The third cartoon, about 340 by 540 cm, distemper on paper, in the V&A on loan from the Royal Collection: the miracle at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple (Acts 3) — Peter and John, at the centre, heal the cripple who sits at the gate, Peter grasping his hand; around them, among the twisted, vine-wreathed columns of the Temple's portico, a crowd of worshippers, mothers with children, and beggars, and at the right a second cripple with his crutches watching. The setting is the cartoon's invention: the spiral columns are the colonne vitinee — the Solomonic columns of Old St Peter's, believed to have come from the Temple at Jerusalem, which Raphael as architect of the new basilica knew intimately — and their use here, three pairs receding in a colonnade, makes the scene an architecture of columns among which the figures move, the most complex setting in the series and the one that most directly refers to the building the tapestries' chapel stood beside. The cripple, with his thin shanks and his upturned face, is a figure of great pathos, studied from the model; Peter, bending, is the grand apostle of the Charge; the crowd, with its naked children and its mothers, is the most populous of the set. The tapestry woven from it is in the Vatican (Q131290545). The cartoon was restored in 2019–20 and is in good condition; the columns' twisted shafts and the crowd's faces are legible, and the whole has the breadth of Raphael's distemper at its most confident. It is the cartoon in which the painter's architectural and figurative imaginations meet most directly, and its twisted columns — through the tapestries and Bernini's later baldacchino, which quotes the same source — became a motif of the Baroque. The cripple's healing is staged as an exchange of gazes as much as of grasp — Peter looks into the man's face, the man into his — and the crowd around them is so arranged that every second figure looks at the miracle and every other at us or at each other, the audience woven into the scene in the transitive manner of the Sistine Madonna. The children at the columns' bases, naked and climbing, are Giovanni da Udine's and the shop's; the great heads of Peter and John are the master's. The composition's density — twenty figures among six columns — is unique in the set, and it was deliberate: the Beautiful Gate's crowd was the series' image of the Church's public, the mixed multitude among whom the miracle happens. Its position in the chapel was on the left wall, second from the altar. Of the seven cartoons it is the one whose crowd most repays the slow reading, and the one in which the shop's several hands — the master's apostles, Giovanni's children and ornament, Penni's bystanders — can be told apart most easily; it is, in that sense, the cartoon that shows the enterprise as an enterprise, many hands under one design, which is what the whole tapestry project was. Bernini knew the columns from the originals in St Peter's; the cartoon's use of them, a century earlier, is the first Renaissance monument to their legend.

A Wikidata item for a lost work by Raphael — described as a "lost fresco" and associated with the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart — whose image is Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving of the Judgement of Paris (c. 1515–17), the print made from Raphael's drawing: Paris, seated at the left with his dog, hands the apple to Venus, who stands between Juno and Minerva, attended by Cupid; at the right, a group of river-gods and nymphs recline on the bank — the three figures at the lower right, a river-god and two naiads seated in the foreground, being the group that Manet took for the Déjeuner sur l'herbe in 1863; above, in the sky, Apollo in his chariot, the Zodiac, and the gods. The composition is known only from the print and from copies; whether it was ever painted — as a fresco, as Wikidata says, or otherwise — is uncertain; what is certain is that Raphael drew it for Marcantonio, that the engraving was among the most celebrated prints of the century, and that its figures passed into the repertory of European art. The design is the most complete of Raphael's antique-style compositions for the press: derived from Roman sarcophagi of the Judgement (one, in the Villa Medici, supplies the arrangement), it is a frieze of some twenty figures in the classical manner, with the gods above, and its river-gods and nymphs are among the most graceful nudes he invented. The print's influence runs from the Fontainebleau school through Rubens to Manet, whose borrowing of the right-hand group is the most famous instance in modern art of a Renaissance composition reused. The Stuttgart connection in Wikidata presumably refers to an impression of the print or a copy in the Staatsgalerie; the entry records the design as Raphael's and the work as lost, which is what the item says. It has Wikipedia articles in four languages, which tiers it among the documented works. The print's fame in its own century was immense: it was copied in majolica, in enamels, in relief and in painting, and its groups were quarried by the decorative painters of Fontainebleau and the Netherlands; its river-gods, in particular, became a standard of the reclining male nude. Manet's borrowing — the seated river-god and the two naiads at the right, translated into a picnic with two dressed men and a naked woman — was recognised at once by the critics of 1863, who saw it as either homage or insolence; it was both, and it made the Judgement of Paris one of the few Renaissance compositions that modern art cannot do without. The original drawing is lost; the print survives in many impressions, the best in the British Museum, the Albertina and the Metropolitan. Whether Raphael ever intended the composition for a wall is unknowable; the print was, in any case, its destination, and its life has been on paper. It is the most consequential of the lost Raphaels, because it was never quite lost. Its Stuttgart association is a clerical accident; its home is wherever there is a good impression of the print.

The first of the seven surviving Raphael cartoons, about 360 by 400 cm, distemper on paper, lent by the Royal Collection to the Victoria and Albert Museum: the scene from Luke 5 in which Christ, seated in Peter's boat on the lake of Gennesaret, tells the fishermen to cast their nets, and the nets come up full; Peter, recognising the miracle, kneels before Christ in the boat, Andrew behind him spreading his arms in wonder; in the second boat, James and John haul the laden net with Zebedee; on the shore, cranes; across the water, a landscape with a city and the crowd that had listened to Christ. The composition is the calmest of the set — a horizontal of two boats on still water, the figures large against the lake, Christ at the left edge and the action rising towards the right — and the landscape, with its reflections and its distant town, is the most extensive in the cartoons, painted with the help of Giovanni da Udine, whose cranes and fish are a natural-history still life. The cartoon's subject was the first in the series as hung — the calling of Peter — and its place on the chapel's wall was beside the altar. Its design is among the most admired of the set: the kneeling Peter, the spreading Andrew, the straining fishermen make a chain of gestures from adoration to labour, and the water, which Raphael had never painted at this scale, is rendered as a luminous mirror. The tapestry woven from it is in the Vatican (Q131290595). The cartoon was restored in 2019–20 and is the best preserved of the seven; its blues have held, and the landscape's reflections are legible. It is also the cartoon that the English tradition loved best — Reynolds praised the "simplicity" of its Christ, and the Victorians reproduced it as the image of the Gospel by the lake. A technical note: the cartoon's water was painted in layers of blue and green distemper with the reflections dragged in a lighter tone — a method improvised for the occasion, since neither fresco nor panel practice offered a model for a lake at this scale — and the passage, which reads from ten metres as still water, dissolves at arm's length into broad, confident strokes: the best place in the seven to see how the distemper manner worked. The two boats, hopelessly small for their crews — a criticism made since the eighteenth century — are the one licence: Raphael shrank them so that the figures would dominate, and the choice, deliberate and visible, is a small lesson in the priority of the figure over the fact in Renaissance narrative. The tapestry's position beside the altar made the Draught the first scene a celebrant saw; its Christ, seated low in the boat with his hand raised to the kneeling Peter, is the series' gentlest figure, and the design's stillness — one miracle, two boats, a lake — was the series' overture. Reynolds devoted pages of his fifth Discourse to it; Turner, improbably, admired its water.

The sixth cartoon, about 350 by 540 cm, distemper on paper, in the V&A on loan from the Royal Collection: the scene from Acts 14 in which the people of Lystra, having seen Paul heal a cripple, take him and Barnabas for Mercury and Jupiter and prepare to sacrifice to them — at the centre, before a classical altar, a priest raises an axe over an ox garlanded for sacrifice while attendants hold it and a boy plays pipes; at the left, Paul tears his clothes in horror and Barnabas clasps his hands; at the right, the healed cripple, his crutches discarded, kneels with his hands joined, and the crowd presses; behind, the town's buildings and a statue of Mercury. The composition is a classical relief: the sacrifice group is taken directly from Roman sarcophagi and the Arch of Constantine's reliefs — the ox, the axe-bearer, the pipe-player, the altar are antique stock — and the cartoon is the most archaeological of the set, the Raphael of the antiquities survey applied to Scripture. The figures are monumental and the drama clear: the pagan rite at the centre, the apostles' refusal at the left, the cured man's faith at the right, a triangle of belief, error and conversion. The tapestry woven from it is in the Vatican (Q131290374). The cartoon was restored in 2019–20 and is in good condition; its architecture and its sacrificial group are legible, and the axe-bearer, seen from behind with his arm raised, is among the most copied figures of the series — the antique made Christian, and then made European. The boy with the pipes, at the altar's foot, is a study from life that the shop's children in the Loggia would repeat. The scene's texts — Paul's cry, 'We also are men of like passions with you' — made it, for the Reformation century, an ambiguous image: the refusal of divine honours to men could be read against the papacy itself, and Protestant prints reused the composition with that edge. Raphael's design, made for the Pope's chapel, intended the opposite — the apostles' humility as the Church's credential — and the double use is a reminder that compositions, once loosed in print and cloth, serve whoever holds them. The ox, garlanded and about to die, painted with Giovanni da Udine's animal exactness, is the set's finest beast. The cartoon hung fourth on the left in the chapel's order. Among the seven it is the scholar's favourite: the most antique, the most exactly constructed, and the one in which the series' argument — the apostles' refusal of worship — is staged with the least rhetoric and the most archaeology; its altar group has been traced relief by relief, and the tracing is a seminar in how Raphael used the past. Goethe, who studied the set in engravings before he saw anything Italian, singled out the Lystra for its 'antique truth'; the judgement has held. The tapestry's ox and altar, woven with the Flemish love of the particular, are the set's best passage of animal and still-life weaving.

A fresco fragment transferred, or a panel, about 130 cm high, in the Louvre (INV 657): a standing female figure, classically draped, crowned with wheat and holding a cornucopia and ears of grain — Ceres, or Abundance — of the type of the mythological decorations that Raphael's workshop produced in the late 1510s for Roman villas and palaces; the Louvre associates it with the master's circle and Wikidata credits it to Raphael. The figure's design — the turning stance, the drapery, the crown — is of the Farnesina family, and the execution is the shop's; the piece has been connected with the decorations of the Palazzo of the Chigi circle and with detached fragments of Roman façade painting, without certainty. It entered the French collection early and has been catalogued under various names. Its interest is as a specimen of the workshop's decorative mythology at the moment of the Psyche loggia — the single antique figure, half goddess and half ornament, that the Raphael school scattered through Roman decoration and that Fontainebleau would import; the Louvre shows it among the school pictures. The attribution to Raphael himself extends only to the type; the hand is anonymous, and the entry records it as the catalogue does. The figure's identification oscillates in the old inventories between Ceres, Abundance and a Muse — the wheat crown argues Ceres, the cornucopia Abundance, and the distinction mattered little to the decorators; such figures were the connective tissue of Roman palace decoration, and the Louvre's specimen is valuable precisely because so few survived the demolitions: the façades and loggie that the workshop and its followers covered with painted goddesses are almost all gone, and this panel — with the drawings and Polidoro's ruined façades — is what remains of a whole genre. Its French history goes back, by some accounts, to the sixteenth-century royal purchases; it has hung in the Louvre's reserve and its galleries by turns, and it awaits the study that the school's decorative fragments have generally lacked. A figure of this type — the standing goddess with cornucopia — appears in the Loggia's ornament and in the Farnesina's spandrels, and the Louvre panel may preserve a design made for one of those campaigns and executed separately; the suggestion is speculative, but it places the piece where it belongs: in the orbit of the workshop's decorative production of 1516–19, whose surviving fixed works (the Stufetta, the Loggetta, the Loggia) it usefully complements as a movable specimen. The figure's serene frontality and her wheat crown also made her, in reproduction, an emblem of agricultural plenty — she appears on nineteenth-century French agricultural society diplomas, an afterlife as improbable and as characteristic as any in the school's diaspora: the workshop's goddesses were made to be useful, and they went on being used. The panel's dimensions and support have been variously recorded in the catalogues — a sign of how little sustained attention it has had — and a modern technical examination would settle its relation to the workshop's documented decorative campaigns; until then it remains a handsome orphan of the school, with the master's type and nobody's certain hand.

