A panel transferred to canvas, 178 by 122 cm, in the Louvre: Saint Margaret of Antioch, full-length, in a green robe with a wind-lifted veil, steps forward out of the dragon's coils — the monster gapes at her feet and behind her — holding the martyr's palm, her face calm; a dark cavern landscape behind. The picture was painted around 1518, almost certainly for Marguerite of Angoulême, Francis I's sister — the saint was her name-patron, and the picture belongs with the 1518 group of papal gifts to France — and its execution is given largely to Giulio Romano on Raphael's design (Vasari says as much); it entered the royal collection and has been in the Louvre since. The design — the virgin saint stepping unharmed from the monster, her drapery blown, her palm raised — is the Saint Michael's theology in female key: innocence traversing evil without effort; and the figure's striding grace, all wind and calm, is the late manner's serpentine line at its most fluent. The Vienna version (Q3464523) is the composition's other principal witness, and the two divide the literature's votes for primacy; the Louvre's, larger and French from birth, is the version history has known. Its state — transferred, worn, restored — leaves the design carrying the picture, which it does. Margaret, swallowed by the dragon and delivered unharmed, was the patron of childbirth; a gift to a French princess in a marriage-alliance year could not have chosen better, and the picture is one more instance of the late workshop's art serving, with perfect tact, the diplomacy that commissioned it. The picture was restored in Paris in the 2010s; the green robe and the dragon's coils recovered depth, and the saint's stride — the design's life — reads again as the single sweep Raphael drew. Marguerite of Angoulême, its recipient, was the future author of the Heptaméron and the protector of reformers; the painting outlived the confessional world that gave it, and its serene saint, stepping from the monster, served every side's iconography in the century that followed. A studio drawing for the figure is recorded; the design's serpentine stride entered the pattern-books, and the French court's Margarets — in glass, enamel and print — repeat it through the century. The picture's pairing in the royal collection with the Michael made the two dragon-treaders a matched pair of triumphs, male and female; they hang near each other in the Louvre still, and should be read together. Read so, they state the late enterprise's range of address: the king's picture and the princess's, the militant and the intercessory, produced in one campaign by one shop for one diplomatic season — the 1518 French suite (Michael, Margaret, the Holy Family, the Isabel portrait) being the largest coordinated export of Italian painting to that date, and the model for every state gift of pictures after. The Margaret's part in that suite — the princess's picture, the childbirth patron for a dynastic marriage — was the most personally aimed of the four, and the archives' record of its reception is warm; the painting served, which is what it was for.

A panel, 192 by 122 cm, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, from the collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm: the second principal version of the Saint Margaret — the saint, palm in hand, stepping from the dragon's coils in a dark landscape — attributed to Raphael with workshop execution (Giulio's name attached, as at the Louvre) and dated c. 1518. Leopold Wilhelm, governor of the Spanish Netherlands and the greatest collector of his age, acquired it in the seventeenth century (it appears in Teniers's painted galleries of his collection); it passed with his pictures to Vienna. The Vienna and Louvre versions differ in details of the dragon and the landscape; which is prime, or whether both left the shop in parallel — the workshop's replication practice makes parallel production likely — remains open, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum's technical work has kept its version in the master-and-shop category. Seen in Vienna near the Madonna of the Meadow, the Margaret measures the arc of the whole career in one room: the Florentine spring of 1506 and the Roman workshop of 1518, the meadow and the dragon, twelve years and a world apart. The picture was restored in the twentieth century; the saint's face and the blown veil are its best-preserved passages, and its type — the serene virgin over the monster — furnished the Counter-Reformation with one of its standard images. Teniers's gallery pictures, which show the archduke's Italian pictures wall by wall, include the Margaret among the Titians and Giorgiones — a documented seventeenth-century hang that few Raphael-shop works can claim — and the picture's Vienna life has been continuous since; it is among the works through which Central Europe knew the late Raphael, and its copies in Austrian and Bohemian collections descend from it rather than from the Louvre version. The two-version situation — Paris and Vienna, both shop-executed, both c. 1518 — is itself the datum: by the last years the enterprise produced significant compositions in parallel editions as a matter of course, and the Margaret, like the Julius and the Baptist, survives as an edition rather than an object. Connoisseurship's task in such cases is not to crown a winner but to map a practice; the recent literature has largely accepted that reframing, and the two Margarets are its textbook. The Vienna panel's provenance through Leopold Wilhelm also ties it to the theatrum pictorium — the archduke's engraved catalogue, the first illustrated collection catalogue in history — where the Margaret appears among the plates: the picture is thus present at the birth of the illustrated catalogue, the genre to which the present page distantly belongs. Its cataloguing history is thus longer than most originals'; the picture has been reproduced continuously since 1660, and its Vienna room places it, with the Meadow, in the small class of works that have never once left the public record since the seventeenth century. That continuity is worth prizing for its own sake: attribution debates come and go, and the Margaret has outlasted four centuries of them in the same building, patient as her namesake. The dragon, for the record, is among the school's best monsters — Giulio's zoology at full stretch — and children in the Vienna galleries find her before their parents find the label; that, too, is a kind of connoisseurship, and the picture rewards it.

A panel transferred to canvas, 268 by 160 cm, in the Louvre, signed and dated RAPHAEL VRBINAS PINGEBAT MDXVIII: the archangel Michael, in gilded armour with vast wings and a billowing blue mantle, descends from the air onto the back of Satan — a muscular, horned devil sprawled face-down on the burning ground — and pins him with one foot, his spear raised for the stroke; the setting is a dark volcanic landscape with flames at the horizon. The picture was painted, with the Grande Sainte Famille, as Leo X's gift to Francis I in 1518 — Michael being the patron of the French royal order of Saint-Michel, the subject was a compliment to the King — and it has been in the French collection since: the Grand Saint Michel, pendant in the royal galleries to the Holy Family.

The design is the Little Saint Michael of 1504 (Q2415259) reconceived at colossal scale and stripped of its Dantean fantasy: no monsters, no burning city — one angel, one devil, one action. Michael descends in a single spiralling movement, weightless, his beauty untroubled by the effort; Satan writhes under his foot, all mass and rage; and the contrast — the effortless above, the straining below — is the picture's theology and its aesthetic in one: grace defeats force without exertion. The figure's serpentine descent is the late Raphael's answer to Michelangelo's terribilità — victory as ease — and it became the canonical Michael: Guido Reni's famous version, and every baroque and academic archangel after, descend from it. The execution is shared with Giulio (the devil and the landscape are usually his); the archangel's head and the design are the master's. The picture went with its pendant to Fontainebleau, was transferred to canvas in Paris in 1751 and restored repeatedly; the 2010s Louvre restoration recovered its blues and the armour's gold. Le Brun's conférence on it inaugurated the Academy's lecture series in 1667 — the French classical doctrine was literally founded on this picture — and its pairing with the Sainte Famille, the warrior and the family, made the two panels the twin faces of the papal gift: the Church militant and the Church domestic, sent to France in one crate.

The Grand Saint Michel also carries a personal charge that the correspondence preserves: Raphael, in the year of the commission, was negotiating through Bibbiena his standing with the French court, and the picture was understood — Vasari says as much — as the painter's demonstration piece for Francis I, the king who would later try to draw him to France. The archangel's beauty is thus also a professional statement: this is what the first painter of Rome could send a king. Fontainebleau received it as such; the picture hung at the head of the royal collection, was copied for the Order of Saint-Michel's ceremonies, and fixed the archangel's iconography so completely that when Reni painted his Michael for the Capuchins in 1635 — the Baroque's most famous — he was correcting Raphael's balance, not replacing it. The 2010s restoration and the Louvre's rehang have returned the picture to prominence after a century in the Castiglione's shadow; its blues and golds, recovered, explain the old fame.

The archangel's pose repays a moment more. Michael does not stand on Satan: he alights — one foot touching the demon's back, the wings still spread, the body still descending in its spiral — and the instant chosen is the touch-down, not the triumph; the spear is raised, the stroke not yet given. Raphael's late art lived in such suspended instants (the Transfiguration's boy between seizure and cure, the Sistine's Virgin mid-step), and the Michael's is the most athletic of them: victory shown as arrival, the whole outcome legible in a landing. Coypel, David's teachers and the academy's juries set the figure as the model of 'noble action'; the picture's five-century service as a teaching image rests on that one instant's choice. One relation more: the Michael and the Transfiguration, designed in the same months, share the descent-from-light structure — the vertical of power arriving from above — and the archangel is, in a sense, the altarpiece's action distilled to a single figure; seen in a week, Louvre then Vatican, the two pictures read as one thought at two scales, and the painter's last years acquire the unity the commissions' variety obscures.

