which is the only thing in the background and the thing that makes the figure sit in space. Then the Cortegiano, which the picture illustrates without a word.

A panel, 59.7 by 43.8 cm, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington (Samuel H. Kress Collection): a young man of about twenty-two, seen from behind and turning to look over his left shoulder at the viewer, his long fair hair falling to the shoulders of a dark green doublet, a blue mantle over the other shoulder, a black cap on his head; his right hand rests on his breast, the fingers spread; the background is a dark green wall lit from the left, the light falling on his face and hair and leaving the rest in shadow. The sitter is Bindo Altoviti (1491–1557), the Florentine banker in Rome, a papal financier and later an opponent of the Medici, a patron of Cellini (who made his bronze bust, now in Boston), of Vasari and of Michelangelo (who gave him the cartoon of the Drunkenness of Noah); Vasari says Raphael painted "his portrait when he was young, which is held to be most beautiful," and the picture remained in the Altoviti family's Roman and Florentine palaces until 1808, when it was sold to Ludwig of Bavaria; it hung in Munich until 1936, when the Nazi government sold it, and it came through Duveen and Kress to Washington in 1943.

The portrait's history is a history of attribution: in the Altoviti palace, and in Munich, it was long believed to be Raphael's self-portrait — the turning pose, the long hair and the youth of the sitter suggested the painter himself, and the picture was reproduced as "Raphael" throughout the nineteenth century (Passavant doubted; Morelli gave it to Giulio Romano); Vasari's text, rediscovered as the key, restored the sitter's identity, and the twentieth century, after a period of doubt about the attribution (the picture was given to Giulio Romano by some, and its condition questioned), has settled on Raphael, around 1512–15, with the Kress and National Gallery technical examinations supporting the autograph status. It is now regarded as among the most original of his portraits.

The originality is in the pose and the light. The sitter is seen from behind — the back of the green doublet and the shoulder fill the lower half — and turns his head over his shoulder to look at us, so that the portrait is a movement caught, a glance returned; and the light, falling from the left, models the face and the hair against the dark wall and leaves the rest in shadow, in a chiaroscuro that is the most Leonardesque in Raphael's Roman work and that looks forward to the Fornarina's and the Velata's dark grounds. The hand on the breast — the fingers spread, the gesture of the Gravida and the Velata — is the one still point; the face, soft and fair with a slight smile, is the face of a rich young man pleased to be painted. The colour — the green wall, the green doublet, the blue mantle, the fair hair, the warm flesh — is a harmony of cool against warm that is unusual in his portraits.

The panel is in the fluent oil of the middle Roman years, over a white ground, with a free underdrawing and the flesh modelled softly; it suffered in the nineteenth century from cleaning and has been restored, and the surface is somewhat worn in the shadows; the face, hair and hand are well preserved. It hangs in Washington with the Small Cowper, the Niccolini-Cowper, the Alba and the Saint George — the last of the Gallery's five Raphaels, and the one whose attribution took longest to settle.

The picture's Munich century is worth a note: Ludwig I bought it as the self-portrait of his favourite painter and hung it in the Pinakothek, where it was, for a hundred years, Germany's Raphael self-portrait; the 1936 sale, arranged by the Nazi authorities to raise foreign currency and remove what they regarded as an overrated picture, was among the losses that the Bavarian museums have since regretted; Washington's gain, like its gain from the Hermitage, was a dictatorship's need for dollars.