The picture

A panel transferred to canvas, 318 by 229 cm, in the Prado, Madrid: Christ, fallen under the cross on the road to Calvary, turns his head back towards his mother — the Virgin, at the right, kneeling, stretches out her arms to him in the spasm of grief (spasimo) that gives the picture its name; around them, the procession — Simon of Cyrene lifting the cross, a soldier hauling on the rope round Christ's waist, another with a halberd driving the march on, horsemen with banners behind, the two thieves led away up the hill at the left, where the crosses wait; the holy women crowd behind the Virgin, and the whole moves from right to left against a dark sky. The composition is the Colonna predella's Procession to Calvary (Q26705837) reconceived at altarpiece scale: the fallen Christ at the centre, the exchange of looks between son and mother as the heart of the scene.

The commission and the shipwreck

The altarpiece was painted around 1515–16 for the Olivetan monastery of Santa Maria dello Spasimo at Palermo — the church of the Virgin's Spasm, whose dedication the picture illustrates — and Vasari tells its famous story: the ship carrying it to Sicily was wrecked, and the crated panel floated to Genoa, where it was recovered undamaged, "guarded by the winds and the waves"; the monks reclaimed it through the Pope, and it reached Palermo, where it became, Vasari says, more famous than the mountain of Vulcan. In 1661 the Spanish viceroy obtained it for Philip IV, in exchange for privileges to the monastery; it went to Madrid, was taken by the French to Paris in 1813, transferred there from panel to canvas, and returned to the Prado in 1822. It has been in the Prado's Raphael room since.

The design and the workshop

The Spasimo is the first of the great late altarpieces produced by the Raphael enterprise at full stretch: the design is the master's — the drawings (a modello at the Louvre, studies elsewhere) show his hand, and Marcantonio's engraving of the composition spread it at once — and the execution is shared with the workshop, Giulio Romano and Penni being credited with much of it; the Prado's technical examination for the 2012 Late Raphael exhibition mapped the hands and confirmed the master's presence in the principal heads, above all Christ's. The composition is built on Dürer: the Great Passion's Bearing of the Cross, whose fallen Christ turning to the women Raphael openly adapts — the clearest of all his borrowings from the German master whose prints he traded for drawings — and on the antique relief. Its energy is the Fire in the Borgo's applied to the Passion; the soldiers' violence, the horses, the banners are the Roman narrative manner at its most crowded.

The picture's fortune

The Spasimo was, for the Spanish world, Raphael's greatest work: in the Escorial and the Prado it was ranked with the Transfiguration, engraved and copied endlessly (the copies run from full-scale altarpieces to devotional prints), and its exchange of looks between the fallen Christ and the reaching Virgin became the standard image of the Passion's human centre in Spanish devotion; Goya's contemporaries still cited it as the summit of expression. Modern criticism, cooler about the late workshop, has treated it as a document of the enterprise; the 2012 exhibition restored its standing, and its Christ's head — turned back, thorn-crowned, meeting his mother's eyes — is among the most affecting passages Raphael designed. The Prado shows it with the Cardinal, the Fish and the late Holy Families; it is the largest Raphael in Spain, and the picture around which the museum's Raphael room is built.

What to look at

The exchange of gazes — Christ's turned head, the Virgin's outstretched arms; Simon's grip on the cross; the rope; the two thieves on the hill; and, close, the head of Christ, where the master's hand is surest. Then Dürer's woodcut, which the design transforms, and Marcantonio's engraving, which carried it back north.

The Spasimo and Sicily

The Palermo years deserve recording, because they made the picture's legend. Santa Maria dello Spasimo, begun in 1509 outside the walls, was never finished — its roofless nave is now a concert space — and the altarpiece, arriving after its shipwreck, became the city's chief artistic possession: the Sicilians, Vasari says, held it dearer than Etna. Its removal in 1661, negotiated by the viceroy with the monastery under papal licence and popular protest, followed the pattern of the Baglioni Deposition's — the strong took the Raphaels — and Palermo received, as Perugia had, privileges and a copy. In Spain the picture was framed by Velázquez's generation as the summit of the "grand manner"; it survived the 1734 Alcázar fire (carried out through the smoke, with the Fish), and the Paris transfer of 1813 — panel to canvas, by the same team that transferred the Foligno — saved it from its worm-eaten support at the cost of surface. The 2012 Prado restoration recovered its depth of colour and settled the debate about its state: worn but authentic, the design's power intact.

The Dürer connection

The borrowing from Dürer's woodcut is worth dwelling on, because it reverses the usual direction of exchange. Northern artists had copied Italians for a century; here the most admired painter in Italy took, from a German print, the central group of a major altarpiece — the fallen Christ turning under the cross — and the taking was noticed and approved: Vasari, who elsewhere condescends to the Germans, praises the picture without reserve. The episode belongs with the 1515 drawing sent to Nuremberg (Q18688665): between Raphael and Dürer there was, for a few years, a genuine commerce of inventions, conducted through prints and couriers, and the Spasimo is its largest monument. What Raphael added to the woodcut's motif was the Virgin's outstretched arms — the spasm itself, taken from the Italian tradition of the swooning Madonna that the theologians of the day were, at that very moment, debating (could the Virgin faint? the Spasimo controversy) — so that the picture's two sources, German print and Italian devotion, meet in the exchange of gazes at its centre.

The mosaic dome of the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome — Raphael's design, executed in 1516 by the Venetian mosaicist Luigi di Pace: at the crown, God the Father, foreshortened from below with his arms spread, in the act of creation; around him, in the dome's eight compartments, the planetary spheres — Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the sphere of the fixed stars — each as a pagan planetary deity guided by an angel who rests on the celestial globe, in a marriage of astrology and providence: the planets, which govern the horoscope (Agostino Chigi's, whose chapel this is, and whose Farnesina ceiling Peruzzi had painted with the same theme), are shown steered by angels under the Creator's command — pagan fate subdued to Christian providence. The mosaics are the only ones ever made from Raphael's designs, and the cartoons for them (some survive in part; a study for God the Father is at Oxford) show the figures conceived for the medium: broad contours, simple masses, gold grounds. The dome crowns the funerary chapel that Raphael designed for Chigi entire — architecture (a miniature Pantheon-Bramante crossing), mosaics, marbles, and the pyramidal tombs — begun in 1513 and completed, after both men's deaths in 1520, by Bernini in the seventeenth century, who added his Habakkuk and Daniel; the ensemble is the first Renaissance chapel conceived by one artist in all its media, and the dome is its heaven. The mosaics were restored in the twentieth century; their gold and colour are brilliant, and the visitor to the Popolo — the church also of Caravaggio's Cerasi Chapel — should stand under the Chigi dome and look up: it is the one place where a Raphael heaven is made of glass and gold, as the Disputa's only pretends to be. The chapel's programme deserves its sentence: Chigi's tomb-chapel joins the planetary dome (the soul's ascent through the spheres), the pyramid tombs (Egypt and eternity), the prophets Jonah and Elijah in sculpture (resurrection), and the altarpiece of the Virgin's birth (begun by Sebastiano, of all people, after Raphael's death) into a single argument about death and rising — the most complete piece of Renaissance funerary theology, designed by the painter for the banker, both of whom died in the same month of April 1520, leaving the chapel to Bernini's completion and to the readers of its layered programme. Raphael's mosaic heaven, at the top, is where the argument ends: the Creator with his arms spread, setting the spheres in motion — the first cause, in gold, above a banker's grave. The mosaics' execution by Luigi di Pace is documented by the date and the mosaicist's name in the dome itself; Raphael's cartoons, at full scale and in colour, are recorded by Vasari, and their translation into tesserae — the first Renaissance mosaics designed by a major painter since the medieval workshops lapsed — required the design's simplification into the broad contours the medium demands, a discipline Raphael met as he met the tapestries': by designing for the material. The planetary gods — Apollo in his chariot for the Sun, Diana for the Moon, the rest with their attributes — are the antique pantheon set into a Christian ceiling, each pagan figure paired with its guiding angel in an image of supervision that the Counter-Reformation would have found too generous and the Chigi court found exact.

A panel, about 90 by 63 cm, in the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh (Bridgewater loan): the Virgin, standing in a landscape — the "walk" (passeggio) of the title — pauses as the Christ Child and the infant Baptist embrace before her; Joseph, behind at the right, approaches down the path; a wide landscape with a river and town. The picture is a workshop production of the late 1510s on a Raphaelesque design — the attribution has ranged from Raphael himself (rarely) through Giulio Romano and Penni to the shop at large, and the Edinburgh catalogue gives it to the workshop; the design's charm — the standing Virgin looking down at the embracing children, the family on a journey — made it one of the most copied of the school's Madonnas, with versions in many collections. It came to Britain with the Orléans collection in 1798 and to the Bridgewater loan in 1945. The Virgin's type and the children's embrace are the late Roman Madonna's; the landscape is the shop's Flemish-Roman hybrid; the execution is smooth and a little sweet. Its interest is as the type of the "promenading" Holy Family that the workshop popularised — a domestication of the Flight into Egypt into a family walk — and as a specimen, in a public gallery beside the Bridgewater Madonna and the Holy Family with the Palm, of the distance between the master's hand and the shop's: Edinburgh's three Raphaelesque pictures, one autograph, one master-and-shop, one shop, are a graded lesson in connoisseurship. The design's popularity outlived the century: Passeggio copies hang in a dozen European collections, and the composition was engraved repeatedly; the Edinburgh version, the best, was itself long catalogued as Raphael, and its demotion to the shop — argued by Crowe and Cavalcaselle and settled in the twentieth century — is a standard episode in the literature of the late workshop. Recent technical study has kept a hand for the master in the design stage and given the surface to the shop, with Penni the usual candidate; the picture's sweetness, which the nineteenth century loved, is exactly the shop's register — the master's designs, in his own hand, are never quite this comfortable. The picture's title-motif — the walk itself — deserves a note: the Holy Family shown mid-journey, pausing on a path, was a workshop invention with no strict textual source (it conflates the Return from Egypt with the meeting of the children), and its appeal was precisely its informality — the sacred family as travellers, met on a road; the seventeenth century, which loved the theme, developed it into the 'Rest on the Flight' industry, and the Passeggio's casual grace stands near that genre's head. The Edinburgh panel's condition is good — the Bridgewater pictures were carefully kept — and its surface, smooth and unbroken, is itself evidence in the attribution question: the master's panels carry pentimenti, and this one carries none. It was engraved as Raphael's by the Orléans gallery's engravers, and the print's diffusion gave the composition its European currency before the attribution's demotion; the design, at least, deserves the currency.

A panel, 138 by 109 cm, in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples: the Virgin, seated in a dim chamber, supports the Christ Child, who stands on her lap and raises his hand to bless the infant Baptist, kneeling with his cross; Saint Elizabeth, seated beside the Virgin, holds the Baptist's shoulder and looks on; behind, in the shadow at the right, Joseph; the light falls on the group from the left. The picture was painted around 1516–18 for Leonello Pio da Carpi, lord of Meldola, by Vasari's account, and passed through the Farnese collection to Naples; it was among the most famous of the late Madonnas — its name, "of divine love," is early, and copies abound — and its attribution has swung between Raphael and the workshop, with Gianfrancesco Penni's name most often attached to the execution; the design, and perhaps the Virgin's head, are the master's. Capodimonte's technical examination in the 2010s, published for an exhibition dedicated to the picture, found an underdrawing of high quality with pentimenti, and argued for Raphael's substantial share; the debate continues. The composition — the blessing Child, the two mothers, the kneeling Baptist, the dark chamber — is the Madonna dell'Impannata's made devotional and nocturnal; the light, falling on the Child's body and the Virgin's face out of shadow, is the late manner's Leonardism, and it points towards the Transfiguration's lower half. It hangs in Capodimonte's Farnese gallery with the Farnese Cardinal; it is the most important of the late Madonnas in Italy outside Florence, and the best place to weigh the master-or-Penni question with one's own eyes. The picture's fame in the seicento was immense — the Divino Amore was, with the Seggiola and the Spasimo, among the most copied of all Raphaels, and its name became a devotional brand; Poussin's and Sassoferrato's Madonnas know it. The Farnese acquired it from the Pio da Carpi inheritance, and it hung in Parma and then Naples with the family's collection; its journey is the standard Farnese route. The 2010s examination — infrared and X-ray at Capodimonte, published in a dedicated exhibition — found under the surface a first version with differences in Elizabeth and the architecture, and argued from the pentimenti that the invention happened on this panel, not in a shop copy; the argument has persuaded some and not others, and the picture remains the test case for the late Madonnas: those who see Raphael in it see him everywhere in the late work; those who see Penni see the enterprise. The name 'of divine love' attached itself early, from the confraternity of the Divino Amore or from the picture's mood — the sources differ — and it fitted the image's fortune: as a devotional composition it was reproduced at every scale, and its kneeling Baptist blessed by the standing Child became a standard pairing. The dark chamber, with the light entering from the left onto the Child's body, is the picture's most forward-looking feature; whether it is Raphael's Leonardism or Penni's is, once more, the question. Naples shows the picture with its technical dossier summarised on the label — a practice more museums should adopt — and the visitor can weigh the X-ray's first version against the surface. Few late Madonnas offer so open a case.