Condition and copies, briefly: the transfer of 1751 and successive relinings left the surface thinned, and the archangel's wings and the landscape carry old restoration; the head, the armour's gold and Satan's musculature are the authentic core. Copies and reductions multiplied from the sixteenth century — the Order of Saint-Michel used the image ceremonially, and French provincial churches wanted their patron in Raphael's form — and the composition's engraved diffusion (Edelinck's great plate above all) made it one of the most reproduced of all the late works. The Louvre's label gives Raphael with Giulio's collaboration; the design's authorship has never been questioned, and the picture remains what Leo intended: the papacy's compliment to France, permanent, weightless, and armed. Its subject's personal aptness went unremarked at the time and deserves remark now: Michael, the psychopomp who weighs souls, painted by a man with two years to live, descending without weight onto the age's shoulders — the late Raphael's angels all share that unearned ease, and the Michael is their captain. The picture asks nothing of the viewer but assent; five centuries of viewers, and the entire academic tradition, gave it. That assent, withdrawn by modernism along with the academy that taught it, is returning by the side door of exhibition attendance: the restored Michael, rehung, stops crowds who have never heard of Le Brun. The picture's power was never in the doctrine built on it. It was in the landing foot, and it still is. Five hundred years of archangels have landed on that foot. None has landed lighter. The Michael asks one thing more of its viewer: distance. At three metres the spiral resolves and the descent completes itself; the crowded gallery rarely allows it, but the picture was made for a throne room's depth, and it opens at the range a king would have seen it from.

A Wikidata item for a lost series: full-length figures of the Apostles that Raphael designed — Vasari records apostle figures painted in the Vatican, in the Sala vecchia degli Svizzeri, retouched and later lost — and that survive through the engraved series by Marcantonio Raimondi and his school (the image attached to the item is Marcantonio's Saint Jude Thaddeus): twelve standing apostles, each with his attribute, in niches or against plain grounds, of the monumental draped type of the tapestry cartoons' apostles. The engravings, produced in the late 1510s, carried the figures into every European workshop — apostle series after Raphael became a staple of print publishing, and the designs served sculptors, majolica painters and glass painters for a century. Whether the engraved series records the lost frescoes, or independent drawings, is uncertain; the designs are in any case Raphael's late apostolic type, and drawings related to them survive (auxiliary studies at Chatsworth and elsewhere connect with the Transfiguration's and the cartoons' apostles). The item stands, in this catalogue, for the whole class of Raphael's lost Vatican decorations known only through prints — a reminder that the surviving frescoes are a fraction of what the palace held, and that the print shop was, among its other functions, the workshop's memory. Marcantonio's Saint Jude, the image Wikidata attaches, shows the manner: the heavy drapery, the attribute held plainly, the head of the tapestry-cartoon type; twelve such figures, multiplied through Europe, were the late Raphael's apostolic alphabet, and the sculptors of the Counter-Reformation — down to the colossal apostles of the Lateran nave, two centuries later — spelled with it. The lost Vatican apostles themselves — Vasari places them in the Sala vecchia degli Svizzeri, repainted later — are a reminder of how much of the workshop's palace work vanished under redecoration within a generation or two: the Stanze and the Loggia survived because they were famous; the service rooms' paintings went the way of service rooms. The engraved series is their afterlife, and this catalogue's policy — recording the lost through the prints that preserve them — is nowhere more necessary than here. Twelve figures, one surviving image apiece, and a wall that no longer exists: that is the state of a good part of the late workshop's production, and the apostle series is its emblem. The series' image in this catalogue — Marcantonio's Saint Jude — should be read accordingly: not a work but a witness, the engraved shadow of a painted wall. For the reader who wants the series itself, complete sets of the engraved Apostles are in the British Museum, the Albertina and the Bibliothèque nationale, and the images are online in each; an hour with them is an hour with a lost room of the Vatican, which is a bargain the print shop offers nowhere else so cheaply. The apostle type the series fixed — the mantled colossus with his attribute — is also the type of the Transfiguration's lower apostles and the tapestry cartoons'; the three bodies of work, panel, cloth and print, share one figural language, and the engraved series is its cheapest dictionary.

A panel, 144 by 110 cm, in the Prado, Madrid: the Virgin, seated at the right before a great oak, holds the Christ Child, who leans across to the infant Baptist; the Baptist, at the left, holds a scroll (ECCE AGNUS DEI) which the Child grasps; Joseph, behind the oak, leans on a fragment of ancient masonry and watches; behind, a landscape with ruins — a domed tholos among them — under a warm sky. The picture is a late workshop Holy Family of c. 1518, on Raphael's design with Giulio Romano's execution (the Prado's label and the 2012 exhibition give it so); it was in the Spanish royal collection by the seventeenth century and entered the Prado at its foundation. The design is among the most graceful of the late family groups — the two children joined by the scroll, the Virgin's turning attention, Joseph's leaning watch — and its setting is its distinction: the oak (a della Rovere emblem, perhaps, or simply a tree of strength), the antique ruins, the classical tholos in the distance make the family's rest a scene in the Roman campagna among the ruins Raphael was surveying; no other Holy Family of the group is so archaeological. Copies abound (the Munich "Kopie nach" in this catalogue's copies section is one); the Prado's is the prime version. Its handling is Giulio's smooth late finish; the Virgin's head keeps the master's type. In the Prado's Raphael room it completes the sequence of the late Holy Families, and its ruins — the past as the family's furniture — are a quiet emblem of the whole late enterprise: the Holy Family at home in antiquity. One comparison completes the entry: the Oak's leaning Joseph, propped on the antique block and watching the children, is the Canigiani's standing Joseph of 1506 aged twelve years and seated among ruins — the same figure, the same office of watching, at the two ends of the painter's career; set the Munich and Madrid pictures side by side in the mind and the whole path from Florence to the late shop runs between the two fathers. The oak itself has been read as a della Rovere compliment — the family's rovere — which would date the design's conception to a moment when della Rovere favour still mattered, or simply as the sheltering tree of the Rest on the Flight tradition; the ruins carry the standard typology (the old order crumbling behind the new) with the workshop's archaeological relish. Copies of the composition are legion — Munich's, catalogued in this collection's copies section, among them — and the design was engraved early; the Prado's panel was restored in the twentieth century and holds its wall in the Raphael room, where its warm ruins and golden light make it the most pastoral of the late group. The picture also carries a small signature curiosity: an inscription on Joseph's masonry block has been read as a workshop mark, and the Prado's examination assigned the picture's underdrawing to a cartoon transfer of the standard late kind — the enterprise's machinery, visible as always just under the poetry. The picture's British engraved fame ran through the nineteenth century under the title 'Madonna della Quercia,' and the Ulster and provincial copies of its type descend from those plates; the Prado original, cleaned, keeps the golden tonality the engravings could only rumour.

A panel, 147.4 by 116 cm, in the Prado, Madrid: the Virgin, seated, supports the Christ Child, who stands on her knee with one foot on his cradle and reaches towards the infant Baptist; the Baptist offers fruit in his camel-skin; Elizabeth, kneeling at the left, joins her hands; behind, in the shadow at the right, Joseph; the setting a dark chamber opening to a landscape with ruins and a distant washing scene at the river. The picture — "La Perla," the pearl — owes its name to Philip IV of Spain, who, when it arrived from the sale of Charles I of England's collection in 1649–53, is said to have declared "This is the pearl of my pictures"; it had belonged to the Gonzaga of Mantua (bought with their collection by Charles I in 1627–28) and, before that, presumably to the recipients of the late workshop's production. It is a Raphael-and-Giulio work of the last years — the design the master's, the execution largely the pupil's, finished perhaps after 1520 — and its composition combines the Divino Amore's two mothers with the Grande Sainte Famille's springing Child in the dark-chamber manner of the final period; the landscape's ruins and river scene are Giulio's Roman-campagna furniture. Its Spanish fame was immense — in the Escorial and the Prado it ranked just below the Spasimo — and "la Perla" became, in the Spanish literature, the type-name for a collection's chief treasure. The picture is, in the modern literature, the clearest case of the posthumous workshop: a "Raphael" that may have been entirely painted after Raphael's death, from his design, by the heir who inherited his manner — and that was, for three centuries, loved as the master's own. The 2012 exhibition hung it at the centre of that argument. It remains, whatever its hands, among the most beautiful of the enterprise's products; the two mothers' heads, the Child's step from the cradle, and the cool cave-light are of the design's quality, and the design is Raphael's last word on the theme he had painted since Urbino. The Gonzaga-Stuart-Habsburg provenance gives the picture a second history as an object of state: bought by Charles I with Mantua's collection, sold by the Commonwealth with his head, bought by Spain's ambassador at the Commonwealth sale — the Perla crossed the seventeenth century's three great collections and two revolutions before settling in Madrid, and its travels are a compressed history of how power moved pictures in the Baroque age. Philip's exclamation named it; the name did the rest, and 'la Perla' has been shorthand, in Spanish, for a collection's best thing ever since. The design's authorship question — how much existed before April 1520 — turns on the drawings: a study connected with the Virgin's head has been claimed for the master, and the composition's geometry is of his late type; Giulio's execution is not in doubt, and the picture's date may fall either side of the death. The Prado's technical dossier of 2012 left the question open with a leaning to the posthumous; the entry's dating follows it. As with the Rose, the certainty is the design and the uncertainty the decade — the enterprise's condition, once more.