The portrait's originality has made it a favourite of modern eyes, and its influence runs in an unexpected direction: the turned head over the shoulder, the glance back at the viewer, the half-lit face against the dark, became a type of the Mannerist portrait — Parmigianino's and Bronzino's young men turn this way — and, through the Baroque, of the informal portrait generally; the pose has been called the first "snapshot" in Renaissance painting, which is anachronistic but not absurd. Its sitter's later life is worth a line: Bindo Altoviti became the richest Florentine in Rome, a banker to the popes and an enemy of Duke Cosimo, who confiscated his Florentine property; Cellini's bronze bust of him (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston), made around 1550, shows the same man at sixty, bearded and heavy, and the two portraits — Raphael's boy, Cellini's banker — frame a life. The National Gallery's technical study of the 1990s confirmed that the panel's ground, underdrawing and paint are consistent with Raphael's Roman practice, and the attribution is no longer seriously questioned; what remains open is the exact date, between 1512 and 1515, which the style does not settle. The picture is shown in Washington beside the Niccolini-Cowper, and its green and blue, against the Madonna's red and blue, are the room's coolest passage. Among the Kress Foundation's gifts to Washington the Altoviti is the one that has most repaid the foundation's faith: bought as a doubtful Raphael, it is now among the Gallery's most admired Renaissance portraits. Its date has been argued from the costume — the slashed doublet and the cap are of the early 1510s — and from the sitter's age: Bindo was twenty-one in 1512, and the face is a very young man's; c. 1512–15 is as close as the evidence allows. The panel was lent to Rome in 2020, where it hung among the portraits and surprised those who knew it only in reproduction: the green is deeper, the face softer, and the turn of the head more sudden than the photographs suggest.

A Wikidata item, unlabelled, whose image is a copy of a portrait of Antonio Tebaldeo — the Ferrarese poet (1463–1537), Bembo's friend and one of the literary circle of Leo's Rome — which Raphael painted around 1515–16, according to Bembo, who wrote to Bibbiena that Raphael had made Tebaldeo's likeness "so like that he is not more like himself," and that he hoped Raphael would make his own; the original is lost, and the composition is known from copies and engravings, of which the image attached to this item is one. Tebaldeo, a poet of the Petrarchan school and a courtier at Mantua and Rome, was among the humanists Raphael frequented — he is said to appear in the Parnassus — and the lost portrait belongs to the group of likenesses of Leo's literary court (the Inghirami, the Navagero and Beazzano, the Castiglione) in which the painter recorded the circle he moved in. The entry records the item as Wikidata gives it — a portrait of Tebaldeo by Raphael — with the caveat that what survives is a copy and that the original's whereabouts, if it exists, are unknown; it is one of several lost portraits documented by Bembo's letters, and its inclusion here is a reminder of how much of the Roman portraiture has gone.

What they are

Seven full-scale cartoons — designs painted in glue-size distemper on paper, at the size of the tapestries they were made for, roughly three metres high and three to five wide — for the set of ten tapestries of the Acts of the Apostles that Leo X commissioned in 1515 to hang on the lower walls of the Sistine Chapel, below Perugino's and Botticelli's frescoes and beneath Michelangelo's ceiling. The seven survivors are the Miraculous Draught of Fishes (Q3900659), Christ's Charge to Peter (Q3687196), the Healing of the Lame Man (Q3778388), the Death of Ananias (Q3863236), the Conversion of the Proconsul or Blinding of Elymas (Q3925594), the Sacrifice at Lystra (Q3944654) and Saint Paul Preaching at Athens (Q3910088); the cartoons for the Stoning of Stephen, the Conversion of Saul and Paul in Prison are lost. The seven belong to the Royal Collection, having been bought by the future Charles I in 1623 as models for the Mortlake tapestry works, and they have been on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum since 1865, where they hang in a gallery built for them. They are, after the Stanze, the most important works of Raphael's maturity, and the most influential of all his designs in Northern Europe.

The commission

Leo X, elected in March 1513, wanted to leave his mark on the chapel his predecessors had decorated, and the lower walls — where painted hangings had been — were the space left; he ordered from Raphael, by the summer of 1515, designs for ten tapestries of the lives of Peter and Paul, the two founders of the Roman Church, to be woven in Brussels by Pieter van Aelst, the finest weaver in Europe, in wool, silk and gold thread. Raphael was paid 1,000 ducats for the cartoons (the first instalment in June 1515, the last in December 1516); the tapestries cost the Pope some 15,000 ducats — about five times what Julius had paid Michelangelo for the ceiling; seven were hung in the chapel on 26 December 1519, the feast of Saint Stephen, and Paris de Grassis, the master of ceremonies, recorded that the whole chapel was struck dumb by the sight. The tapestries are in the Vatican (Q76844726 and the individual entries); the cartoons, having served the weavers, stayed in Brussels, were reused for other sets, and were bought from a Genoese collection by Charles I's agent.