A canvas, 76 by 107 cm, in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome: two men in half-length, side by side, against a dark ground — at the left Andrea Navagero, bearded, in a black cap and dark coat, turning his head to look over his shoulder at the viewer; at the right Agostino Beazzano, clean-shaven, in a black cap and dark coat, facing forward and looking out; their bodies turned slightly towards each other, their heads in opposite directions. Navagero (1483–1529) was a Venetian humanist, poet, historian of the Republic and later ambassador to Spain and France; Beazzano (c. 1490–1549) was his friend, a Venetian poet in Bembo's circle; both were in Rome in 1516 as Bembo's companions, and Bembo wrote to Cardinal Bibbiena in April of that year that the two were about to "return to Venice and to be painted by Raphael" in a single portrait — the document that dates and identifies the picture. Bembo owned it; it passed to his heirs and, in the seventeenth century, to the Pamphilj, in whose Roman palace-gallery it has hung since.

The double portrait is rare in Raphael's work — the Self-portrait with a Friend (Q2275653) is the other — and this one is the earliest of the type in Italian painting to show two friends of equal standing side by side, without hierarchy or narrative; the two heads, one turned and one frontal, are composed as a pair, and the picture's subject is friendship, or the literary companionship that Bembo's circle cultivated. The handling is broad and warm, the dark grounds and black costumes in the manner of the Castiglione and the Altoviti, the faces modelled with the directness of the late Roman portraits; the picture has been restored and somewhat flattened by relining, and parts — Beazzano's coat especially — are summary, which has led some to see workshop participation; the heads are generally accepted as Raphael's. It hangs in the Doria Pamphilj's gallery in a room with Titian's Salome and Caravaggio's Rest on the Flight, and it is the Pamphilj's one Raphael. Its interest, beyond its quality, is as a document of the humanist Rome of Leo X in the year of the Cortegiano's first circulation: two Venetian poets, friends of Bembo and Castiglione, painted together by the friend of both, on the eve of their return home. The picture's attribution was doubted in the nineteenth century — it was given to Sebastiano and to Giulio — and restored to Raphael in the twentieth on the strength of Bembo's letter and the quality of the heads; its relining, done in Rome in the eighteenth century, flattened the surface and has made the costume passages hard to judge. The Doria Pamphilj shows it in the gallery's second wing, in a room of portraits, where its two heads hold their own among Titians. The two poets were, incidentally, the friends who accompanied Bembo to the Vatican to see the Stanze, and Beazzano left a Latin epigram on the School of Athens; the portrait is a likeness of its first literate viewers.

A canvas, 85 by 66 cm, in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti: a cardinal of about forty-five, seen at half-length and three-quarter view turned to the left, in a scarlet mozzetta and biretta over a white rochet, his right hand holding a folded letter and resting on a ledge, his face long, clean-shaven, shrewd, with a long nose and a slight smile, his eyes looking at the viewer; the background is a plain green-grey. The sitter is Bernardo Dovizi (1470–1520), called Bibbiena from his Tuscan birthplace, the Medici's secretary and fixer, made cardinal by Leo X in 1513, the wittiest man of the court, the author of the comedy La Calandria (1513), the patron of Raphael's stufetta and loggia in the Vatican, and the uncle of Maria Bibbiena, to whom Raphael was betrothed in 1514 and whom he never married; he died in 1520, eight months after the painter. The portrait was presumably painted around 1516, when Bibbiena was at the height of his influence, and it came to Florence with the Medici inheritance; it has been in the Pitti since.

The attribution has been debated — the picture is a replica or a version, some have said, of a lost original, or a workshop portrait on Raphael's design, or a work of Giulio Romano — and its condition, relined and somewhat abraded, has not helped; the Pitti gives it to Raphael, and the face, with its shrewd intelligence and its faint smile, is of his quality; the costume is broader. The composition is the Cardinal of the Prado's — the red mass, the pale face, the hand on the ledge — with a letter added and a smile; and the portrait's character is its sitter's: Bibbiena was the court's wit, and the picture shows a man amused. It hangs in the Pitti's Raphael rooms with the Inghirami, the other portrait of a learned churchman, and the two make a pair of the Roman intelligentsia — the librarian and the secretary — painted by the man they patronised. A version in a private collection has been proposed as the original; the question is open, and the Pitti's is the picture that the tradition has known. Bibbiena's friendship with Raphael was one of the closest of the painter's Roman life: the cardinal lodged him in the Vatican, commissioned his bathroom and loggia, arranged his betrothal to Maria, and was, by Vasari's account, among those at his deathbed; the portrait, painted for the cardinal's own rooms, is the record of that intimacy, and the smile is the smile of a man painted by a friend. The canvas's relining in the eighteenth century, and a cleaning in the twentieth, have left the surface thin in the mozzetta; the face and the hand with the letter are the best-preserved passages, and they are the ones that matter. The letter in the hand — folded, sealed, unaddressed — is the secretary's attribute, as the glass is the Pope's and the pen was Inghirami's. Raphael's churchmen hold what they do. Bibbiena, who wrote comedies, holds a letter.

A drawing in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston — pen and wash, associated with the sedia gestatoria scene (the museum's image shows the papal chair borne in procession) — connected with the projects of the Leonine years for scenes of papal history: the procession of Sylvester, the pope of Constantine's legend, whose story the Sala di Costantino would paint after Raphael's death. The sheet, acquired by Mrs Gardner with Berenson's advice, is among the museum's small group of Raphael-circle drawings; its attribution has been given to Raphael and to the workshop, and its purpose — a first idea for the Costantino cycle, or for another papal commission — is not settled. The drawing's interest is as evidence of the planning, in the last years, of the papal-history decorations that the heirs executed: the procession with the borne chair, the guards and the crowd is the Heliodorus's left group turned into an independent subject. Wikidata records it without type or article; the Gardner's cataloguing is the source. It hangs, like everything in the museum, where its founder placed it, in the Raphael Room beside the Inghirami and the Colonna Pietà — Mrs Gardner's little Roman court.

The small bathroom — stufetta, a heated bath-chamber barely two and a half metres square — of Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena on the third floor of the Apostolic Palace, frescoed in 1516 by Raphael's workshop (Giulio Romano, Giovanni da Udine and others) to the master's designs: walls and vault covered with grotesque ornament on red and black grounds in the manner of the Domus Aurea, with small mythological scenes of Venus and Cupid — Venus born from the sea, Venus and Adonis, Venus wounded by the rose's thorn, Cupid's punishments — in painted panels, marble basins, and niches; the whole an antiquarian jewel-box of pagan love imagery, made for a cardinal, inside the Vatican. Bibbiena's letters to Bembo document the work's progress and his delight; the room, private then and now, survives with its frescoes somewhat worn, and is not on the public itinerary — it is among the least seen and most storied of Raphael-school works, known through photographs, engravings and special-permission visits. Its importance is double: it is the purest surviving example of the all'antica grotesque decoration that the workshop revived from Nero's buried palace — the Loggetta beside it and the great Loggia (Q3836415) apply the same vocabulary at scale — and it is the frankest document of the pagan taste of Leo's court, where a cardinal bathed among Venuses designed by the Pope's painter. The little Venus scenes were engraved by Marcantonio's school and circulated; the room itself, sealed in the palace, became a legend — the "secret bathroom of the cardinal" — and its rediscovery by art history in the nineteenth century embarrassed the Raphael of the Madonnas' devotees. It is, in fact, the workshop's most concentrated essay in the antique, and the model, through prints, of three centuries of grotesque decoration. Bibbiena's letters to Bembo, written while the work was in progress in June 1516, are the most vivid documents we have of a Renaissance patron's pleasure: he reports the little scenes as they dry, jokes about the Venuses, and demands that Bembo come and bathe. The room's programme — the loves of Venus, in a bathroom, for a cardinal-playwright — is the Leonine court's self-portrait in miniature, and its survival, sealed within the palace that also holds the Disputa, is one of history's neater ironies: the sacred and profane Raphael, twenty metres apart, under one roof. Illustrated surveys and the occasional documentary have made the stufetta's images familiar; the room itself remains closed, its fragile grounds unable to bear visitors, and it is likely to remain the most famous bathroom in art history that almost no one has entered. Technical examination of the stufetta in the 1970s and 2010s identified the hands — Giulio's in the mythologies, Giovanni da Udine's in the ornament and animals — and confirmed the loss of several scenes to damp and early repainting; engravings by the Raimondi school and seventeenth-century copies preserve the lost panels' compositions, so that the little room's programme can be reconstructed complete. It was, in effect, a built manifesto of the antiquarian Raphael: the Domus Aurea's manner, studied on the spot by torchlight (the workshop's signatures survive in the grotte), reproduced for a modern patron at the exact scale of the ancient models.

The fourth wall of the Stanza dell'Incendio, about 500 by 670 cm, painted in 1516–17 by the workshop — chiefly Gianfrancesco Penni — on Raphael's design: the coronation of Charlemagne by Leo III in St Peter's on Christmas Day 800, the founding act of the Holy Roman Empire. The scene is set in the nave of Old St Peter's, rendered with its columns and its apse: the Pope, enthroned at the right, places the crown on the kneeling emperor's head; cardinals and bishops attend; the Frankish court, in armour and robes, fills the left; at the lower edge, choirboys and pages, and on the steps a row of clerics and a chamberlain; above, the basilica's vaults. Leo III has Leo X's features and Charlemagne those of Francis I of France — the fresco was painted in the year after Leo's meeting with Francis at Bologna (December 1515), where the Concordat was agreed, and the coronation of the Frankish king by the pope was a compliment to the French alliance and a statement of the papacy's ancient right to crown emperors. The composition is a ceremonial assembly like the Oath's, more crowded and more splendid: the gold and red of the vestments, the armour of the Franks, the great columns of the nave, make a display of the Church's magnificence. The execution is Penni's and the shop's — the figures repetitive, the faces stock — and Raphael's part was the design and, perhaps, the portraits of the two principals; a drawing for the composition has been connected with the Louvre modello tradition. The basilica's interior is a record of Old St Peter's before its demolition, which Raphael as architect was then carrying out — one of the few painted views of the ancient nave. The wall was cleaned in the 2010s. It is the most obviously political of the Stanze's walls and the least interesting as painting; but it is a document of a moment — the Medici pope crowning the French king's ancestor in the church he was pulling down — that the rest of the century would not forget. Wikidata's date of "800" is the event's, an error corrected here; the fresco belongs to 1516–17. The choirboys at the lower edge, singing from a book, and the pages on the steps are the wall's liveliest passage and the one in which the workshop's Roman manner — Penni's smooth, rather sweet handling — is most characteristic; the gold plate on the table at the right, painted with a goldsmith's care, is a small still life in fresco of the kind the Leonine court enjoyed. The fresco was restored in the 2010s and is in fair condition. The room's ceiling, Perugino's, hangs above all four walls as a reminder of what Raphael's arrival had replaced: the old master's Trinity and allegories, sweet and symmetrical, over the new school's crowded histories — the whole distance of the painter's life, from Perugia to the workshop, in one room. It is the one place in the Vatican where master and pupil, in the old sense, share a ceiling and four walls.