The picture

A panel, 410 by 279 cm, in the Vatican Pinacoteca: the last painting of Raphael's life, unfinished at his death and set at the head of his bier. Above, on the summit of Mount Tabor, Christ floats in a blaze of white light between Moses and Elijah, his arms spread, his garments blown, transfigured; below him on the mountain-top the three apostles — Peter, James and John — sprawl dazzled, shielding their eyes; at the left edge two kneeling deacon-saints (Justus and Pastor, patrons of the Narbonne cathedral for which the picture was destined) witness. Below, in a darkened valley, the simultaneous scene from the same chapter of Matthew: the nine remaining apostles, gathered at the left, confront the demoniac boy, brought by his father and family from the right — the boy writhes, his eyes rolling, his arm flung up; the apostles, who cannot cure him, point and dispute; at the centre, kneeling with her back half to us, a woman — the composition's pivot — turns from the boy to the apostles and points to him; and several apostles point upward, to the mountain, where the power that can heal him is. The upper half is all light; the lower all shadow; and the two halves are joined by the pointing that runs through the whole.

The commission and the contest

Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, the Pope's cousin, commissioned the altarpiece in 1516–17 for his cathedral of Narbonne, and at the same time commissioned from Sebastiano del Piombo a Raising of Lazarus (National Gallery, London) — a deliberate competition, with Michelangelo supplying Sebastiano with drawings; everyone in Rome knew the stakes. Sebastiano's picture was finished by 1519 and exhibited; Raphael, occupied with St Peter's, the Loggia and everything else, worked on his through 1518–20 and left the lower right corner unfinished at his death on 6 April 1520; Giulio Romano and Penni completed it. Exhibited beside the Lazarus after Raphael's death, it was judged the victor; Giulio de' Medici kept it — Narbonne got the Lazarus — and gave it to San Pietro in Montorio, on whose high altar it stood until 1797, when the French took it to Paris; it returned in 1815 to the Vatican, where it is the last wall of the Pinacoteca's Raphael room.

The double subject

The picture's originality is its doubling. The Transfiguration and the healing of the demoniac boy are successive episodes in Matthew 17 — Christ descends from the mountain to cure the boy the apostles could not — and painters had always shown them separately; Raphael showed them at once, the mountain above and the valley below, the glory and the failure, and made the join the meaning: the boy's rolling eyes are turned, unseeing, towards the light that will heal him; the apostles' pointing hands direct his family — and us — upward; the kneeling woman at the centre, twisting between the two groups, is the hinge on which the whole turns. The composition is thus an argument about mediation — the power absent below is present above, and the picture's traffic of gestures carries the eye from the need to the source — and it is the most complete statement of the "transitive" art that Shearman traced through Raphael's work: every figure moves the viewer on.

The figures

The lower half is the summit of the late manner: the apostles at the left — old, bearded, disputing, their heads studied in the black-chalk auxiliary cartoons at Oxford, Chatsworth and the British Museum that are among the greatest drawings of the Renaissance — are the tapestry cartoons' apostles brought to their final gravity; the demoniac boy, twisted and open-mouthed, is the most extreme figure of pathos Raphael designed, clinical (his state has been diagnosed in the medical literature) and terrible; the father who holds him, the women of the family, the youth pointing upward are studies of response; and the kneeling woman at the centre — monumental, coiled, her drapery in the late manner's deep folds, her pointing arm the composition's lever — is the last of Raphael's great figures, an invented mediator with no textual source, placed where the picture needs her. The upper half is another register: Christ floating with spread arms, weightless, his whites painted in the highest key the panel allows; the two prophets lifted beside him; the apostles below flattened by light. The contrast of the halves — dark tumult, luminous stillness — was read by Nietzsche, in the Birth of Tragedy's fourth section, as the Apollonian redemption shining above the Dionysian ground: the one philosophical reading of a Raphael that has become part of the picture's literature.

Technique and condition

The panel — five vertical poplar planks — is painted in the deep, dark, saturated late manner: the lower half's shadows are built in layers of glaze over dark underpaint, the flesh warm against them, the highlights sharp; the upper half is keyed to white and blue. The restoration of 1972–76 in the Vatican removed darkened varnish and the repaints of centuries and settled the old question of the two halves: the examination showed the picture almost entirely autograph — the long tradition that gave the lower half to Giulio was reversed, and only the lower right group (the woman and figures behind the boy's family) shows the workshop's completion; the darks are Raphael's own late tonality, not dirt. The auxiliary cartoons — full-scale black-chalk heads of the apostles, pounced from the cartoon and reworked from life — document the final stage of his working method, invented, it seems, for this picture: the painter, at the end, drawing each head again from the model before painting it.

The bier and the afterlife

Vasari's account of the picture at the painter's bier — "the sight of the dead man and the living painting made every soul weep" — fixed its status at once: it was, for three centuries, by common consent the most famous painting in the world. It headed every list: Vasari's, Bellori's (who analysed it figure by figure), Reynolds's (the Discourses' recurring touchstone), the French Academy's; its removal to Paris in 1797 was the Louvre's greatest trophy, and its return in 1815 a European event; copies, engravings and mosaic replicas (the St Peter's altar mosaic among them) multiplied it. The nineteenth century began the demotion — the Romantics preferred the early Raphael, Ruskin the primitives; the picture's doubleness, praised by the classicists as invention, was condemned by the new unities as a fault (two pictures in one frame, said the critics from Fuseli onward) — and the twentieth century completed it, preferring the Madonnas and the portraits. The 1972–76 restoration, and Shearman's and Oberhuber's readings, reversed the tide: the picture is again seen as what its first viewers saw — the summation, deliberate and achieved, of everything its painter knew, finished at the edge of death and standing over it. Caravaggio's tenebrism, the Carracci's altarpieces, Rubens's Miracles, the whole Baroque of divine intervention descend from its lower half; its upper half had no heirs, because no one else could float.

What to look at

The kneeling woman — walk to the right until her pointing arm aligns with the boy's; the boy's eyes; the apostles' hands, counting the directions they point; the two kneeling deacons at the left edge, the commission's signature; the auxiliary-cartoon heads of the old apostles, then (in reproduction) the drawings themselves; Christ's whites; and the whole from the room's far end, where the two halves become one vertical event. (Twenty minutes' walk away, the Pantheon holds the tomb; picture and painter still share the hill.) It was the last thing he made; it reads like it.

The picture and its double, again

The comparison with Sebastiano's Lazarus — the two panels were conceived together and exhibited together — remains the frame the picture asks for. Sebastiano's, with Michelangelo's drawings in it, is a frieze of muscular action around the raised dead man: powerful, congested, earthbound. Raphael's answer was to divide the world — to give the earth its darkness and confusion and the sky its light and order, and to make the picture the passage between them. Contemporaries judged it the victor; the judgement was also a verdict on the two conceptions of painting the contest embodied, Michelangelo's force against Raphael's mediation, and Rome's award of the palm to mediation was, as it turned out, the High Renaissance's last decision: within seven years the Sack scattered the school, and the argument moved elsewhere.

The mosaic and the multiplications

The picture's fame produced a unique honour: the full-scale mosaic copy over the altar of the Chapel of the Choir in St Peter's, executed in the eighteenth century by the Vatican's mosaic workshop, so that the Transfiguration stands, in permanent material, inside the basilica whose architect its painter was. The engraved reproductions begin with the sixteenth century and never stop; the painted copies fill the copies section of this catalogue (Christ Church's, the Walker's, Boston's); and the picture's two halves, detached in reproduction, had separate careers — the demoniac boy became a clinical illustration (the first accurate depiction of an epileptic seizure in art, the medical literature says), the transfigured Christ a devotional image. The whole, reassembled in the Vatican's room with the Foligno and the Oddi Coronation, closes the sequence those two begin: the painter's first heaven, his middle one, and his last, on three walls — twenty years of the same problem, ending in the only solution that needed no successor.

Goethe, Hegel, and the modern reading

The picture's philosophical fortune is worth its own note. Goethe, who saw it in Paris's absence only in copies but studied it lifelong, defended its unity against the critics of the doubling: the two scenes, he argued, are one — the need below and the power above are "mutually necessary," and the picture's subject is their relation. Hegel took the picture up in the Aesthetics on the same ground; Nietzsche's reading has been mentioned; and the twentieth century's phenomenologists of the image (from Wölfflin's formal analysis to the recent literature on the pointing hand) have made the Transfiguration the most theorised of all Raphael's works. The reason is in the picture: alone among the altarpieces of its age it is about the structure of mediation — how the visible reaches the invisible — and every philosophy of the image finds its own problem waiting there. That, more than the bier, is why it has never left the centre of the literature: it is the Renaissance's one altarpiece that theorises itself.

The unfinished corner

What Raphael left undone, and Giulio finished, is the lower right: the demoniac's family group behind the boy, where the handling coarsens and the heads lose the auxiliary-cartoon precision. The seam is visible to a patient eye and instructive: the same design, the master's hand on one side of an invisible line and the heir's on the other — the whole problem of the late workshop condensed to a square metre, on the very picture where the master's own hand is everywhere else at its most intense. Death drew the line; the picture carries it; and the Transfiguration is, among everything else, the only Raphael where the transition from Raphael to his school happens inside one frame, mid-figure, on a date we know.