The designs

The cartoons show the narrative art that the Deposition had struggled towards and the Stanze had developed brought to its final clarity: a few large figures, at the front of a shallow stage, performing one clear action, with the emotion legible across a chapel. The Draught of Fishes: Peter kneeling in the boat before Christ, the nets full, the lake behind; the Charge to Peter: Christ handing the keys, the apostles in a row behind the kneeling Peter, the sheep; the Healing of the Lame Man: Peter and John among the twisted columns of the Temple gate, the cripple between them; the Death of Ananias: the liar falling dead before the apostles on their dais, the crowd recoiling; the Elymas: the proconsul Sergius Paulus enthroned, the sorcerer struck blind, Paul's gesture; the Lystra: the crowd preparing to sacrifice to Paul and Barnabas as gods, the ox, the altar, Paul tearing his clothes; Paul at Athens: the apostle on the steps of the Areopagus, his arms raised, the philosophers below. Each is a single action; each is built of figures of monumental scale in the Roman manner, derived from the antique and from the Stanze; each is composed to be read from a distance and in reverse (the tapestries mirror the cartoons); and together they make, with the Stanze, the grammar of European history painting for three centuries.

Technique

The cartoons are painted in distemper — pigment in animal glue — on sheets of paper pasted together, some two hundred sheets per cartoon, in broad, opaque, rapid strokes that could be read by weavers and that show Raphael's hand at its fastest and freest; the workshop (Giulio Romano, Penni, Giovanni da Udine for the landscapes and animals) assisted, but the principal figures and the heads are the master's, and the cartoons are the nearest we come to seeing him paint at speed. They were cut into strips for the loom and reassembled; they have been restored many times — the Mortlake works used them for a century — and were relined and conserved at the V&A in the twentieth century and again in 2019–20 for the quincentenary, when they were rehung under new lighting and published online at high resolution.

Reception

The cartoons were the Raphael that Northern Europe knew best: through the tapestries woven from them for courts from Madrid to Vienna, through the engravings, and — after 1623 — through their presence in England, where they were the national collection's first great Italian possession, admired by Rubens, studied by Reynolds (who built the Discourses on them) and Hogarth, copied by every English history painter, and hung at Hampton Court in a gallery Wren built for them; Queen Victoria lent them to South Kensington in 1865. They have been the model of the history picture in England ever since — Reynolds called them "the greatest productions of the art"; Haydon and West built on them; the Pre-Raphaelites reacted against them — and Shearman's monograph of 1972 made them, for modern scholarship, the central works of Raphael's Roman narrative art: the place where the "transitive" mode, the address to the spectator, the economy of figure and gesture, are most complete.

What to look at

Go to the V&A's gallery, stand back, and look at the Ananias — the liar falling, the apostles on the dais, the crowd turning — and then the Draught, the quietest; then the heads, close: Christ's in the Charge, Paul's in the Athens, the cripple's in the Healing. They are painted with a brush loaded with glue-colour, in a morning's work each; they were never meant to be seen; they are among the grandest paintings in England.