The third wall of the Stanza dell'Incendio, painted around the window in 1516–17 by the workshop on Raphael's design: the scene of 23 December 800, in which Pope Leo III, accused by his enemies before Charlemagne, cleared himself by an oath on the Gospels in the basilica of St Peter, the king and the clergy attending — the event that established, in papal doctrine, that the Pope could be judged by God alone. Leo III has Leo X's features; the scene is set under the vaults of Old St Peter's, with the altar and the Gospels at the centre, the Pope's hand raised, the cardinals and bishops ranged on either side and the Frankish court at the right; the composition is a ceremonial assembly in a basilica, and it is the least dramatic of the room's walls. Its subject was chosen for its doctrine — the inscription on the wall records that "God, not man, judges the bishops" — and the fresco is, in effect, a painted assertion of papal immunity, apt for a pope who had just concluded the Fifth Lateran Council (1517) and who faced, that same year, the first stirrings of Luther. The execution is the workshop's — Penni's and Giulio's — and the figures are stiff; the design, with its balanced groups and its architecture, is Raphael's in type, and the drawings for it show his hand in the composition. The window below the fresco, like the Parnassus's, is incorporated into the design, the altar raised above it. The wall was cleaned in the 2010s and is in fair condition. It is of documentary rather than aesthetic interest — the room in which the papacy, at the moment of its greatest splendour, painted its claim to be above judgement, a few months before the Reformation began; and the Oath's Pope, with Leo X's calm, heavy face, raising his hand over the Gospels, is an image to set against the events of the next decade. The fresco's architecture is its most careful passage: the nave of Old St Peter's, with its columns and its apse mosaic, is rendered from the building as it stood in 1516, and the painting, with the Coronation next to it, is among the few visual records of the Constantinian basilica's interior before its demolition — made, ironically, under the direction of the man demolishing it. The workshop's hand is evident in the stock faces of the clergy and the stiff Frankish court; Raphael's, in the composition's balance and in the Pope's figure. A drawing in the Louvre for the Pope's group has been connected with the wall. The wall's inscription, on a painted tablet — DEI NON HOMINUM EST EPISCOPOS IUDICARE, 'it is for God, not men, to judge bishops' — is the room's one piece of explicit text, and it was read, within the decade, against the Reformers' claim that popes could be judged by councils and by Scripture. The painting is a doctrine; the doctrine would be tested. Few visitors give the wall more than a glance; it is worth the glance for the basilica's nave.

A red-chalk drawing, about 28 by 19 cm, in the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh: a female nude, kneeling, seen from the side with her left arm raised — a study from the model for one of the figures of the Loggia of Psyche at the Farnesina (the pose connects with the women of the Council and Banquet scenes), of the group of red-chalk nudes of 1517–18 that are the summit of Raphael's late draughtsmanship. The sheet — acquired by the Edinburgh gallery in the twentieth century — shows the working method of the loggia: the model (a garzone or, as the softness of these late studies has suggested to some, a female model, unusual for the period) posed in the studio, drawn in red chalk with the light modelling the body, the contour firm and the interior soft; the drawing then passed to the shop for the fresco. The Farnesina nudes in fresco are the shop's; the drawings are the master's, and sheets like this one — with the Windsor Three Graces and the Louvre studies — are the evidence that the late Raphael, amid the architecture and the administration, drew the figure with undiminished and even deepened power. It is among the finest Raphael drawings in Scotland and is shown in the gallery's print room on rotation.

One of the pendentive frescoes of the Loggia of Psyche at the Villa Farnesina (Q3836436): Cupid, flying, points out Psyche to the three Graces, gathered in the air on clouds — one of the ten spandrel scenes of the loggia's ceiling, painted in 1517–18 by Raphael's workshop (this pendentive is usually given to Giulio Romano and associates) from the master's designs, as part of the fable of Cupid and Psyche after Apuleius. The three Graces — three female nudes in the round, seen from three sides in the antique group's manner — are the loggia's homage to the motif Raphael had painted at Chantilly's scale fifteen years before; the red-chalk study for them at Windsor, from the model, is among the most celebrated of his late drawings, and the fresco, executed by the shop, preserves its design with the workshop's harder surface. The pendentive's colours — the nudes against the blue sky, the garlands framing — were recovered in the loggia's 1990s restoration. The entry for the loggia (Q3836436) treats the ensemble; this records the single scene, which Wikidata lists separately. As often in the Farnesina, the drawing is the masterpiece and the fresco its record; but the record, forty feet up in Chigi's garden loggia with the whole fable around it, is where the design lives. The Windsor Three Graces study — three views of one model, turned between poses, the red chalk modelling the backs and flanks with a softness the fresco cannot hold — is by common consent among the greatest life drawings in existence, and its relation to this pendentive is the best single demonstration of what the Farnesina project was: the master drawing at the height of his power for a ceiling he would never touch with a brush. Vasari's complaint — that the loggia, executed by the pupils, lacked the master's finish — was already the sixteenth century's; the drawings answer it. The pendentive's grouping also settled, for the decorative tradition, how three nudes share a cloud: the Carracci's Farnese ceiling and its descendants take the arrangement from here, and the Graces of the French ceilings — Fontainebleau to Versailles — are the Farnesina's at one or two removes. The 1990s restoration of the loggia recovered the blue of the sky fields and the garlands' greens; the frescoes remain harder and drier than the master's own walls, and the visitor should read them as what they are: the shop performing the master's score.

A panel in a South American collection — the "Madonna de Bogotá," recorded in Colombia — of the Madonna del Velo/Madonna di Loreto type: the Virgin lifting the veil from the Child, in the composition of the Chantilly original (Q2427320), which was copied in Raphael's shop and after it in dozens of versions across Europe and, through Spain, the Americas. The Bogotá panel has been claimed, in local tradition and occasional publications, as an original or an early workshop replica; the scholarly literature has not accepted the claim, and the picture is best understood as one of the Loreto composition's many early copies — evidence of how the design travelled the Spanish world. Wikidata lists it with articles in three languages and a genid collection (the record is thin); this entry records it accordingly: a document of the Madonna del Velo's extraordinary diffusion — the most copied of all Raphael's Madonnas — and of the way colonial collections acquired, with the copies, the aura of the name. The Chantilly entry tells the type's story; the Bogotá panel is one of its farthest travels. Its story is representative of a whole class: the Spanish empire's churches and collections received, through Seville's trade, hundreds of Italian devotional pictures and copies, and the best of them acquired, over generations, attributions that rose with local pride; the scattered 'Raphaels' of Latin America — in Bogotá, in Lima, in Mexico — are the archive of that traffic, and their study belongs to the history of taste as much as of attribution. The Bogotá Madonna, whatever its hand, has served its city as a Raphael for a century; the claim's persistence is itself a fact worth recording, and this catalogue records it without endorsing it. The type's original — Chantilly's — has its entry above (Q2427320); the reader comparing the two images will see at once what four generations of copying does to a design, and why the recovery of originals from their copies has been, since Gould's work on this very composition, one of connoisseurship's central crafts. Bogotá's panel awaits that craft's full attention; until it receives it, the entry stands as the record of a claim. There are many such claims in the world's collections; this catalogue includes the one Wikidata does. The reader in Bogotá may take the entry as an invitation: the panel deserves a modern examination, and its result — original copy, shop replica, colonial derivation — would be worth having whichever way it fell. Attribution is not honour but knowledge, and the panel would be interesting under any answer. The same is true, in kind, of every unexamined 'Raphael' in this catalogue's farther reaches; the Bogotá entry stands for them all. Its image, at least, is here; the reader can begin the examination themselves. That, in the end, is what a catalogue with images is for. The claim, the image, and the reader's eye: the rest is scholarship's business, and it moves slowly, as it should. Attribution outlives us all. So, happily, do the pictures, wherever in the world they hang.

The garden loggia of Agostino Chigi's villa (Q1126723), frescoed in 1517–18 by Raphael's workshop to his designs with the fable of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius's Golden Ass: on the vault, two great fictive tapestries — the Council of the Gods and the Wedding Banquet of Cupid and Psyche — painted as though stretched across a pergola; in the fourteen spandrels and lunettes, the fable's episodes (Venus pointing out Psyche to Cupid; Cupid and the Graces, Q121689728; Venus before Jupiter, Q110831269; Psyche carried to heaven; Mercury; the rest); and framing everything, Giovanni da Udine's festoons — garlands of fruit, flowers and vegetables of botanical exactness (the first depiction of maize in European art among them), swagged along the ribs against blue sky. The loggia, open to the garden until it was glazed, was the villa's reception space, decorated for the celebrations of Chigi's marriage in 1519; Raphael, absorbed in St Peter's and the Loggia, designed the cycle — the red-chalk studies (Windsor's Three Graces, the Louvre's Venus, Haarlem's and Chatsworth's sheets) are among his supreme drawings — and Giulio Romano, Penni, Giovanni da Udine and Raffaellino del Colle painted it. Vasari already noted the execution's shortfall; the frescoes, exposed to the open air for two centuries, were restored repeatedly (Maratta's campaign of 1693–94 saved and repainted them; the cleaning of the 1990s recovered what survives), and the loggia today is the grandest surviving monument of the late workshop's mythological manner — the ceiling that taught the Carracci how gods recline. The fable itself — the mortal soul, persecuted by Venus, won to immortality through love's trials — was the humanists' allegory of the soul and the court's compliment to Chigi's bride Francesca Ordeaschi, married in the loggia's shadow; the two "tapestries" of the vault, feasts of gods at ease, are the Renaissance's most complete picture of Olympian leisure, and their device — heaven as a garden party under an awning — is the Farnesina's own self-portrait: Chigi's villa as the place where the gods would choose to dine.

The loggia's restoration history deserves its note: Carlo Maratta's campaign of the 1690s — consolidation, repainting, and the addition of the blue grounds' retouching — was itself a landmark in conservation's history (Bellori wrote its apologia), and the modern cleaning of the 1990s had to negotiate Maratta's layer as part of the monument; what is seen today is Raphael's design, the workshop's execution, and Maratta's rescue, in one surface. The garlands' botany has generated a literature of its own — Giovanni da Udine's swags include over 170 identifiable species, the New World's maize and beans among them within thirty years of Columbus — and the loggia is, among its other titles, the first botanical garden of American plants in European art. Visitors find the villa a short walk from the Trastevere river-bank; its two Raphael rooms — the Galatea's and this — are the most pleasurable hour the school offers anywhere. The loggia's two vault 'tapestries' bear a last note: their fiction — heaven painted as cloth pinned to a pergola — is the Eliodoro ceiling's device monumentalised, and it makes the whole ceiling a picnic canopy: the gods dine under an awning in a rich man's garden, and the fiction winks at its own luxury. Raphael's mythological imagination, which began with the Three Graces' solemn little panel, ends in this sociable key — Olympus as good company — and the loggia's charm, which survives every loss of surface, is that key held for fourteen scenes.

A panel transferred to canvas, 103 by 84 cm, in the Prado, Madrid: the Virgin, at three-quarter length, holds the Christ Child, who sits on her lap and takes a scroll — inscribed ECCE AGNUS DEI — from the infant Baptist; Joseph, behind at the left, leans in; on the table at the lower edge, a rose, which gives the picture its name; the figures against a dark ground. The picture is a late workshop Madonna, around 1517, on Raphael's design — Giulio Romano is the usual name for the execution, with the master's share argued — and it was in the Spanish royal collection by the seventeenth century (the Escorial, then the palace), entering the Prado at its foundation. The composition is the late half-length family at its most compact: the scroll passing between the children (the Terranuova's motif matured), the leaning Joseph, the dark ground of the late manner; the rose on the parapet — possibly a later addition, as some technical studies have suggested — supplies a devotional emblem (the Virgin as rosa mystica) and the name. The picture's smooth, full handling is the shop's late finish; the Child's turning body and the Baptist's profile carry the design's energy. Among the Prado's late Raphaels it is the domestic one — the family at a table, with a flower — and its copies (including the Ulster Museum's, Q119454732, in this catalogue's copies section) spread the design widely. It was included in the 2012 Late Raphael exhibition, attributed to Raphael and Giulio Romano.

The Rose's history in Spain made it one of the most beloved of the royal Raphaels: it hung in the king's private oratory rooms, was engraved for the royal collection's publications, and entered the Prado's first catalogue among the untouchables. Its technical examination for 2012 found the composition complete without the rose — the flower and the table-edge added over finished paint, by the shop or slightly later — which returns the picture to its first state as a pure figure group and explains the name's absence from the earliest records. The design's compactness — four figures locked in a half-length frame, every hand engaged — is the late workshop's classicism at its tightest, and the scroll's ECCE AGNUS DEI, passing from Baptist to Christ, is the Terranuova's motif brought to its final economy: the Lamb announced by a child to a child. The picture's copies — Ulster's among them — carried the design through the British and Irish collections in the nineteenth century, when the Rose was among the most engraved of the Prado's pictures; its domestic scale and its table made it the Prado Raphael that private houses could imagine owning, and the copies are the record of that imagining. The original was restored for the 2012 exhibition; its surface, transferred and thinned, keeps its glow in the flesh passages, and the scroll's inscription is crisp. Among the Prado's four late Raphael-shop pictures — the Spasimo, the Fish, the Visitation, the Rose — the Rose is the one that repays the closest viewing distance: a cabinet composition hung among altarpieces, it asks for the arm's-length attention its first royal owners gave it, and the museum's dense hang obliges the visitor to give it or miss it.