Coda

Two facts, side by side, close the picture's entry as they close the career. The Transfiguration was carried in Raphael's funeral procession to the Pantheon and set above his bier; and it was carried, two hundred and seventy-seven years later, in Napoleon's triumphal procession into Paris, at the head of the wagon-train of confiscated masterpieces, as the trophy of trophies. The two processions — the mourning and the plunder — mark the poles of what Europe made of him: the beloved dead master, and the supreme cultural property. The picture survived both, and hangs now a few hundred metres from his tomb; between them, painter and painting hold the two ends of the Vatican hill, and the visitor can walk from one to the other in twenty minutes, which is the best last act any museum city offers. Walk it. The picture stays; the walker changes; that has been the arrangement since 1520, and it holds.

The set of ten tapestries woven in Brussels, in the workshop of Pieter van Aelst, from Raphael's cartoons, for the Sistine Chapel — in wool, silk and gilt-metal thread, each about five metres wide and four and a half high, with borders of grotesque ornament, scenes from the life of Leo X in monochrome below, and the Medici arms: the Miraculous Draught (Q131290595), the Charge to Peter (Q131290623), the Healing of the Lame Man (Q131290545), the Death of Ananias (Q131290769), the Stoning of Stephen (Q3826995), the Conversion of Saul (Q3689722), the Blinding of Elymas (Q131290754), the Sacrifice at Lystra (Q131290374), Paul in Prison (Q3947763) and Paul Preaching at Athens (Q131290106), with the border strips of the Hours and the Seasons (Q131292166, Q131292152). Seven were hung in the chapel on 26 December 1519; the rest followed by 1521. They were looted in the Sack of 1527, dispersed, partly recovered, looted again by the French in 1798, and returned in 1808; they are in the Vatican Pinacoteca's tapestry gallery, and they were rehung in the Sistine Chapel for a week in February 2020, for the quincentenary of Raphael's death — the first time since the eighteenth century that the chapel was seen as Leo X intended, with Michelangelo above and Raphael below. The 2020 rehanging deserves its paragraph: for one week in February, the Vatican Museums hung the ten tapestries on the chapel's lower walls in their original order — the Petrine scenes on the right of the altar, the Pauline on the left — and the chapel was seen, for the first time in over two centuries, as the total ensemble of 1519–21: Perugino's and Botticelli's cycle, Michelangelo's ceiling, and Raphael's woven histories below, the three generations of the Renaissance stacked on one wall. Photographs and film recorded it; the tapestries returned to the Pinacoteca; and the week became, for the quincentenary literature, the demonstration that the tapestries were designed for that light and that height — the gold thread answering the candlelight, the borders aligning with the painted pilasters — and that the cartoons, for all their grandeur, are the means and the tapestries the end.

The tapestries are the cartoons reversed — the weavers worked from behind, so that every composition is mirrored (Christ gives the keys with his left hand) — and translated into wool, silk and gold: the colours are richer and flatter than the cartoons', the gold thread makes the highlights glitter, the borders add a frame of ornament that the cartoons lack. They cost Leo some 15,000 ducats, and they were, with the Stanze, the most expensive artistic undertaking of his reign; their effect in the chapel, by de Grassis's account, was overwhelming. The designs' influence in the North — through the weavers, who kept the cartoons and wove further sets for Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V and others — was immense: the Raphael tapestries were the Italian High Renaissance as Northern Europe first saw it at full scale. The Vatican's set is the first and the finest; it has been restored repeatedly, most recently in the 2010s; and the 2020 rehanging in the chapel, photographed and filmed, allowed the first modern judgement of the ensemble Leo saw. The individual tapestries have their own entries below.

One of the border strips woven for the Sistine tapestry set — about 498 by 81 cm, wool, silk and gilt-metal thread, in the Vatican Museums — showing the Hours as a sequence of small figures in grotesque ornament, of the kind that framed the narrative panels at the sides: the tapestries' borders, designed in Raphael's workshop (Giovanni da Udine's ornament), carried allegorical and decorative programmes — the Seasons, the Hours, the Elements, the Fates — in the grotesque manner that the Loggia was developing at the same time, and the surviving strips are the record of that frame. The Hours strip, woven in Brussels with the rest, was part of the ensemble hung in 1519–21; it has the set's history and was restored in the twentieth century. It is of interest as evidence of the tapestries' full original appearance — narrative panel, ornamental border, Medici arms, Leonine frieze — and of the workshop's decorative vocabulary at the moment of the Loggia; the little figures of the Hours, each a nude or draped figure in a cartouche, are of Giovanni da Udine's type. Wikidata records it without an article; it is listed here as part of the set.

A second border strip from the Sistine tapestry set — about 492 by 78 cm, wool, silk and gilt-metal thread, in the Vatican Museums — showing the Seasons as small figures in grotesque ornament, the companion of the Hours strip (Q131292166): the four seasons personified, with their attributes, among the candelabra, masks and foliage of the workshop's grotesque. The strips framed the narrative tapestries at the sides and were woven with them in Brussels; this one has the set's history — Sack, recovery, Paris, return — and was restored in the twentieth century. Its design is Giovanni da Udine's, under Raphael's direction, and it belongs to the same campaign of ornament as the Loggia's pilasters and the Stufetta's walls: the antique grotesque, revived from the Domus Aurea, applied to a papal tapestry's edge. The strip is shown in the Vatican's tapestry gallery with the narrative panels; it is rarely noticed, and it is the place where the set's decorative frame — the part that the cartoons do not record — survives.

The tapestry woven by Pieter van Aelst's workshop from Raphael's lost cartoon, about 464 by 533 cm, in the Vatican Museums: Saul on the road to Damascus, fallen from his horse, shielding his eyes from the light in which Christ appears at the upper left, while his companions and their horses scatter in confusion — the composition is known from the tapestry, from a drawing and from the engraving; the cartoon is lost. The design is the most energetic of the Pauline scenes — horses rearing, soldiers running, the fallen Saul at the centre with his arm raised — and its relation to the Heliodorus is plain; the Brussels weavers rendered the horses and the soldiers' armour with a vigour that shows the cartoon's quality, and the light from the sky in gold thread. The tapestry was hung in the chapel by 1521; it has the set's later history, and was restored in the twentieth century and rehung in 2020. It has an Italian Wikipedia article. Its design, through the tapestry and the prints, was among the most influential of the series: Michelangelo's Conversion of Saul in the Pauline Chapel (1542–45) answers it, and the Baroque's conversions — Caravaggio's, Rubens's — descend from both. The tapestry's preservation of the lost cartoon's composition makes it, with the Stephen and the Paul in Prison, the only evidence of three of Raphael's ten designs. The design's horses — rearing, bolting, riderless — are the Heliodorus's taken to open country, and the fallen Saul, on his back with his arm flung across his eyes, is the series' one figure of total overthrow: the persecutor unhorsed by light. That Michelangelo, a generation later, painted the same subject in the neighbouring Pauline Chapel with his own falling Saul is one of the last exchanges between the two artists' inventions — Raphael's design answered, after his death, by the rival who outlived him thirty years. The tapestry's weaving, with its scattering horses and its gold-shot sky, is among the set's most vivid, and its survival makes the lost cartoon the most regretted of the three. A partial copy of the lost cartoon's design, in a drawing at Chatsworth, supplements the tapestry's reversed record; between the two the composition can be reconstructed, and it has been, in the literature, many times — the unhorsed Saul being too important to leave unstudied. The subject's absence from the surviving cartoons has had one odd effect: the Conversion is the only major Raphael composition known to most viewers in reverse — the tapestry's mirror — so that Saul falls to the right in every reproduction, where the cartoon had him fall to the left; a small, permanent dislocation that only the drawing corrects. The Vatican's piece is also among the best preserved of the ten, its gold thread bright; the visitor comparing it with the neighbouring panels can see what four centuries of light have taken from the others. Its Christ in the sky, leaning from the gold with his arm extended to the fallen man, is the series' one direct apparition, and the weavers gave it their best thread.

A black-chalk drawing in the Albertina, Vienna: the head of a bearded apostle, studied for the lower half of the Transfiguration (Q2344437) — one of the auxiliary cartoons and head studies that Raphael made in his last two years for the altarpiece's apostles, the final and most celebrated group of his drawings. The auxiliary-cartoon procedure — the head's outlines pounced through from the full cartoon onto a fresh sheet, then reworked in black chalk from the living model, so that the painter had, beside the panel, a life-size head drawn from life to paint from — appears fully developed only in the Transfiguration's preparation, and the surviving heads (Oxford, Chatsworth, the British Museum, Vienna) are among the summits of Renaissance draughtsmanship: old men's heads, bearded, furrowed, lit from the left, drawn with a breadth and gravity that the panel itself, in its dark lower half, transmutes rather than surpasses. The Albertina's sheet belongs to this group; its apostle is one of the disputing elders at the left of the valley scene. These drawings were dispersed early — collectors prized them from the sixteenth century — and their reassembly in exhibition (London 1983, the Late Raphael shows, Vienna's own displays) is always the occasion of the same observation: at the end, under every burden, Raphael drew better than ever, and the Transfiguration heads are the proof that the enterprise's administrator remained, first, the finest draughtsman alive.