The seventh and last surviving cartoon, about 340 by 440 cm, distemper on paper, in the V&A on loan from the Royal Collection: Paul, standing on the steps of the Areopagus at the left, his arms raised, his back half-turned to us, preaches to the Athenians — philosophers, citizens, a woman with a child — who sit and stand on the steps below, some listening, some disputing, some (Dionysius the Areopagite and Damaris, at the right) converted; behind, a round temple and a statue of Mars, the city's buildings. The composition is the apostle's sermon as a scene of persuasion: the speaker raised above his audience, his gesture the largest in the set, the listeners' faces a study of response — attention, doubt, scorn, conversion — in the manner of the School of Athens's philosophers, whom the Athenian setting recalls; the round temple is a Bramantesque building, the city a Roman one. Paul's figure — seen from behind and the side, his arms lifted, his mantle falling in heavy folds — is the grandest single figure in the cartoons and the model, through the tapestries and the engravings, of the preaching saint for two centuries; the listeners, seated on the steps, are the type of the audience that Rembrandt's etched sermons and the Baroque's would develop. The tapestry woven from it is in the Vatican (Q131290106). The cartoon was restored in 2019–20 and is in good condition. It has been proposed that the figure at the lower right, in a cap, is a portrait of Leo X's architect or of a humanist; the identification is loose. As the last of the surviving set it is the one most often reproduced as the image of the series — Paul with his arms raised before the temple — and it is, with the Ananias, the cartoon in which the address to the viewer, who stands among the listeners, is most complete. Paul's raised arms — the orator's gesture amplified to the whole body — were studied in the shop and became, through this design, the standard image of apostolic preaching; Rembrandt's Paul, Poussin's, and the preachers of the Baroque pulpits descend from it. The listeners repay individual attention: the man leaning forward with his chin on his hand, the sceptic with his arms folded, the couple at the right — Dionysius and Damaris, the named converts — who lean towards each other as the words strike home; the sequence of response, from resistance through attention to conversion, is the sermon's effect painted. The round temple behind is the Tempietto's family, and its presence at Athens is Raphael's quiet claim: the true philosophy preached in front of the true architecture. The cartoon's audience includes, at the far left, a figure in contemporary dress who has been read as a portrait — of Leo's librarian, of a humanist, even of the donor — standing among the ancient Athenians as the modern listener; whoever he is, he is the viewer's deputy, and his presence is the series' last transitive touch. The design's fortune in England was particular: it hung, in copy and print, in every dissenting academy and every cathedral library, the image of preaching itself, and Wesley's and Whitefield's engravers borrowed its Paul for their frontispieces — the Pope's tapestry become the evangelist's emblem, which is the kind of afterlife Raphael's designs, loosed from their walls, have always had.

The second wall of the Stanza dell'Incendio, about 500 by 770 cm, painted in 1514–15 by the workshop on Raphael's design: the naval victory of 849, in which the fleet of Leo IV, with the ships of Naples, Amalfi and Gaeta, defeated the Saracens off Ostia — the Pope, with Leo X's features, stands at the left on the shore, attended by cardinals (Giulio de' Medici and Bibbiena among them), giving thanks, while before him Saracen prisoners are dragged from the boats and bound, and in the background, on a stormy sea, the ships grapple and sink. The subject was topical: Leo X was preaching a crusade against the Turks in 1514–15, and the victory of his namesake over the infidel at the mouth of the Tiber was its emblem. The composition — the Pope's calm group at the left, the violent foreground of prisoners and soldiers at the right, the sea battle behind — follows the Heliodorus formula of calm witness and commotion, and the foreground figures — the bound prisoners, the soldier dragging one by the hair, the nude pulled from the water — are studies in the Michelangelesque manner of the Fire; the execution, however, is the shop's throughout, and the figures have the hardness of the assistants' hand. Raphael's part was the design: drawings survive, among them a famous red-chalk study in the Albertina of three nude men — the prisoners — drawn from the model, which Raphael sent to Dürer in 1515 inscribed as a sample of his hand (Q18688665). The fresco's interest lies there, and in the sea: the galleys on the grey water, the masts and sails, the storm-light, are the most extended seascape in the Stanze and an early instance of the workshop's landscape manner. The Pope's group is a gallery of portraits — Leo, Giulio de' Medici, Bibbiena — and the Pope's face, heavy and calm, is a sketch for the Uffizi portrait of three years later. The wall was restored in the 2010s; it is in fair condition, the sea somewhat abraded. It is the least visited of the room's walls, and the least rewarding, but its drawing — the Dürer sheet — is among the most important of Raphael's career.