The design's afterlife

The Rose's four-figure knot — Virgin, Child, Baptist, leaning Joseph — became one of the school's standard exports: Giulio repeated it at Mantua, the Flemish Romanists carried it north, and the composition's engraved diffusion made it, with the Seggiola, the most familiar of the 'family at a table' Madonnas; the Ulster copy in this catalogue is one drop of that stream. Its scroll device — the ECCE AGNUS DEI passing between the children — was singled out by the seventeenth-century theorists as a model of how a picture can speak without speech, and Félibien cites it in exactly those terms. The picture's date, c. 1517, sets it beside the Visitation and the Perla in the shop's Spanish-bound group; whether any were painted with Spain in mind, or merely ended there by the gravity that pulled Italian pictures toward the Habsburg collections, the Prado's Raphael room is the result — the largest gathering of the late workshop anywhere, and the place where its argument must be settled. A last note on the frame of reference: the Rose has sometimes been dated after Raphael's death, as a Giulio production of the early 1520s on the master's design — the 2012 catalogue kept it at c. 1517 with Giulio's execution — and the uncertainty of even its decade is a fair measure of how completely the shop absorbed the master's manner. The design is not in doubt; the year is; and that inversion — certain author, uncertain date — is the late workshop's signature condition. The picture was cleaned for 2012; its condition is good, the transfer notwithstanding, and the Child's turning body — the design's engine — reads as freshly as anything in the room. Whether Raphael or Giulio laid the paint, the turn is the master's, and it is the reason the picture holds the wall among its larger neighbours: a small knot of figures, wound tight, by the man who wound the Seggiola. One detail more: the Baptist's profile, pressed close to the Child's turning head, repeats — knowingly or not — the pairing of the Seggiola's two children, and the two pictures, a tondo in Florence and a panel in Madrid, are the same embrace in two grammars. Comparing them is the fastest way to learn what the shop kept of the master and what only the master had. The comparison also measures a decade: the Seggiola of 1513–14, painted by one hand at the height of its powers, and the Rose of 1517 or later, produced by an enterprise — between them lies the transformation of Raphael from painter to institution, which is the last chapter of his story and the first of European art's long age of the studio. The Rose is that age's early flower, which is one more reason for its name to stand. Even the added flower earned its keep, and the name it gave.

A canvas, about 97 by 79 cm, in a private collection: a young man of about twenty-five, seen at three-quarter length and turned to the left, in a magnificent costume — a gold-and-crimson brocade doublet with a fur-trimmed black cloak, a black cap with a gold medal — holding a small gold box in his left hand, his right on his hip, his face clean-shaven, his expression a little sullen, against a dark ground. The sitter is Lorenzo di Piero de' Medici (1492–1519), Leo X's nephew, whom the Pope made Duke of Urbino in 1516 after expelling the della Rovere, and who married Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne in 1518 — the occasion, it is thought, of this portrait, which was sent to France as a likeness for the bride (a letter of 1518 records a portrait of Lorenzo being dispatched); he died of syphilis and consumption in 1519, and Michelangelo's tomb in the New Sacristy is his. The portrait was lost sight of for centuries, known from copies, and rediscovered in the 1960s; it was sold at auction in 2007 for a record price for a Raphael and is in a private collection. Its attribution is to Raphael with workshop participation — the face and hands are of his quality, the brocade has been given to the shop — and it has been shown at the Prado's Late Raphael exhibition of 2012 and elsewhere. The costume is the picture's display: the gold brocade, painted with the breadth of the late workshop, is among the richest passages of textile in the late portraits; the face, slightly petulant, is the face of a young man who had been given a duchy and did not know what to do with it. The picture is a document of the Medici dynastic politics of Leo's reign — the Pope's nephew, painted for a French marriage, by the Pope's painter — and of the late workshop's portrait production; and it is the one Raphael portrait of the Medici family's younger generation, whose faces Michelangelo would idealise in marble. The 2007 sale, at Christie's in New York, brought the picture to public attention for the first time in a generation and set a record for a Raphael at auction; the buyer has lent it since, and the portrait, long a footnote, has entered the canon of the late works. Its technical examination, published with the sale, showed an underdrawing of the Roman workshop's type and pigments of the period. The portrait's French destination — the bride's family, the La Tour d'Auvergne, and Francis I's court — would explain its long absence from the Italian record and its reappearance from a French provenance; the brocade, the box and the medal are the trappings of a prince being presented to in-laws. Lorenzo's premature death, a year after the wedding, made the portrait a memorial almost at once; his daughter, Catherine de' Medici, born weeks before he died, became Queen of France. The portrait thus stands at the head of a French dynasty as well as at the end of a Medici one.

A canvas, 135 by 142 cm, in the Louvre: the young Baptist, a nude adolescent seated on a rock in a wooded wilderness, turns and points with his right arm to a slender cross of reeds at the left, his red mantle slipping from him, a leopard skin beneath; a spring at his feet, dense foliage behind. The picture is the Louvre's version of a composition that exists in several — the Uffizi's (Q3463871) is the version with the strongest claim to the master's design — and the Louvre catalogues its canvas as workshop of Raphael, painted around 1516–18. The subject — the boy prophet alone in the desert, pointing to the cross — was in demand in the late 1510s (Leonardo's Saint John, painted in Rome in these years, is its dark cousin), and the workshop produced it in more than one format; the figure's twisting seated pose is Michelangelesque, from the Sistine ignudi, and the pointing arm carries the Baptist's whole meaning — ecce agnus reduced to a gesture. The Louvre canvas came from the royal collection; its execution is the shop's, smooth and firm; its design is Raphael's circle at its most sculptural. The comparison with Leonardo's Baptist, a few rooms away in the Louvre — the same saint, the same gesture, the one radiant and athletic, the other shadowed and ambiguous — is among the museum's quiet lessons: the two Roman answers, of 1515–18, to the same question. The composition's history is tangled in the way of the late workshop's successes: versions exist in the Uffizi (the Saint John as a Boy, Q3463871, of higher quality), in Bologna, and elsewhere; the invention has been dated 1516–18 and connected with a commission from Cardinal Colonna recorded by Vasari, whose picture — given by the cardinal to his doctor, Vasari says, in gratitude for a cure — has been identified with the Uffizi version. The Louvre canvas, larger and squarer, is the shop's replica for another patron. The type's fortune was long: the seated pointing Baptist became a staple of the Bolognese and French academies (Reni's and Mola's Baptists descend from it), and the Louvre picture, whatever its hand, transmitted the design to the painters who studied in the Grande Galerie. The Louvre picture's own history includes a curiosity: in the nineteenth century it was among the works reproduced for teaching by the École des Beaux-Arts, and its Baptist was a set figure for the concours — the shop's Baptist teaching the French academy's pupils, in a chain of transmission that Raphael, who built his own shop on teachable design, would have recognised. The Louvre's version was restored in the twentieth century; the Uffizi's — the finer — hangs in the Tribuna's orbit, and the two should be compared by anyone weighing the shop's replication practices: same design, two hands, two finishes, one type. The subject's popularity in these exact years — Leonardo's, Raphael's shop's, and Sebastiano's Baptists all date from 1513–18 — reflects a Roman devotional fashion whose centre was the Oratory of San Giovanni; the workshop, as always, served the market it found.

Another pendentive of the Loggia of Psyche (Q3836436): Venus, standing in the air, appeals to Jupiter, enthroned on clouds with his eagle — the moment of the fable in which the goddess, Psyche's persecutor, brings her complaint to the king of the gods; painted 1517–18 by the workshop (Giulio Romano and associates) from Raphael's design, within Giovanni da Udine's garlands. The scene's two figures — the persuading Venus, seen from behind with her drapery slipping, and the attentive Jupiter — are among the loggia's most admired pairings, and the Venus, a standing nude turned from the viewer, derives from a Raphael study of the model of the kind the Windsor and Louvre sheets preserve. The fresco's surface is the shop's; its colour was recovered in the 1990s restoration. Like its companion scenes it was engraved early, and its Venus passed into the European repertory of the persuasive nude. The loggia's entry treats the whole; this records the scene as Wikidata lists it. The loggia's Venus and Jupiter had a particular afterlife in France: engraved in the Fontainebleau circle, it supplied the type of the celestial audience — the standing goddess pleading before the enthroned god — that the French decorators repeated at Fontainebleau and Versailles; Boucher's Olympian ceilings are its distant heirs. The scene's Jupiter, bearded and attentive, with the eagle at his knee, is the workshop's most Michelangelesque god, and the pairing of the two figures across the pendentive's curve is among the loggia's happiest solutions to its awkward fields. A red-chalk study connected with the Venus — the model seen from behind, the drapery slipping — is at the Louvre, and its comparison with the fresco is the loggia's usual lesson; the scene's colour was recovered in the 1990s cleaning. Apuleius's fable, in which the soul (Psyche) suffers Venus's persecution and wins immortality through love, was read by the Farnesina's humanists as an allegory of the soul's ascent — and as a compliment to Chigi's own marriage, celebrated in the villa in 1519 with the loggia new; the ceiling is, among its other things, a wedding decoration, and its gods' good humour suits the occasion.

A panel transferred to canvas, 200 by 145 cm, in the Prado, Madrid: the meeting of Mary and Elizabeth — the two women clasp hands in a landscape, Elizabeth, aged, bending towards the young Virgin, who carries the unborn Christ; at the upper right, in the sky, God the Father in a glory; in the left distance, the Baptism of Christ in the Jordan — the future encounter of the two women's sons — as a subsidiary scene; the landscape green and broad. The altarpiece was commissioned by Giovanni Battista Branconio dell'Aquila — the papal chamberlain and Raphael's close friend, executor of his will, for whom he designed the Palazzo Branconio (Q3361286) — for the church of San Silvestro at L'Aquila, in honour of his father Marino (the inscription records it); it was taken by the Spanish in 1655 for Philip IV, hung in the Escorial, went to Paris in 1813 and returned to the Prado. The execution is given largely to the workshop — Penni's name is usual — on Raphael's design; the two women's meeting, the design's heart, has been claimed for the master's hand. The composition's quiet — two figures clasping hands on a path, the miracle entirely in the encounter — is unique among the late altarpieces, and its subsidiary Baptism, tiny in the distance, is a narrative rhyme of the kind the late workshop enjoyed. The picture was prized in Spain — the Escorial ranked it with the Spasimo — and the Prado shows it in the Raphael room; the 2012 exhibition assigned it to the shop with the master's design and possible retouches, which is where matters rest.

The Visitation's design deserves more than the attribution question. The subject — two pregnant women greeting each other on a road — is among the tenderest in the Gospel repertory, and Raphael's solution gives it the whole picture: no crowd, no architecture, only the two figures bending together, their clasped hands at the centre, the older woman's reverence and the younger's grace in one linked movement. The landscape's breadth and the distant Baptism make the meeting an episode in a continuing story — the two hidden children will meet again at the Jordan — and the God the Father above, in his glory, blesses the whole chain. The design's quiet was noticed: Poussin, who studied the Spanish royal Raphaels in engraving, built his own Visitation manner on it, and the picture's clasped hands became the subject's standard. Branconio's commission, for his father's memorial in their provincial city, gives the picture its human context — a courtier's monument to a parent, ordered from a friend — and the L'Aquila provenance, unusual among the late works, is a reminder that the enterprise served the Abruzzi as well as the courts. The picture's Spanish afterlife included a curious honour: it hung in Philip IV's bedchamber suite, among the works the king kept closest, and the royal inventories describe it with unusual warmth; the Bourbon court kept the placement. Its transfer to canvas in Paris flattened the surface, as with its companions; the faces of the two women survived best, and they are the picture. A drawing for the composition at Chatsworth, in the workshop's finished-modello manner, preserves the design's first state, with small differences in the landscape; it is the usual evidence of the usual process — the master's or the shop's modello, the panel after it — and it anchors the picture's date to 1517. One more inheritance deserves note: the Visitation's embracing-profile composition became, through the Escorial copies, the model for the subject in Spanish colonial painting, and Cuzco and Mexican Visitations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries still keep its two bending figures — the Prado picture's design living on, like the Loreto's, at the empire's far edge. Few of the late workshop's inventions travelled further.