The tapestry woven from Raphael's cartoon (Q3778388), about 501 by 575 cm, in the Vatican Museums: Peter and John healing the cripple among the twisted columns of the Temple gate — reversed from the cartoon. The Solomonic columns, which Raphael took from Old St Peter's, are the weavers' tour de force: their spiral shafts, wreathed in vines with putti, are rendered in gold and coloured thread with a richness the cartoon's distemper only suggests, and the tapestry's surface is the most ornamental of the set. It was among the seven hung in December 1519; it has the set's later history; it was restored in the twentieth century and rehung in 2020. The crowd of mothers and children at the sides, and the two cripples, are woven with the Flemish attention to the particular — the faces individualised, the crutches exact — and the whole shows how the Brussels workshop added, to Raphael's design, a texture of its own.

The picture

A panel, 85 by 60 cm, in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica at the Palazzo Barberini, Rome: a young woman, seated, seen at half-length and three-quarter view turned to the left, naked to the waist, a transparent veil held against her belly by her left hand and her right hand laid, with spread fingers, across her left breast; a striped silk turban of blue and gold is wound round her dark hair, with a pearl pendant at the brow; on her left arm, a narrow blue band — an armlet — inscribed in gold RAPHAEL VRBINAS; behind her, dark foliage — a myrtle bush and a quince branch — against a dark ground; her face is oval, dark-eyed, with a faint smile, and she looks at the viewer. The picture has been called La Fornarina — "the baker's girl" — since the eighteenth century, after the legend of Raphael's mistress.

Identity and legend

Vasari says that Raphael loved a woman so much that his friends, to get him to work on the Farnesina, had her brought to live there; later tradition named her Margherita Luti, daughter of a baker (fornaio) from Siena living in Trastevere, and made her the model of the Velata, the Sistine Madonna, the Seggiola and this picture; a document of 1520 records a Margherita, daughter of Francesco Luti of Siena, entering a convent in Trastevere as a widow — four months after Raphael's death — and the romantics took her for the painter's abandoned love. Nothing connects the Barberini picture with her except the legend and the armlet with the painter's name, which has been read as a lover's possession, a signature, or a later addition; the picture was in the collection of the Countess of Santa Fiora in the sixteenth century, then in the Boncompagni and Barberini collections, and it entered the Galleria Nazionale in 1901 with the Barberini purchase. The sitter may be a courtesan, a mistress, a model, or an allegory; the picture may be a portrait, a Venus, or both.

Attribution

The attribution has been debated for a century. The picture was accepted as Raphael's until Morelli and others, finding the handling coarse beside the Velata, gave it to Giulio Romano; the twentieth century divided; the restoration of 2000 and the accompanying technical examination found beneath the dark background a landscape (painted out, perhaps by Raphael himself, perhaps later), a ring on the sitter's fourth finger painted over, and an underdrawing with the pentimenti of an original; the Barberini catalogues it as Raphael, with the possibility that it was finished after his death by Giulio. The consensus now is that it is Raphael's in conception and largely in execution, begun around 1518–20 and left unfinished at his death, with Giulio's hand in the background and perhaps the turban.

The picture itself

Whatever its status, the Fornarina is the most sensual picture Raphael painted and the one in which the Roman Madonna's type — the dark eyes, the oval face, the turban — is shown without the sanctity: a young woman, half-naked, touching her own breast, smiling slightly, with the painter's name on her arm. The gestures are Venus's — the hand to the breast and the veil to the lap are the Venus pudica of antique sculpture, and the myrtle and quince behind her are Venus's plants — so that the picture is a portrait in the guise of the goddess of love, or the goddess in the guise of a portrait; the armlet's inscription, in that reading, is the painter's claim to her or his signature on his Venus. The flesh is painted with a dry, smooth, luminous touch, the modelling soft; the veil is a scumble of white over the belly; the turban's stripes are laid in with a full brush; the pearl at the brow catches the light. The face, with its faint smile and direct look, is of the type of the Velata — the same woman, many have said; the same ideal, others — and its expression, neither coy nor bold, is the picture's strangeness: she is being looked at and she knows it, and she does not mind.

The ring

The restoration of 2000 revealed, under overpaint, a ring on the fourth finger of the left hand — a small band with a stone, of the kind given at betrothal — which some have read as evidence that the sitter was the painter's promised wife or secret bride (the Margherita of legend, married to him before his death and widowed), and the painting-out of the ring as the act of heirs who wished to hide the marriage. The reading is romantic and unprovable; the ring is there, and it was painted over, and no one knows by whom or why. It has given the picture a new life in the popular imagination, and a new reason for its fame.

Technique and condition

The panel is in the full oil of the late Roman years, with the flesh in thin, smooth layers over a warm ground and the background, as now seen, in a dark brown over the suppressed landscape; the turban and the foliage are broader than the flesh; the armlet's inscription is in gold over the blue. The restoration of 2000 cleaned the picture, left the background as it was (the landscape beneath being too fragmentary to recover) and stabilised the panel; the picture is in good condition, the flesh especially.

Reception

The Fornarina became, in the nineteenth century, the most famous woman in Raphael's work after the Sistine Virgin — the image of the painter's love, reproduced, engraved, and made the subject of Ingres's five versions of Raphael and the Fornarina (1814–40), in which the painter turns from his mistress on his knee to look at her portrait on the easel; the legend of the baker's daughter and the painter who died of love is a Romantic invention built on this panel, and it has never been dislodged. The twentieth century, more sceptical, treated the picture as an attribution problem and a Venus; the 2000 restoration and the 2020 exhibition in Rome — where it hung beside the Velata — restored it to the centre of attention, and the question of its sitter was argued again in front of both pictures by more people than have ever argued about a Raphael. It hangs in the Barberini's Raphael room, and it is, with the Transfiguration, the picture Rome's visitors most want to see.

What to look at

The armlet, and the name on it; the hand on the breast; the veil; the turban's pearl; the myrtle behind; the smile; the place on the fourth finger where the ring was; and the edge of the dark, where the landscape once was.

Ingres and the legend

The Fornarina's afterlife is inseparable from Ingres. Between 1814 and the 1840s he painted at least five versions of Raphael and the Fornarina — the painter seated with his mistress on his knee, turning from her to look at her portrait on the easel behind, the Barberini picture's pose and turban quoted exactly — and the image fixed, for the nineteenth century, the story of the artist torn between love and art, with this panel as its emblem. The legend grew: the baker's daughter of Trastevere, the house in Via di Santa Dorotea said to be hers, the painter's death of love, the convent, the ring; and the picture, which had been a Venus or a portrait, became a relic. The twentieth century's scepticism — Morelli's reattribution to Giulio, the doubts about the armlet — was in part a reaction to the cult; the 2000 restoration's findings (the ring, the landscape, the pentimenti) revived the romance on a technical basis, and the picture's popular fame now rests on both: it is a Raphael, and it is a mystery.

The Venus and the portrait

The scholarly question is whether the picture is a portrait at all. Its sources are Venus images — the Venus pudica's gestures, the myrtle and quince, the transparent veil — and its type is that of the Venetian half-length nudes (Titian's Flora, Palma's courtesans) that were reaching Rome in the 1510s; its armlet, with the painter's name, has parallels in Venetian pictures where the inscription identifies the artist as the woman's "maker" in a double sense. One reading makes it an allegory of painting — the painter's name on the body he has made — another a portrait of a courtesan in Venus's guise, another simply a portrait of a woman he loved, painted as the goddess. The picture's smile and its direct look, which no Venus has, and its jewelled turban, which no goddess wears, argue for a real woman; the gestures argue for the goddess; the answer, probably, is both — the Roman habit of portraying a lady as Venus, or Flora, or a saint, applied by the painter to a woman he knew. That the picture was left unfinished, and finished by Giulio, would explain its unevenness; that it was painted at all, in the last year of a life spent on Madonnas and popes, explains its fascination.

Technique, again

The restoration of 2000 published its findings in detail. The panel is poplar; the ground white; the underdrawing free, with changes in the position of the hands and the line of the shoulder; the flesh was painted first, in thin layers of a warm mid-tone with cooler half-lights, the highlights on the breast and shoulder applied with a dry brush; the veil was scumbled over the finished flesh; the turban, the armlet and the pearl were added over the flesh and hair; the landscape — trees, a sky — was painted behind the figure and then covered with the dark brown that now serves as ground, by a hand that may have been Raphael's (changing his mind) or Giulio's (finishing the picture) or a later owner's; the ring was painted and covered. The sequence is that of a picture worked on in stages and left, at some point, with a decision unmade; and it is the picture's unfinished quality, more than any legend, that makes it feel like a private thing.