The fresco's history is the history of the room. The Stanza dell'Incendio had been begun under Julius II by Perugino, whose ceiling of the Trinity and allegories — the one part of the pre-Raphael decoration that survives in the Stanze — remains above the walls; Leo X, in 1514, gave the room's walls to Raphael, who was by then architect of St Peter's, superintendent of the Loggia and designer of the tapestries, and who delegated the execution to his growing shop. The Ostia was painted first, in 1514–15, when the crusade was topical; its subject was chosen, as the Vatican's documents show, by the Pope's own circle. The fresco's sea battle was designed with the help of drawings of galleys, and its foreground prisoners — the three nudes of the Albertina sheet — were studied from the model in the studio, then clothed and bound for the wall; the transformation from red-chalk athlete to Saracen captive is the clearest instance in the Stanze of how a life study became a history figure. The Pope's group, at the left, was the part on which the master's attention fell: Leo's profile, Giulio de' Medici's and Bibbiena's heads are portraits of the court, and their quality is higher than the rest. The fresco was darkened by four centuries of the room's use — it was a dining room, with candles and fires — and the restoration of the 2010s recovered a colour that surprised: the sea is grey-green, the sky storm-lit, the prisoners' flesh warm. It remains a picture to be read for its design rather than its surface, and the Albertina drawing, which the Vienna museum lends rarely, is the place to see what Raphael gave it.

The subject's later fortune deserves a note. The Battle of Ostia became, through engravings, the standard image of a papal naval victory, and it was invoked in the propaganda of Lepanto in 1571 — the Holy League's triumph over the Turks — as the precedent; Vasari's own battle pictures in the Sala Regia draw on it, and the Baroque's sea-fights, from the Farnese to the Barberini, keep its arrangement of shore, prisoners and distant ships. The fresco thus had a public life out of proportion to its quality, as the Leonine crusade's icon. Among Raphael's designs it is the one in which the Michelangelesque nude was most directly put to narrative work — the bound prisoners are the Cascina's bathers taken captive — and in which the workshop first showed what it would become under Giulio: energetic, hard, a little coarse, and capable of covering a wall. The foreground's best figure, the Saracen dragged by the hair, seen from behind with his back arched, is the one passage that has been claimed for the master's own brush; the claim is disputed, and the figure is, in any case, from his drawing. The cardinals behind the Pope repay a closer look than the wall usually gets: Giulio de' Medici, the future Clement VII, stands at Leo's shoulder with the long face Raphael would paint again in the Uffizi portrait, and Bibbiena, beside him, has the shrewd profile of the Pitti panel; the group is a small gallery of the men who ran Leo's Rome, placed at a sea-battle they never saw. The Vatican's restoration report of the 2010s gives the Ostia to Giulio Romano and Penni on Raphael's design, with the master's possible intervention in the Pope's group; that is the sensible view, and it leaves the wall where it has always been — the least of the Incendio's four, and the one with the best drawing behind it. Seen after the Fire, on the adjoining wall, it shows what the design lost when the master's brush was withdrawn — and what, in the prisoners' bodies, it kept. It kept, in the end, a good deal. The prisoners, at least, are worth the wall.