Condition and display

The picture's transfer and its Escorial centuries have left it more worn than its Prado companions, and the landscape's greens have sunk; the two women's heads and hands, the design's heart, are well preserved, and the 1990s cleaning recovered the sky's storm-light around the God the Father. The Prado shows it on the Raphael room's left wall, where its quietness is easily overpowered by the Spasimo opposite; the visitor should give it its minute — the clasped hands ask for no more, and reward it.

The two women

A closing observation. Raphael's art began, in the Umbrian altarpieces, with figures who could not touch each other across the composition's symmetry; it ends, in pictures like this, with touch as the whole subject — Elizabeth's hands on Mary's, the Spasimo's reaching arms, the Transfiguration's pointing chain. The Visitation, shop-executed as it may be, belongs to that last chapter: two figures, one gesture, and the gesture is the meaning. That the design could survive Penni's surface is the proof of what the late Raphael had learned to put into a design.

Drawings and the modello

The design's preparation is thinly documented — no autograph study for the two women survives — but a workshop modello of the composition is recorded, and the picture's underdrawing, examined for 2012, follows a transferred design with minor shifts in the landscape: the standard late procedure, master's design to shop's panel. The God the Father in his glory, more summarily painted than the women, is Penni's register at its plainest; the distant Baptism, a miniature of real delicacy, may be another hand again — the late panels were often three hands deep, and the Visitation is a fair map of the layering. The signature question — the picture is unsigned, like all the shop works — is answered by the inscription's naming of Branconio's father and by Vasari, who lists the commission among Raphael's; that listing, for the sixteenth century, was what mattered: the enterprise's products were Raphael's products, whoever ground the colours. That principle, stated at the Visitation's expense, is the key to the whole of this catalogue's last section; the reader should carry it forward. It is also the principle the modern market resists, since prices follow hands; the sixteenth century followed designs, and was, in this at least, the better judge.

One of the fifty-two small frescoes of the Loggia of Leo X in the Apostolic Palace (Q3836415) — "Raphael's Bible": Abraham, kneeling before his tent at Mamre, receives the three angels — the three men of Genesis 18, the visit that promised Isaac's birth — painted in 1518–19 by the workshop (this scene is usually given to Penni or Pellegrino da Modena on Raphael's design) in the ninth bay of the loggia, among the Abraham scenes. The composition — the kneeling patriarch, the three standing figures, the tent and the tree — follows the design economy of the whole Bible: a few figures, a clear action, a landscape, at the small scale of the vault compartments; the three angels, walking abreast, were among the series' most copied groups (the motif passed through prints into Northern painting — Rembrandt knew it). The Loggia's entry (Q3836418 records Bibbiena's loggia; the great Loggia's scenes are catalogued variously) and the two other scenes in this catalogue (Q110897727, Q110887638) give the context; this records the single fresco as Wikidata lists it, with its Italian article. The scene is in the ninth vault; the visitor with permission to walk the Loggia — it is not on the standard route — finds it halfway along, small, bright and, like the whole Bible, designed to be read at a walk. The three angels at Mamre carried, in the period's exegesis, a Trinitarian reading — the three who are addressed as one Lord — and the Loggia's programme, which pairs each Old Testament scene with its typological weight, placed the scene among the promises: the covenant meal before Isaac's announcement. Raphael's design economy served the theology: three identical striding figures, a kneeling old man, a tent — the mystery stated in silhouette. Rembrandt's etched and painted versions of the subject, a century later, descend from the Loggia's through the print series; the little fresco's afterlife, like most of the Bible's, is Northern and Protestant — the papal corridor's pictures became, in engraving, the household Bible of the Reformation's grandchildren, which neither Leo nor Luther would have predicted. The scene's execution has been assigned, within the shop, to Pellegrino da Modena or Penni; the Loggia's bays were distributed among the assistants by Raphael's plan, and the ninth bay's Abraham scenes are among the drier in handling — the design, as throughout the Bible, is the thing. The bay's other scenes — Abraham and Melchizedek, the Covenant, Lot's flight — complete the patriarch's sequence, and the visitor tracing them from the ninth vault reads the promise's arc as the programme intended, four scenes at a glance overhead. That glancing legibility was the Bible's design brief, and Raphael's solution to it — one action, few figures, strong silhouette — is the same solution as the tapestry cartoons', scaled down: the late workshop had one narrative grammar, and it worked at every size. The ninth bay's frescoes were cleaned with the Loggia in the campaigns of the later twentieth century; their colours are bright, their scale modest, and their author, within the shop, is a question that matters less than their designer, who is not in question at all.

A small panel, 40.7 by 29.5 cm, in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti: God the Father, borne aloft in a blaze of glory, his arms spread, supported by the four living creatures of Ezekiel's vision — the man (an angel), the eagle, the lion and the ox — with two putti at his sides; far below, a wide landscape under storm-light, with a tiny figure (Ezekiel, or the beholder) picked out by a shaft of light on a hill. The picture compresses the theophany of Ezekiel 1 — the chariot of the four creatures, the maiestas Domini of medieval apse and manuscript — into a cabinet panel of Michelangelesque energy: God's spread-armed figure derives from the Sistine's Creator, the creatures cluster under him like a living throne, and the tiny earth below makes the scale cosmic. Vasari says Raphael painted a "small picture of Ezekiel's vision" for Vincenzo Ercolani of Bologna; the picture passed through Bolognese and Medici hands to the Pitti, where it has hung since the seventeenth century. Its execution has been debated — the panel's density and its date, c. 1518, put it in the workshop years, and Giulio's name has been attached — but its quality is high, and the design is the master's beyond question; the 2012 exhibition kept it in the master-and-shop group with a strong autograph share. The picture is the one surviving instance of Raphael's maiestas at cabinet scale — the Disputa's God the Father concentrated to a hand's breadth — and its influence ran through engraving into the Baroque's heavens: the storm-lit distance with its spotlit figure is among the earliest uses of the light-shaft as revelation, a device Rembrandt would own. In the Pitti it hangs among the Madonnas, a thunderclap in a room of lullabies; it is the smallest of the late works and the loudest. The picture's Bolognese commission connects it with the Saint Cecilia's city and years, and its cabinet scale with the private devotion of a humanist collector: Ercolani's little vision was made to be held and pored over, its cosmic subject at miniature size being precisely the point — the hand-held infinite, a Renaissance conceit the Romantics rediscovered when Palma the Younger's and Elsheimer's small heavens took it up. The Pitti's panel was engraved repeatedly (the Vision circulated widely in print), and William Blake, who knew it in engraving, has been thought to remember it in his Job's whirlwind; whether or not the memory is real, the affinity is: the picture is the one Raphael that visionary art has claimed as ancestor. The four creatures' handling — the eagle's feathers, the lion's mane, the ox's muzzle painted at thumbnail scale with full plasticity — suggests Giulio's animal manner to some and the master's concentration to others; the God, whose spread arms fill the panel corner to corner, is in either case the design's engine, and the drawing tradition connects a Windsor study with him. The little panel was among the works Napoleon's commissioners left (too small to notice, or too fixed in the grand-ducal rooms); it has been continuously visible in Florence for four centuries, and generations of Pitti visitors have had, in one wall's span, Raphael's tenderest picture and his most terrifying — the Granduca and the Ezekiel, the whisper and the thunder, ten steps apart. Its reception history has one more chapter: the Ezekiel was among the pictures most admired by the English Grand Tourists — copies and engravings of it multiplied in British collections — and the small panel's sublimity-in-miniature fed directly into the eighteenth century's discourse of the sublime; Burke's contemporaries cited it, and the picture stands, oddly but genuinely, among the sources of a category usually built on mountains and storms. A four-hundred-square-centimetre sublime: Raphael's economy, one last time.

Ercolani and Bologna

The Bolognese context deserves its lines. Vincenzo Ercolani, count and senator, commissioned the panel in the years when Bologna — newly papal, freshly visited by Leo and Francis at the 1515 meeting — was assembling its Raphaels: the Saint Cecilia arrived in the same half-decade, and the two pictures made the city, briefly, a Raphael centre outside Rome and Florence. The Ezekiel stayed in Ercolani hands into the seventeenth century, entered the Medici orbit through purchase, and its Pitti placement among the Madonnas was the grand dukes' own wit or accident; either way the hang has taught generations the painter's range faster than any lecture. The panel is in good state, its surface's density intact; its size asks the visitor to come close, which the room's crowds rarely do — the reader is advised to.

The panel's iconographic singularity completes the entry. Raphael painted God the Father many times — the Baronci fragment, the Oddi lunette, the Disputa, the Loggia — but always enthroned or blessing; only here is he borne, carried on the creatures' wings in full flight, the medieval maiestas set moving. The choice reads as a deliberate archaism made kinetic — the Romanesque tympanum's God, launched — and it is the clearest late instance of the painter's habit of reviving an old form by giving it motion: the icon walked in the Sistine, the maiestas flies here. The habit is the career in one device, and the tiny Ezekiel is its most concentrated display, which may be why the picture, small as it is, has never dropped out of the anthologies. A last practical note: the panel's glass and the room's light flatten it in most photographs, and the picture is far better in the room than in any book — the rare case where reproduction, which made the Sistine's fortune, has undersold a Raphael. The visitor should not trust the plates; the four hundred square centimetres are bigger than they print. Seen so, the Ezekiel completes the Pitti's lesson: the room holds the painter's smallest sublime and his largest tenderness, and the pairing is the collection's quiet masterstroke. Few museums teach range with two adjacent labels; the Pitti does it daily, to whoever slows down. Slow down. The Ezekiel was made for the pace of a private study, and it keeps that pace still.

A panel transferred to canvas, 207 by 140 cm, in the Louvre, signed and dated RAPHAEL VRBINAS PINGEBAT M.D.XVIII: the Virgin, kneeling, bends to receive the Christ Child, who springs up towards her out of his cradle — a leap of infant energy without precedent in the iconography; Saint Elizabeth, kneeling at the left, presents the infant Baptist, whose hands are joined; Joseph, behind, leans and watches; above, two angels — one strewing flowers, one with joined hands — descend; the setting is a shadowed chamber. The picture was commissioned by Leo X, through Cardinal Bibbiena, as a diplomatic gift to France — it was presented to Queen Claude, Francis I's consort, in 1518, with the Saint Michael (Q594470) for the King, the pair sealing the Franco-papal alliance and the marriage of Lorenzo de' Medici — and it has been in the French royal collection and the Louvre since: the Grande Sainte Famille of the old catalogues, the largest and most official of the late Holy Families.

The execution is shared — Giulio Romano's part is documented by Vasari and confirmed by examination, and the picture is the type case of the master-designed, workshop-executed state picture — but the design is among Raphael's most vital inventions: the springing Child, rising from the cradle into his mother's arms, turns the Madonna and Child into an event, and the composition's diagonals — the Virgin's bend, the Child's leap, the descending angels — make the family group a burst of motion in the dark chamber. The signature, unusually emphatic (pingebat, "was painting" — the imperfect that classical painters used to mark work as ever-unfinished), marks the picture's official standing. Its French afterlife was immense: at Fontainebleau and the Louvre it was the Raphael of the French school's education — Poussin cited it, the Academy lectured on it (Le Brun's conférence of 1667 on this picture is among the founding documents of academic criticism), and its Child's leap echoes through French painting into the nineteenth century. Restored in 2011–12 and shown at the Prado's Late Raphael, it is the anchor of the Louvre's late-Raphael wall, beside the Saint Michael with which it travelled to France five hundred years ago.

The springing Child deserves the last word. Raphael's infants had leaned, reached, stepped and turned for fifteen years; this one leaps — rises bodily from the cradle towards his mother in a movement that fuses the Resurrection with the nursery, and that carries, for the theologically minded viewer, exactly that double sense: the Child rising from the wooden cradle prefigures the rising from the tomb, and Elizabeth's grave presentation of the kneeling Baptist completes the prophecy. The invention was Raphael's last word on the Christ Child, and the seventeenth century heard it: the leaping Child of the French and Flemish Baroque — Rubens's springing infants above all — descends from this panel. Le Brun's 1667 conférence analysed the picture's expressions member by member and made it the Academy's textbook of les passions; through that lecture, the picture stands at the source of French academic theory — a Roman workshop panel teaching Paris how to feel. The picture's transfer to canvas (1777, by the royal restorer Picault's successors) and its many restorations have worn the surface — the 2011–12 campaign stabilised it and recovered the chamber's depth — and the modern eye must reconstruct some of its first brilliance; the design does most of the work. Its scale and format made it the pattern of the French 'grand family piece,' and the royal children were painted, more than once, in arrangements that quote it: the papal gift became, in its adopted country, a template of dynastic tenderness.