What the picture became

The Fornarina is also the picture through which the modern public knows Raphael's name best after the Sistine — the naked woman with the painter's name on her arm has a currency that no altarpiece can match, and the Barberini's postcards sell her above everything else. That currency has its costs: the picture is read, by most who see it, as a love-token rather than as the sophisticated Venus-portrait it probably is, and the name on the armlet, which may be a signature of the most ordinary kind, is read as a brand. But it is also true that the picture invites the reading — the smile, the touch, the turban's intimacy — and that the painter, or his pupil, left it so. Of all Raphael's pictures it is the one in which the ideal and the erotic are least separable, and the one in which his art of relation — the look returned, the gesture that includes the viewer — is turned to its most private end. It was lent to Rome in 2020 and hung with the Velata; it is otherwise always in the Barberini, in a room of its own, where the crowd in front of it is, day after day, the largest in the palace. That, whatever the attribution, is a kind of verdict. The picture's scale — under a metre — surprises those who know it from reproduction; it is a cabinet picture, made to be looked at closely by one person at a time, which is how, for three centuries, it was. The crowds have changed that; the picture has not. A last word on the name. La Fornarina is an eighteenth-century label, like La Velata and La Gravida, and it has fixed the picture's identity as firmly as any title could; the Barberini's own inventories called it simply a portrait of a woman, and the painter, whatever he intended, did not call it anything. The reader should hold the legend and the picture apart, and look at the second.

The small private loggia — with the adjoining stufetta (Q3976326), the apartment of Cardinal Bibbiena on the palace's third floor — decorated in 1516–19 by Raphael's workshop under Giovanni da Udine's leadership: a corridor of grotesque ornament on pale grounds, with small mythologies, landscapes, and the cardinal's devices, in the Domus Aurea manner that the great Loggia below applied at monumental scale. The loggetta's decoration, lighter and more playful than the Bible Loggia's, is the purest surviving stretch of the workshop's grotesque style after the stufetta, and its preservation — the apartment passed to the Secretariat of State's use, and the rooms are not publicly accessible — has kept it, like the bathroom, a specialists' treasure known through photographs. Its authorship is Giovanni da Udine's and the ornament shop's, on the master's general design; its patron's letters (Bibbiena to Bembo) document the pleasure the apartment gave. The Wikidata item stands for the loggia; this entry records it with its context: the Bibbiena apartment — loggetta, stufetta, chambers — was the model of the all'antica private suite, and its ornament, engraved and copied, furnished European decoration from Fontainebleau to the Adam brothers; every "Pompeian" corridor of the eighteenth century is, at bottom, a memory of this one, which was itself a memory of Nero's. The loggetta's small mythologies — Apollo and the Muses among them — were engraved in the eighteenth century when the apartment was accessible to artists, and those prints carried its motifs into the neoclassical pattern-books; Percier and Fontaine's Empire ornament, and through them the nineteenth century's decorative grammar, quote the Bibbiena rooms at several removes. The apartment's inaccessibility has preserved it; photography has published it; and the scholar's consolation stands — of all the workshop's ornament, Bibbiena's is the best documented in its patron's own letters, the cardinal's delight surviving where the public's access does not. The loggetta also documents the ornament shop's division of labour at its most refined: Giovanni da Udine's stuccoes and animals, the figure-painters' small scenes, the gilders' grounds — a decorative production line whose precedence disputes (Vasari records Giovanni's pre-eminence and Giulio's impatience) prefigure the school's dispersal. When the heirs scattered in 1527, Giovanni carried this manner to Venice and the Palazzo Grimani; the loggetta is where it was perfected. Its dating, 1516–19, brackets the great Loggia's campaign, and the two projects shared scaffolding, hands and patterns: the cardinal's corridor was, in effect, the palace-wide manner's trial gallery, and the Bible Loggia its public monument; between the two, and the stufetta beside them, the Vatican preserves the grotesque revival's whole arc within fifty metres. The reader without Vatican connections may see the manner's export instead: Giovanni da Udine's Palazzo Grimani ceilings in Venice are open to visitors, and they are the Bibbiena rooms' direct Venetian children — the nearest a traveller can now come to walking the cardinal's corridor. Failing Venice, the engravings serve; failing those, this paragraph — which is, for most readers, how the Bibbiena rooms have always been visited. The apartment's future opening has been discussed in the Vatican's plans more than once; if it comes, the loggetta will need a queue system, and will deserve one.

The palace Raphael designed and built around 1518–20 for his friend Giovanni Battista Branconio dell'Aquila — papal chamberlain, goldsmith's son from L'Aquila, executor of the painter's will — on the Borgo Nuovo facing St Peter's: demolished in the 1660s for Bernini's colonnade, and known from drawings and engravings (Ferrabosco's elevation among them). The façade was the most inventive of Raphael's architectural designs: five bays and three storeys in which the orders' logic was deliberately played against — Doric half-columns below carrying nothing, an arcaded mezzanine with stucco festoons, niches with statues between the windows, medallions, and a rich crust of stucco ornament by Giovanni da Udine — the wall treated not as structure but as decorated surface, a goldsmith's façade for a goldsmith's son. Where Bramante's palaces stated the orders' grammar, Raphael's Branconio embroidered on it; the licence scandalised and delighted, and its progeny is Mannerist architecture: Giulio's Mantuan façades, Peruzzi's play, the whole sixteenth-century game with the rules descends in part from this front. Its destruction — the painter-architect's most personal building, razed for the century's grandest colonnade — is among the sharper ironies of Roman building history: Bernini, who venerated Raphael, demolished him. The palace's appearance is preserved in enough detail for reconstruction drawings, and every history of Renaissance architecture reproduces them; the site is under the north colonnade's sweep. With the Chigi stables, the Palazzo Jacopo da Brescia (also demolished) and Villa Madama, it made the case that Raphael's architecture, had he lived, would have been as consequential as his painting; the Branconio façade, even on paper, made the next fifty years of façades possible. One of its inventions deserves singling: the festooned mezzanine — the band of stucco garlands swagged between the upper windows — became, through engravings, a standard instrument of the European façade, and the palace's whole principle, ornament as architecture's subject, is the licence on which the Mannerist and Baroque fronts drew; architectural historians from Wölfflin onward have treated the lost building as a hinge of the discipline, a status few standing palaces achieve. Raphael's own house — he bought Bramante's Palazzo Caprini nearby, the 'House of Raphael,' also lost — stood minutes away; the Borgo he inhabited and built is entirely gone under the colonnades and the Via della Conciliazione, and the Branconio drawings are its chief remaining witness. The palace's interior held Branconio's collection — including, by tradition, works of Raphael's own — and its chapel; the demolition dispersed everything, and the drawings' survival owes to the seventeenth century's antiquarian habit of recording what it destroyed: Bernini's own circle drew the façade before the piques fell. Architectural history's debt to such records is the entry's closing moral — of Raphael's Roman buildings, more survive on paper than in stone, and the paper is in Florence, Vienna and the Uffizi's drawing cabinets. Modern digital reconstruction has rebuilt the façade in three dimensions from the drawings, and the models circulate in the architectural literature and online; the palace thus has a second, virtual existence, and the student can now walk, on a screen, the front that Bernini's colonnade replaced — a resurrection the drawings alone made possible, and a reminder of why record matters.

The tapestry woven from Raphael's cartoon (Q3910088), about 504 by 535 cm, in the Vatican Museums: Paul on the steps of the Areopagus, arms raised, preaching to the Athenians below, the round temple and the statue behind — reversed from the cartoon, so that Paul stands at the right. The weavers rendered the apostle's heavy mantle, the listeners' varied dress and the classical buildings with their usual richness, the gold thread picking out the temple's ornament; the audience's faces, individualised in the cartoon, are individualised in the wool. The tapestry was hung in the chapel by 1521; it has the set's later history; it was restored in the twentieth century and rehung in 2020. With the Charge to Peter it was the design most often rewoven for other courts — the preaching Paul suited any chapel — and its influence on the Northern image of the sermon is direct.

A panel, about 65 by 50 cm, in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg: a young woman in half-length, turned slightly to the left, in a dress with a low neckline and a dark mantle, her hair drawn back under a cap, her hands together, looking at the viewer, against a dark ground — a portrait of the late Roman years which the Strasbourg museum and Wikidata give to Raphael and Giulio Romano jointly, in the manner of the Doña Isabel (Q3399388): the head Raphael's in design, the rest the pupil's. The picture came to Strasbourg in the nineteenth century; its sitter is unknown — a Roman lady, or a version of the Fornarina type dressed — and its status has been argued between Raphael, Giulio and the workshop. The face, with its oval and its dark eyes, is of the late type; the handling of the dress is the shop's. It has Wikipedia articles in six languages, which places it among the documented works, and it is the only picture associated with Raphael in Strasbourg; the visitor will find it among the museum's Italian pictures, a small dark portrait whose quality is in the face. Its interest is as one of the group of late female portraits — the Velata, the Fornarina, the Doña Isabel, this — in which the Roman Raphael's type of the woman with dark eyes and a direct gaze was painted by the master and multiplied by his school, and in which the line between the two is, as here, hard to draw. The Strasbourg museum acquired the panel in 1890 from a private collection as a Raphael; its attribution has oscillated since between the master, Giulio and the shop, and the museum's current label — Raphael and Giulio Romano — reflects the view that the design and the face are the one and the execution largely the other. The costume, with its low neckline and dark mantle, is of the late 1510s; the hands, held together at the lower edge, are of the type of the Castiglione's, less finely drawn; the dark ground is the late portraits'. The picture was restored in the 1990s and is in fair condition. It has been proposed as a portrait of Margherita Luti — the Fornarina dressed — on the strength of the features, and as a portrait of a Roman courtesan or a lady of the Medici circle; the proposals are guesses, and the picture is best seen as what it is: a late workshop portrait with a Raphaelesque face, of the kind the shop produced as the master's attention went to St Peter's and the Loggia. It hangs in Strasbourg among the museum's Italian pictures, near the Giotto and the Correggio, and it is, for the city, a Raphael; the label says so, with its qualification. The qualification is honest; the face is good. It is the face that the Strasbourg visitors remember. They are not wrong to. The picture has been lent once, to Mantua for a Giulio Romano exhibition, which is itself a comment on where the museum thinks its execution lies.