The fifth cartoon, about 340 by 450 cm, distemper on paper, in the V&A on loan from the Royal Collection (Wikidata lists it under the Royal Collection): the scene from Acts 13 in which Paul, before the proconsul Sergius Paulus at Paphos, strikes blind the sorcerer Elymas who opposed him — the proconsul, enthroned at the centre under a canopy with his lictors and court, starts forward in amazement; Elymas, at the right, gropes with his hands out, his eyes closed, as a man beside him watches; Paul, at the left, stands with his arm raised in the gesture that caused the miracle; the setting is a classical hall with a frieze. The cartoon is the first of the Pauline scenes and the one in which the conversion of a Roman official — the gentile governor brought to the faith — is the subject, apt for the papal chapel; the inscription on the dais, in Latin, names the proconsul's conversion. The composition is a tribunal: the throne at the centre, the apostle at one side, the blinded man at the other, the court as chorus; and the groping Elymas — a figure derived from the antique and from the Laocoön's pathos — is the cartoon's invention, his blind advance among the staring courtiers the image the sixteenth century copied most. The cartoon is the most damaged of the seven: it lost a strip at the left in the Mortlake years and has been restored; the tapestry woven from it (Q131290754) preserves the full composition. It was conserved in 2019–20. Its classical setting — the hall, the frieze, the Roman dress — shows the antiquarian Raphael of the letter to Leo X applied to a history; and its proconsul, starting from his throne, is among the most vivid figures of reaction in the set. The lost left-hand strip — which the Mortlake weavers cut away, and which the Vatican tapestry preserves — carried a further group of onlookers; its absence unbalances the cartoon as now seen, and the visitor should mentally restore it from the tapestry's reversed image. The proconsul's throne, with its sphinxes and its canopy, is an archaeological reconstruction of a Roman magistrate's seat, of the kind the antiquities survey was cataloguing; and the lictors' fasces at the throne's side are the sort of detail that made the cartoons, for the Northern courts that bought the re-weavings, an encyclopedia of the antique. Its subject also carried the series' one contemporary allusion: Sergius Paulus, the Roman governor converted by Paul, was the type of the secular ruler brought to the faith — the hope Leo entertained, in 1515–16, for the kings of France and Spain. Its groping sorcerer, meanwhile, entered the repertory of the blind — Bruegel's parable and the Baroque's blind men know him — and the figure is among the clearest cases of a Raphael invention passing into the common stock of European image-making. The cartoon was Reynolds's example of 'expression carried through a whole figure' — the blindness shown in the feet as much as the hands — and his analysis of it, in the eighth Discourse, is still the best short account of what Raphael's figures do.

The fourth cartoon, about 340 by 530 cm, distemper on paper, in the V&A on loan from the Royal Collection: the episode from Acts 5 in which Ananias, who had lied to the apostles about the price of his land, falls dead at Peter's word — Ananias sprawls at the lower left, his body convulsed; Peter, at the centre of a dais on which the apostles stand in a row, points down at him with one hand and up with the other; John beside him; the crowd on either side recoils in horror, a man at the left turning with his hands raised, a woman at the right (Sapphira, counting her coins, unaware of her own coming death) at the edge; behind, the apostles distribute alms through a window. The composition is the most dramatic of the set and the one most often cited as the model of the history picture: the apostles' dais raised at the centre, Peter's double gesture as the hinge, the dead man in the foreground as the consequence, the crowd's reactions at the sides as the chorus — every element clear, every gesture legible, the emotion carried across the whole width. Ananias's falling body, foreshortened and twisted, is among the most powerful figures Raphael drew, and Peter's judgement, calm above it, is the image of apostolic authority that the tapestry's chapel was meant to proclaim. The tapestry woven from it is in the Vatican (Q131290769). The cartoon was restored in 2019–20; its surface, worked in rapid distemper, shows the master's hand in the principal figures and the shop's in the crowd. Reynolds made it the text of his discourse on expression; Poussin built pictures on it; it is the cartoon that the academic tradition reproduced most, and the one in which Raphael's narrative economy is most complete. The dais's carpet, the alms passing through the window behind, and Sapphira at the right edge counting the coins she will die for — the details repay the long look: the composition tells not one story but three (the lie punished, the alms given, the second lie coming), and it tells them in a single glance's sweep from left to right. That is what Reynolds meant by calling the cartoons the greatest productions of the art: not the figures singly but the total organisation of meaning, which he thought no other painter had equalled. The falling Ananias was studied from the model — a drawing connected with the figure is at Windsor — and his convulsed hand, half-open on the floor, is the kind of observed particular that the grand manner is supposed to exclude and Raphael never excluded. The tapestry hung third on the right; its subject — the Church's discipline over property and truth — had a particular edge in a chapel maintained by Medici banking money, which the preachers of the next decade did not fail to notice. Its composition was reused within a decade for majolica, enamels and relief sculpture, and its dais-and-crowd scheme became the standard frame for scenes of judgement in Northern prints; no other cartoon seeded so many derivatives.