A panel, 38 by 32 cm, in the Louvre (INV 605): the Virgin, seated in a chamber, supports the Christ Child, who stands on her knee and leans forward to embrace the infant Baptist, presented by Saint Elizabeth, seated at the left; behind, a garden with a pergola. The picture — called "small" to distinguish it from the Grande Sainte Famille of Francis I (Q2467141), with which it shares the royal French provenance — was painted around 1517–18, probably for Cardinal Bibbiena to give to a French recipient, and its execution is generally given to Giulio Romano on Raphael's design, with the master's possible touches; the design itself, the two mothers presenting the two embracing children, is a reduction of the Divino Amore's and the Impannata's family groups to cabinet scale. The panel is of high finish — the workshop's small pictures were made as jewels — and its garden, with the pergola's greenery, is a note of domestic grace; the children's embrace, the design's centre, was among the school's most repeated motifs. In the French royal collection it hung with the great Raphaels of Fontainebleau; in the Louvre it hangs near them still, a small sweet postscript to the Grande Sainte Famille beside it. The attribution question — how much Raphael, how much Giulio — is the late workshop's usual one, and the picture is a textbook case: the invention unmistakably the master's, the surface unmistakably a pupil's, and the object, in its charm, entire. The panel's history in France is documented from Fontainebleau: it appears in the royal inventories from the sixteenth century, was engraved as Raphael's throughout the ancien régime, and hung in the Cabinet du Roi — the small pictures' sanctum — before the Revolution moved it to the Louvre. Its execution was given to Giulio by the connoisseurs of the nineteenth century and the attribution has held; the design's drawing, at Windsor, in red chalk, is the master's, and the comparison of sheet and panel is, once again, the late workshop's whole story on one wall: the drawing alive, the painting exact. The Petite Sainte Famille was also, through engraving, one of the most copied of the small late Holy Families — the Laing and Bowes copies in this catalogue's British section descend from its type — and its garden setting, with the pergola, introduced a domestic-idyllic note that the seventeenth century's Holy Families made standard; the picture is small, but its progeny is large. Its small scale also made it a natural cabinet picture for engravers' models, and the eighteenth century's reduced devotional prints — the little Holy Families of the French and Flemish presses — repeat its arrangement more often than any other source. In the Louvre's Raphael hang it sits beside the Grande Sainte Famille as the pair the royal collection always made of them: the state Holy Family and the cabinet one, the public and the private register of the late shop, side by side. The picture is in good condition, its enamel finish intact — the shop's small panels, made as gifts, were made to last — and its greens and golds are bright after the most recent cleaning.

The Last Supper of the Vatican Loggia — the fifty-second and final scene of "Raphael's Bible," in the thirteenth bay: Christ and the apostles at table, in a compressed, frieze-like composition, painted 1518–19 by the workshop on Raphael's design. The Loggia's Bible runs from the Creation to this one New Testament scene — fifty-one Old Testament subjects and, at the end, the institution of the Eucharist, the point to which, in the programme's typology, the whole Old Law led. The scene's design compresses the Leonardo tradition of the Supper into the small vault compartment, the table seen frontally, the apostles' reactions abbreviated; the execution is the shop's (Perino del Vaga's name is attached to the late bays). Wikidata lists the scene with a French label ("La Cène") from the Commons photograph; this entry records it as part of the Loggia ensemble. Its position — the Bible's last word, at the loggia's end, above the private apartments — made it the programme's theological signature: the papal palace's open gallery, walked daily by the court, ended its picture-Bible at the altar's sacrament.

The Deluge of the Vatican Loggia — one of the Noah scenes of "Raphael's Bible," in the third bay: the Flood, with the ark riding the waters and the drowning scrambling for high ground, painted 1518–19 by the workshop on Raphael's design. The composition compresses the catastrophe into the small compartment — a few straining figures on the rocks, the ark beyond, the rain — and its debt to Michelangelo's Sistine Deluge, a few rooms away, is open and deliberate: the Loggia's designers took the ceiling's inventions and miniaturised them, as the whole Bible takes the tradition of Biblical illustration and recasts it in the workshop's clear narrative style. The scene is usually given to Giulio Romano or Penni in execution. Wikidata lists it with a French label from the Commons photograph; this entry records it as part of the ensemble. The Loggia's Bible, engraved and copied for three centuries (the "Raphael Bible" print series were nursery Bibles for Protestant and Catholic Europe alike), made scenes like this among the most familiar Old Testament images in the West; the little Deluge, five metres up in a Vatican corridor, has descendants in every illustrated Bible of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

A panel in the Galleria Estense, Modena — a half-length portrait of a young woman, dark-eyed, in the late Roman manner, known as "la Perla di Modena" from its standing as the Este gallery's treasured "Raphael": the attribution, traditional in the collection, has been given in the modern literature to Raphael's last years with workshop participation, or to Giulio Romano outright, and the picture belongs to the group of late female portraits (the Strasbourg Young Woman, Q786196, is its nearest relative) in which the master's type — the oval face, the direct gaze — was produced by the enterprise. The Este acquired it early; its Modena nickname deliberately echoes the Prado's Perla (Q427390), each collection naming its pearl. The picture is little published and rarely lent; its face is of the Fornarina family, its costume of c. 1518–20, and its hand — master, pupil, or both — awaits the technical study that most of the late portraits have now received. It is catalogued here as Wikidata gives it, an attributed original of the last years; the visitor to Modena's Galleria Estense, a museum rich in everything but crowds, will find it worth the detour.

The Este context adds its interest. The dukes of Modena, heirs of Ferrara's collection after 1598, assembled a gallery whose sale of its hundred best pictures to Dresden in 1746 — the Sistine Madonna followed from Piacenza eight years later — stripped it of its Correggios and Titians; the Perla di Modena, kept, became by default the gallery's Renaissance flagship, and its Raphael attribution hardened accordingly: a collection that has sold its masterpieces holds harder to the names of those that remain. The picture's face — the heavy-lidded oval of the late Roman type — is genuinely of the workshop's orbit, and the panel deserves the technical examination that would place it beside the Strasbourg and Thyssen portraits in the late shop's portrait production; until then it remains what it has long been, Modena's pearl by tradition and the late enterprise's by type. Its inclusion here, at the documented tier on its Italian and French articles, reflects that standing: a work of the Raphael question, if not certainly of Raphael's hand. In a catalogue that has weighed the Divino Amore and the Perla of Madrid on the same scales, Modena's pearl completes the set: three collections, three treasured attributions, one enterprise behind them all. The nickname's economy is the entry's last observation: where documents fail, collections name; and the names — pearl, veiled one, silent one — have carried these pictures through centuries of shifting attribution more safely than any scholarship could. The Perla di Modena is held by her name, and the name, at least, is secure. Whether the hand follows the name is the question the Galleria Estense's quiet rooms leave open, and the reader with an afternoon in Emilia is encouraged to go and hold the two in mind together — the picture on the wall, the question in the label — which is the whole discipline of this catalogue practised, in miniature, on one panel.

A panel transferred to canvas, 120 by 95 cm, in the Louvre: a young woman, seated at three-quarter length in a chair, turned slightly to the left and looking at the viewer, in a red velvet dress with great slashed and puffed sleeves of red and gold over a white chemise, her dark hair drawn back under a jewelled net and a pearl-trimmed cap, a pearl necklace and a jewelled chain at her breast, her right hand in her lap holding a fur and her left resting on the chair's arm; behind her, a room with a column, a draped table and a view through a doorway of a loggia and a landscape. The sitter was long identified as Giovanna d'Aragona, the beautiful wife of Ascanio Colonna; she is now recognised as Isabel de Requesens y Enríquez de Cardona-Anglesola, the wife of the Spanish viceroy of Naples, Ramón de Cardona — the portrait was commissioned by Cardinal Bibbiena as a gift to Francis I of France, and Vasari says Raphael sent Giulio Romano to Naples to draw the lady's head, and that the rest was painted in Rome; it was in France by 1518 and has been in the royal collection and the Louvre since.

The picture is the grandest of the late female portraits and the most collaborative: the design and the head are Raphael's, the costume and the setting Giulio's, and the whole has the splendour and the slight heaviness of the late workshop — the sleeves, enormous and brilliant, are the Velata's sleeve multiplied; the room, with its column and its view, is a setting of state; the jewels are painted with the precision of a goldsmith's inventory. The face, turned to us with a calm, slightly haughty look, is the Raphaelesque part, and it has the directness of the Velata; the rest is magnificence. The portrait was famous in France as "Jeanne d'Aragon" — the name by which it was engraved and copied for three centuries, and under which it appears in the old catalogues — and its reidentification, from the documents of the commission, is a twentieth-century correction. It hangs in the Louvre's Grande Galerie, and it is the picture that shows, more than any other, what the late workshop could do with a portrait when the master designed it and the assistant executed it: a thing of display, with a living face in it. The commission's diplomacy is worth spelling out: Bibbiena, the papal secretary, ordered the portrait of the Spanish viceroy's wife as a gift for the French king, at the moment of the Franco-papal alliance of 1518 — a Neapolitan beauty, painted in Rome, sent to Paris; the picture was thus an instrument of policy before it was a work of art, and its splendour was the point. Francis I hung it at Fontainebleau, where Primaticcio and the Fontainebleau school studied its sleeves. The picture was engraved in France as 'Jeanne d'Aragon' throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the name, though wrong, has a claim of use; the Louvre's label now gives the sitter correctly, with the old name in parentheses, which is the right compromise between document and tradition.

The picture

A panel, 155.5 by 119.5 cm, in the Uffizi, Florence: Pope Leo X, seated at a table covered with a red cloth, in a red velvet cap and mozzetta over a white damask rochet, seen at three-quarter length and turned slightly to the left, holding a magnifying glass in his left hand over an illuminated manuscript open on the table and resting his right on the table's edge; beside him on the table a chased silver bell; behind him, standing, two cardinals in red — at the left Giulio de' Medici, his cousin, later Clement VII, looking at the Pope; at the right Luigi de' Rossi, another cousin, gripping the back of the Pope's chair and looking out at the viewer; behind them a dark wall with a pilaster and, at the upper left, a window reflected in the brass knob of the chair. The Pope's face is heavy, fleshy, pale, clean-shaven, with small myopic eyes and a set mouth; the light falls from the left, and the reds — three shades of red, the velvet, the damask, the cardinals' silk — fill the picture.

The commission

The portrait was painted in 1518, in Rome, and sent to Florence for the wedding of the Pope's nephew Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino, to Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne in September of that year; the Pope, who could not attend, sent his likeness to preside at the feast in the Palazzo Medici. It remained in Florence with the Medici, passed to the Uffizi, was taken to Paris in 1799 and returned in 1815, and has been in the Uffizi since; a copy by Andrea del Sarto, so good that it was sent to Mantua as the original and deceived Giulio Romano, is in Naples (Vasari's story of the deception is among his best). The manuscript under the Pope's glass is the Hamilton Bible, a fourteenth-century Neapolitan codex now in Berlin, open at the beginning of John; the bell is a piece of Roman silver of the kind Leo collected.

The portrait

The Leo X is the second of Raphael's great papal portraits and the more worldly: where the Julius shows a warrior in thought, the Leo shows a connoisseur at his table — the illuminated book, the magnifying glass (the Pope was short-sighted), the silver bell, the velvet and damask — a prince of the Church in his study, surrounded by his kinsmen and his things. The composition is a triangle of three heads on a base of red, with the Pope at the apex; the two cardinals, one looking at him and one at us, frame him and extend the picture's address — Giulio's glance to the Pope, Rossi's to the viewer, the Pope's own to the middle distance. The tension between the three — the Pope absorbed, the cousins watchful — gives the group a political charge that contemporaries read as a statement of the Medici family's control of the papacy, and that later viewers have read as foreboding: Giulio would be pope in five years, and would face the Sack.