The tapestry woven from Raphael's lost cartoon, about 479 by 128 cm — a narrow upright panel, made for the slot beside the chapel's door — in the Vatican Museums: Paul in the prison at Philippi (Acts 16), seated in a barred cell at the upper part, his hands raised, as the earthquake that will free him shakes the building — the earthquake personified as a giant figure at the lower part, breaking the foundations. The composition is known only from the tapestry, the cartoon being lost, and it is the oddest of the set: a tall narrow image of the apostle above and a classical personification of the earthquake below, designed for a space where a normal scene would not fit. The weavers rendered the prison's masonry and the giant's body in the flat Brussels manner; the tapestry has the set's later history, was restored in the twentieth century and rehung in 2020. It has an Italian Wikipedia article. Its interest is as evidence of how Raphael filled the chapel's awkward spaces — with a design that is more emblem than scene — and of the lost cartoon's composition; the earthquake-giant, a figure from the antique repertory of river-gods and Titans, is the series' one mythological intruder. The narrow format — barely a metre and a quarter wide — was set by the chapel's door bay, and the design's solution, a vertical of prison above and earthquake below, is a reminder that the series was fitted to a real wall, panel by panel; the set was not a suite of pictures but a decoration, and its odd pieces show the tailoring. The earthquake personified — a bearded giant heaving the masonry from below — is unique in Raphael's work and was probably drawn from an antique river-god; Vasari does not mention the piece, and its authorship within the shop is unsettled. It is, at any rate, the strangest object in the series, and the one that shows most plainly that the set was an architecture of cloth, with its service corners as well as its façades. The 2020 rehanging placed it back in its slot beside the door, where its narrowness at last made sense; photographs of that week show it as Leo's designers meant it, a painted pier between two histories. Its giant, hunched under the prison's floor, was remembered by Giulio Romano, whose Palazzo Te giants — the Sala dei Giganti's crushed Titans — are this figure multiplied into a room; the least of Raphael's tapestry designs thus fathered, at one remove, the most extravagant decoration of Mannerism. That lineage — from a door-jamb tapestry to the Sala dei Giganti — is a fair emblem of how the workshop's smallest inventions travelled. The piece hangs at the end of the Vatican's tapestry gallery, narrow and easily missed; the reader who has come this far in the catalogue will know to look for it. It repays the finding: no other object in the set shows so nakedly the joinery of a great decorative programme — the place where invention met the wall's constraint and bent to it.

A canvas, 99 by 83 cm, in the Louvre: two men at half-length against a dark ground — behind, Raphael himself, bearded, in a black cap and dark coat, his hand on the shoulder of the man in front; in front, a younger man in a dark coat with a white collar and long hair, seen from the side, turning his head to look back at the painter and pointing with his right hand out of the picture, towards the viewer or towards something unseen. The picture was in the French royal collection by the seventeenth century (it came, probably, through the Gonzaga sale or Mazarin) and has been in the Louvre since; its attribution to Raphael is general, with some seeing the workshop in the friend's figure, and its date — c. 1518–20, by the style and by the painter's age and beard — places it among the last portraits.

The identity of the friend has been the subject of much guessing: Giulio Romano, the pupil; Pietro Aretino; Polidoro da Caravaggio; Baldassare Peruzzi; the painter's fencing master, from the gesture (the figure has been called il maestro di scherma); Pontormo; Giovanni Battista Branconio dell'Aquila, the friend for whom Raphael built a palace; or simply a friend. None is proved. What the picture shows is a relation: the painter's hand on the other's shoulder, the other's turn and pointing gesture, the painter's steady look out at us over his friend's head; and the composition — a double portrait in depth, the front figure turning back to the rear one and pointing forward — is the most dynamic of Raphael's portraits, the movement of the Altoviti's turn doubled.

The self-portrait is the last and most mature of the three images of the painter — the Uffizi panel, the School of Athens figure, and this — and it shows a man of thirty-five or so, bearded, grave, with the long oval face and heavy lids of the earlier portraits and a new weariness; it is the face of the architect of St Peter's and the head of the workshop, and it is, as the picture's reticence suggests, the face of a man who preferred to be behind. The handling is the broad, warm oil of the last years, the blacks deep, the flesh modelled softly, the white collar a few strokes; the picture has been relined and somewhat flattened, and the friend's figure is less finished than the painter's. It hangs in the Louvre's Grande Galerie near the Castiglione, and the two — the friend painted alone, and the painter with a friend — are the Louvre's account of Raphael's Rome as a society of men who looked at each other.

Wikidata's date of 1510 is an error: the beard, the style and the painter's age all place the picture at the end of the decade, and this catalogue dates it so.

The picture's composition repays attention beyond the question of the friend's name. The two figures are arranged in depth — the friend in front, three-quarters to the left, the painter behind and slightly above, facing us — and the friend's turn and pointing gesture make a spiral that runs from his hand, out of the picture, back through his turned head to the painter's face and out again through the painter's gaze: a composition of looks and directions, the most "transitive" of Raphael's portraits in Shearman's sense, in which the spectator is implicated by the pointing hand and addressed by the painter's eyes. What the friend points at is the picture's enigma — the viewer, the painter's work, the world — and its indeterminacy is part of the design. The hand on the shoulder is the picture's tenderness: the painter, behind, claims the friend as his; the friend, turning, acknowledges him. Among Raphael's portraits it is the only one that shows a relationship in action, and it is, with the Navagero and Beazzano, the evidence that he thought of the double portrait as a form for friendship.

The self-portrait's beard has been used to date it — Raphael is beardless in the Uffizi panel and the School of Athens, bearded here — and the beard, with the style, places it at the end; it is the only image of the painter in his last years, and it shows a face older than thirty-seven — which he was, or nearly, when he died. The picture's French provenance is early: it is recorded in the collection of Louis XIV by 1683, and it may have come from Mantua, where the Gonzaga had Raphael drawings and pictures through Giulio Romano; if the friend is Giulio, the Mantuan route would make sense. The Louvre's restoration in the 2010s cleaned the surface and clarified the two hands in the execution — the painter's head finer, the friend's broader — without settling the friend's name. It hangs near the Castiglione, and the two pictures, a few metres apart, are the best place in the world to look at Raphael looking at his friends. The picture's fame has been quieter than the Fornarina's or the Castiglione's, but it has had its admirers: the Romantics saw in it the painter and his pupil; the twentieth century's formalists admired its spiral; the Louvre's 2010s restoration and the Rome exhibition of 2020, where it hung near the Castiglione, brought it renewed attention, and the question of the friend — which the exhibition catalogue left open — was argued again. Whoever he was, he is pointing at us, and the painter behind him is watching to see what we do. It is, for that reason, the most modern of his portraits — the one that treats the viewer as a participant rather than a witness — and the one that most directly anticipates the Baroque's habit of addressing the spectator from inside the frame. The friend's pointing hand is the gesture of the Sistine Madonna's Sixtus turned secular; it asks the same thing — look there — and leaves us to find out where. The Louvre's room, which holds also the Castiglione and the Belle Jardinière, is the place to find out.

The tapestry woven from Raphael's lost cartoon, about 450 by 370 cm — the smallest of the set, made for the narrow space beside the chapel's screen — in the Vatican Museums: the martyrdom of Stephen (Acts 7), the deacon kneeling at the centre with his arms raised towards the vision of Christ in the sky at the upper left, the stoning crowd around him, and at the right the young Saul, seated, watching over the cloaks of the stoners; a landscape behind. The cartoon is lost, and the tapestry is the only full record of the design, which is known also from a drawing in Windsor and from the engraving; it shows Raphael's treatment of the martyrdom as a contained, almost classical scene — the kneeling saint at the centre, the stoners in a ring, the future apostle watching — without the violence a Northern painter would have given it. The tapestry was among those hung in December 1519 — its subject, the first martyr, suited the feast day — and it has the set's later history; it was restored in the twentieth century and rehung in 2020. It has an Italian Wikipedia article and is tiered accordingly. Its design is the link between the Petrine and Pauline halves of the series: Stephen's death is Saul's first appearance, and the young man minding the cloaks is the Paul of the next six scenes. The design's calm — the martyr kneeling as if in prayer, the stones almost incidental — is deliberate: in the chapel the scene hung beside the Charge to Peter, and the first martyr's death was paired with the first pope's commission, sacrifice and authority side by side. The Windsor drawing for the composition shows the kneeling Stephen studied from the model; the tapestry's weavers gave the vision of Christ in the sky a glory of gold thread that the cartoon, lost, cannot be compared with. Its small size and its subject have kept it the least studied of the ten; the 2020 rehanging, which placed it back beside the Charge, restored its point. The kneeling martyr's upturned face, woven with the gold glory above it, is the piece's one splendour, and it is enough; the visitor to the Vatican's tapestry gallery, walking the set's length, should not pass it. The scene's pairing of Stephen and Saul — the martyr and his future successor in one frame — is the series' most compressed piece of theology: the Church's continuity shown as a young man holding coats. Raphael's gift for the meaningful bystander, which began with the Oddi altarpiece's apostles, ends here, in a figure who watches a death and will inherit its mission. The tapestry's border, with the Medici arms and the Leonine frieze below, survives complete on this piece, and it is the best place in the set to see how the narrative panels were framed — the grotesque border, the arms, the monochrome scenes of the Pope's life — as one woven wall. The first stone, poised in a stoner's raised hand, never falls; the design holds the death at the instant before it, which is Raphael's tact.