The materials

Vasari's praise of the picture was for its rendering of materials — "the velvet has its nap, the damask shines and rustles, the fur is soft, the gold and silk seem real" — and it is the picture in which Raphael's painting of stuff reached its climax: the red velvet of the cap and mozzetta, with its pile; the white damask of the rochet, its pattern picked out in a lighter white; the cardinals' silk; the red cloth of the table; the vellum of the book, with its miniature and its illuminated initial; the brass knob of the chair, in which a window is reflected; the silver bell, its chasing caught by the light. The whole is a display of texture in three reds and a white, and it is the model for Titian's Paul III and every papal portrait after: the prince among his possessions, in red.

The face

The Pope's face is the picture's truth. Leo was fat, pale, short-sighted and not handsome, and Raphael painted him so — the heavy jowls, the small eyes, the pursed mouth — with a frankness that is not unkind but does not flatter; the face is that of a clever, sensual, calculating man, absorbed in a book and aware of being watched. It is the same face as in the Eliodoro's Attila and the Incendio's popes, matured; and it is, with the Julius, the reason the Medici and della Rovere popes are the two pontiffs of the Renaissance whom everyone can picture.

Technique and condition

The panel is poplar; the ground white; the underdrawing (seen in infrared) free, with adjustments to the cardinals' positions and the Pope's hands; the paint is the full oil of the late Roman years, with the reds in vermilion and lake over warm underlayers, the damask in lead white over a grey, the flesh in soft, warm gradations; the reflection in the chair's knob and the chasing of the bell are painted with a miniaturist's touch. The picture was restored in 2017–20 at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, when old varnish and retouching were removed and the three reds recovered their distinction; the surface is in excellent condition, and the restoration showed the whole to be of one hand — the workshop theory, which had given the cardinals to Giulio, is no longer held.

Reception

The Leo X was famous from the day it arrived in Florence — Vasari's description, the Sarto copy, the engravings — and it has been, for four centuries, the image of the Medici pope and of the Renaissance papacy at its most splendid and most worldly; Titian studied it, and his Paul III with his Grandsons (Naples) is its direct answer; Velázquez's Innocent X descends from both; Bacon's popes from Velázquez. It was taken to Paris as one of the Uffizi's greatest treasures and returned with honour; it hung in the Tribuna; it was lent to Rome in 2020, after the restoration, and was the exhibition's most discussed picture. Among scholars it has been the exhibit for Raphael's late portrait manner — the full, warm, textured oil — and for the question of the workshop, now settled in the master's favour.

What to look at

The three reds; the damask; the glass over the book, and the page beneath; the bell; the reflection in the chair's knob; Rossi's hand on the chair and his eyes on you; Giulio's eyes on the Pope; and the Pope's eyes on nothing — the myopic, inward look of a man who has just stopped reading.

The wedding and the copy

The picture's first public appearance was at the wedding feast of 1518 in Florence, where it stood at the head of the table in the Palazzo Medici in the Pope's stead; the Florentines, Vasari says, marvelled at it, and it remained in the palace as the family's image of their pope. The Sarto copy has its own story: in the 1520s Federico Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua, asked Clement VII for the portrait; the Pope's agent Ottaviano de' Medici, unwilling to part with it, had Andrea del Sarto copy it so exactly that the copy was sent to Mantua as the original and hung there for years, and Giulio Romano — who had, he believed, worked on the original — was deceived until Vasari showed him Sarto's mark on the back. The copy is in the Capodimonte at Naples; the comparison between the two, which the 2020 exhibition made possible, is a lesson in what a great copyist can and cannot do.

The three reds, and the restoration

The Opificio's restoration of 2017–20 was among the most thorough of recent Raphael campaigns, and its findings changed the picture's literature. The panel, made of five poplar planks, was stabilised; the varnish and the retouching of the nineteenth century were removed; and the three reds — the velvet of the cap and mozzetta (vermilion with lake glazes, the nap suggested by a dry dragged highlight), the cardinals' silk (a smoother red), and the table's cloth (a deeper crimson) — recovered the distinction that the old varnish had flattened into one; the damask's pattern reappeared in the rochet; the reflection in the chair's knob proved to show a window with a figure; and the whole surface, examined in infrared and X-ray, proved to be of one hand, with the underdrawing's adjustments continuous across the three figures. The attribution of the cardinals to Giulio Romano, which had been standard since the nineteenth century, was abandoned; the picture is Raphael's throughout, and its late manner — broad, warm, textured — is his own, not the shop's.

Leo and the painter

Leo X was the patron of Raphael's last seven years — the pope who made him architect of St Peter's, commissioner of antiquities, designer of the tapestries and the Loggia, and the most powerful artist in Rome — and the portrait is the record of that relation: the Pope among his books and silver, painted by the man he had made. It is not a flattering picture, and it was not meant to be; Leo, who was vain of his taste and not of his face, wanted the connoisseur shown, and Raphael showed him. The three figures' political charge — the Medici cousins behind the Medici pope — was read at once as a dynastic statement, and the picture's presence at a Medici wedding confirms it. What the restoration has made plain is that the statement was made with a painter's full resources: the picture is a portrait of power, of a family, of a taste, and of three kinds of red, and it is all of one piece.

The Hamilton Bible and the connoisseur

The book under the Pope's glass has been identified — a Neapolitan Bible of the fourteenth century, illuminated in the workshop of Cristoforo Orimina, now in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin as the Hamilton Bible — and its page, open at the Gospel of John with a miniature of the evangelist, is painted with such precision that the identification was made from the picture. The glass is a lens of the kind Leo used for his short sight; the bell is a Roman silver bell with chased ornament, of a type that survives; the chair's knob reflects the window of the room in which the Pope sits. These objects are the portrait's second subject: Leo as the collector and reader, the pope of the Vatican Library's expansion and of the Medici manuscripts, the patron of Bembo and Sadoleto — a man whose power was exercised, in part, through taste. Raphael, who was himself the commissioner of antiquities and the author of the letter on Rome's ruins, understood the taste and painted it with respect; the portrait is the only one of his in which the sitter's things are given equal weight with his face, and the things are chosen to say what the face does not.

What to look at, again

The comparison with the Julius II is the one to make. Julius sits alone, bowed, gripping a handkerchief; Leo sits among his cousins, upright, holding a lens over a book. Julius's picture is about a man; Leo's is about a dynasty and a culture. Both are in red; both are by the same hand within seven years; and the distance between them is the distance between the warrior papacy and the Medici one — which is to say, between the Rome Raphael arrived in and the Rome he died in. Both popes, as it happens, gave him his greatest commissions; both sat still for him; and both, in his pictures, are more alive than in any chronicle. The Uffizi hangs the Leo in the room with the Doni portraits and the Self-portrait; the Julius is in London; the visitor who wants both must travel, and should. No two portraits of power, painted by one man, say more about the difference between two kinds of it. Raphael painted both, without comment; the comment is in the hands — one gripping, one holding a lens. That is the whole of Raphael's political portraiture, and it is enough.

A panel, about 43 by 29 cm, in the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid: a young man in half-length, turned to the left and looking at the viewer, in a black cap and a dark doublet with a white shirt at the neck, against a dark ground — a small, sober portrait of the late Roman years, around 1518–19, which the Thyssen catalogues as Raphael and which has been given by others to Giulio Romano or to the workshop. The picture came to the Thyssen collection in the twentieth century from a private source; its earlier history is unknown, and the sitter is unidentified — a member of the papal court, a Florentine in Rome, or one of the painter's own circle have been suggested. The type is that of the late Roman portraits of young men — the Altoviti's turned head, the Navagero's dark ground — at small scale, and the handling, broad and warm, is of the workshop's late manner with the master's hand possible in the face; the Thyssen's technical examination supported a date in the last years. The picture has Wikipedia articles in French and Italian, which places it among the documented works; it is among the least known of the portraits attributed to Raphael, and the visitor to the Thyssen will find it in the Italian rooms, a small dark panel among larger pictures, rewarding attention for the face — grave, young, slightly wary — which has the quality of the late portraits' directness, whoever painted the rest. The Thyssen's purchase, in the decades when Baron Heinrich and his son Hans Heinrich were building the collection that came to Madrid in 1992, was made as a Raphael, and the museum has held to the attribution while acknowledging the debate; the panel's small size and dark tonality have kept it out of the literature's main current, and it has not been lent to the great exhibitions. It belongs, in any case, to the last years — the costume and the handling place it around 1518–19 — and it is a record of the late workshop's portrait practice at its most modest: a young man, a cap, a dark ground, and a face that someone wanted kept. It was shown in the Thyssen's own Raphael-circle hang of the 2010s beside the museum's Giulio Romano Holy Family, and the comparison — the portrait's face finer than the Holy Family's — was the best argument for the master's hand in at least the head. The sitter's cap and dark doublet, and the plain dark ground, are the uniform of the late portraits; the picture's distinction is in the eyes, which have the late Raphael's directness. Whether that directness is the master's or a pupil's who had learned it is the question the picture leaves open; it is not a small question, and the panel is worth the visit for it. The Thyssen's Italian rooms, a floor above the old masters' main sequence, are quiet; the little portrait has them mostly to itself, which suits it. A label would help; the picture does the rest.

A canvas, 165 by 147 cm, in the Uffizi, Florence: the adolescent Baptist, nude but for a leopard-skin sash, seated on a rock in a grotto-like wilderness, turns to the viewer and points with his raised right arm to a slender cross of reeds; vine leaves at his feet, a spring, dense foliage. This is the prime version of the composition of which the Louvre canvas (Q3463874) is the shop replica: Vasari records the picture painted for Cardinal Pompeo Colonna and given by him to his physician Jacopo da Carpi, from whom it passed to Francesco Benintendi in Florence; it reached the Medici and the Tribuna of the Uffizi, where it hung among the treasures. The attribution has cycled — Raphael alone in the old sources, workshop in the sceptical twentieth century, Raphael-with-workshop now — and the 2012 exhibition placed it with the master's late works with shop participation. The figure — a Michelangelesque seated nude, the Sistine ignudo baptised — turns on the rock in a full spiral, the pointing arm completing it, and the picture's subject is as much the beautiful body in shadowed light as the prophet: the late Raphael's Leonardism (the grotto, the smile, the pointing) crossed with his Michelangelism (the athletic nude), the two great influences of his life joined in one figure at the end of it. The vine and the reed cross carry the sacramental meaning — the Baptist announcing the wine and the sacrifice. It hangs in the Uffizi near the Leo X; its dark ground and gleaming body, restored in the 2000s, make it the most Caravaggesque picture in the room — sixty years before Caravaggio, whose Baptists in this pose know it well. The picture's medical provenance — the cardinal's gift to Jacopo da Carpi, the anatomist and surgeon — has its own charm: the era's most famous anatomist owning the era's most anatomical saint; and Berengario da Carpi's writings mention his Raphael with pride. The Tribuna placement made the picture one of the most copied in Florence (the grand-tour copyists' registers list it constantly), and the copies' spread matches the Louvre replica's: between them, the seated pointing Baptist was available to every academy in Europe. The Uffizi canvas was restored in the 2000s, when its dark ground recovered depth and the figure's modelling its gleam; the attribution debate — how much master, how much shop — was refreshed rather than settled, and the picture remains, with the Divino Amore, one of the two standing test cases. Its pose's afterlife is the entry's last word: Caravaggio's Capitoline St John, which lifts the turning nude and the ambiguous smile, is the Uffizi picture's direct descendant, and through Caravaggio the pose entered the Baroque's repertory of sacred adolescence; the late Raphael, so often cast as the Baroque's opposite, is here its source. The leopard-skin, the vine and the honeycomb-coloured light also made the picture a favourite of the nineteenth-century aesthetes — Pater's circle admired it — and its faintly pagan Baptist, half prophet and half faun, is among the works through which the fin de siècle constructed its ambiguous Raphael; the picture has borne every reading, which is what its designed ambiguity invites. It hangs near the Leo X, pope and prophet in one glance — the official and the ambiguous late Raphael, wall-neighbours in the Uffizi's plan. The panel's dimensions and its Tribuna history are recorded from the seventeenth century without interruption, an unbroken Florentine residence matched among the late works only by the Pitti group's. The picture's British copies — Christ Church's among them, in this catalogue — descend from the Tribuna decades, when it stood at copying height in the world's most copied room; the Uffizi Baptist may be, panel for panel, the most copied of all the late works after the Seggiola, and the copies' spread is the design's second life.