The tapestry woven from Raphael's cartoon (Q3687196), about 486 by 632 cm, wool, silk and gilt-metal thread, in the Vatican Museums: Christ giving the keys to the kneeling Peter and pointing to the sheep, the apostles in a row behind — reversed from the cartoon. Among the seven hung in December 1519, it occupied the wall nearest the altar on the left, facing the Draught, so that the calling and the commission of Peter flanked the altar of the Pope's chapel; the doctrinal weight of the subject — the foundation of the papacy — made it the series' key piece. The weaving is among the finest of the set: the apostles' robes, in reds, blues and gold, and Christ's white tunic, catch the light in the gilt thread; the sheep and the landscape are rendered with Flemish precision. The tapestry's later history follows the set's — Sack, recovery, Paris, return — and it was restored in the twentieth century and rehung in the chapel in 2020. It is the tapestry most often reproduced as the image of the series, and the one in which the Brussels weavers' translation of Raphael's monumental figures into cloth is most successful.

The tapestry woven from Raphael's cartoon (Q3925594), about 501 by 579 cm, in the Vatican Museums: Paul before the proconsul Sergius Paulus, the sorcerer Elymas struck blind and groping at the right, the court starting from its throne — reversed from the cartoon. The tapestry preserves the full composition, including the left-hand strip that the cartoon lost in the seventeenth century, and is therefore the complete record of the design; the inscription on the dais, naming the proconsul's conversion, is woven in. The Brussels weavers rendered the classical hall, the throne's canopy and the courtiers' robes with their usual richness, and the blinded Elymas — the figure the sixteenth century copied — in a foreshortening that the wool carries well. The tapestry was among those hung in December 1519; it has the set's later history; it was restored in the twentieth century and rehung in 2020.

The tapestry woven from Raphael's cartoon (Q3863236), about 486 by 631 cm, in the Vatican Museums: Ananias falling dead before the apostles on their dais, the crowd recoiling — reversed from the cartoon. Among the seven hung in December 1519, it was the most dramatic of the set on the chapel's wall, and its falling figure, woven in foreshortening, was the passage that most impressed the first viewers. The weaving renders the cartoon's architecture — the dais, the steps, the wall with its window — in the flat, precise manner of Brussels, and the figures' draperies in rich colour with gold; the crowd's faces are individualised. The tapestry has the set's later history and was restored in the twentieth century; it was rehung in the chapel in 2020. The design's influence — through this tapestry and its copies, woven for other courts — on the history painting of the North is among the most direct of the series: Rubens's and Van Dyck's apostolic scenes know it.

The tapestry woven by Pieter van Aelst's Brussels workshop from Raphael's cartoon (Q3900659), about 493 by 440 cm, wool, silk and gilt-metal thread, in the Vatican Museums: Christ in the boat with Peter kneeling before him, the fishermen hauling the net, the lake and the city — reversed from the cartoon, as all the set are. It was among the seven hung in the Sistine Chapel on 26 December 1519 and it occupied the place nearest the altar on the right; its border carries the Medici arms and, below, a monochrome frieze of Leo X's life. The weaving translates the cartoon's distemper into a denser, flatter colour, with the gold thread catching the light in the water and the robes; the cranes and the fish, which Giovanni da Udine painted in the cartoon, are rendered by the weavers with the Flemish taste for natural detail. The tapestry was looted in 1527 and recovered; it was among those taken to Paris in 1798 and returned in 1808; it was restored in the twentieth century and rehung in the chapel for the week of February 2020. It is, with the Charge to Peter, the most admired of the set, and the one in which the weavers' skill in water and sky is most evident.

The tapestry woven from Raphael's cartoon (Q3944654), about 482 by 581 cm, in the Vatican Museums: the people of Lystra preparing to sacrifice the ox to Paul and Barnabas, the apostles refusing, the healed cripple kneeling — reversed from the cartoon. The sacrifice group, with its ox, axe-bearer and pipe-player from the antique reliefs, is rendered by the weavers in the flat, precise manner of Brussels, the ox's garland and the altar's ornament picked out in gold; the buildings behind, with the statue of Mercury, are woven with architectural exactness. The tapestry was hung in the chapel by 1521 (it was not among the first seven); it has the set's later history; it was restored in the twentieth century and rehung in 2020. Its design, the most classical of the set, was much copied in the North as a model of antique sacrifice, and its axe-bearer appears in Flemish and Dutch history painting for a century.

A drawing in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt (SM 421Z), of a caryatid — a draped female support figure — connected with the decorative programmes of the last years: the Sala di Costantino's dado of painted caryatids, or the workshop's architectural ornament. The sheet, dated c. 1520, belongs to the final period's design production for the fictive architecture that framed the great walls — the painted supports, herms and Virtues that the Costantino's decoration deployed and that Perino del Vaga's dadoes in the Stanze developed after; caryatid designs from the master and the shop circulated in the workshop's pattern stock, and the Städel's sheet is among the survivors. Attribution within the shop (Raphael, Giulio, Penni) varies by scholar; the Städel keeps it under Raphael's name. The drawing's interest is programmatic: it documents the late workshop's habit of designing the whole wall — history above, architecture and figures below — as one system, the habit the Costantino's restoration has made newly visible; the caryatid, a person become a column, is the system's emblem, and Raphael's late decorative thinking — bodies and buildings interchangeable — is nowhere more compact.

A panel in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin (cat. 242), catalogued as "Raffael (Nachfolger)" — follower of Raphael: a version of the seated Baptist in the wilderness pointing to the cross, after the composition of the Uffizi and Louvre pictures (Q3463871, Q3463874), painted in or after the workshop's orbit in the 1520s. The Berlin picture is one of the many repetitions that the Baptist design generated — the type was among the shop's most demanded, and versions of varying quality spread through the collections — and its "follower" label places it outside the shop proper, a copyist's or associate's derivation. Wikidata lists it under Raphael's name from the older catalogue tradition; this entry records it at its museum's own valuation. Its presence in Berlin, with the gallery's early Madonnas upstairs, offers a compressed lesson: the Solly Madonna of 1502 and this Baptist of the 1520s bracket the arc from the prodigy's own small panel to the posthumous industry — from a boy painting every leaf himself to a name that others painted under.

The largest of the four Stanze — the great hall for receptions and ceremonies — painted 1519–1524, begun on Raphael's designs in his last months and executed after his death by Giulio Romano and Gianfrancesco Penni with the workshop: four vast wall paintings of the life of Constantine — the Vision of the Cross (Q2405750), the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the Baptism of Constantine (Q1996917) and the Donation of Constantine — framed by a painted architecture of enthroned popes flanked by Virtues in fictive niches, with painted caryatids and hangings below; the ceiling (a sixteenth-century replacement of the original wooden one) carries the Triumph of the Cross. The room is the Renaissance's most complete statement of the papacy's imperial claim — the first Christian emperor's vision, victory, baptism and donation, painted around a hall where popes received ambassadors — and its execution history is the workshop's final chapter: Raphael left designs (the Louvre and Chatsworth modelli record them) and, on the evidence of Vasari and the 2015–2024 restoration, painted with his own hand, in oil on the wall, the trial figures of Justice and Comitas at the window wall — his last painting, and the demonstration piece of the oil-mural technique he meant to use for the whole room. His death in April 1520 left Giulio and Penni to carry the hall in fresco; Sebastiano intrigued for the commission and lost; the room was finished under Clement VII in 1524. The recent decade-long restoration, completed in 2024, cleaned the whole, confirmed the two oil figures as autograph, and returned the hall — long the Stanze's dim antechamber — to its blazing intended state. The Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Giulio's execution of the master's battle designs, became the pattern of European battle painting for two centuries; the room entire, the pattern of the state gallery. It is the bridge between Raphael and Mannerism: his conception, their hands, and the difference, wall by wall, is the lesson the room teaches better than any book.

The two oil figures deserve their paragraph: Justice and Comitas (Friendliness), painted in oil directly on the wall flanking the window, were identified by the 2015–2024 restoration as autograph Raphael on technical grounds — the oil-on-wall preparation matching the Liberation of Peter's experiments, the handling unlike Giulio's or Penni's fresco around them — and they are now accepted as his last paintings: two allegorical women, seated in fictive niches, begun as the demonstration of the technique in which he intended the entire hall. Had he lived, the Costantino would have been the first oil-painted monumental room in Europe; his heirs, unable or unwilling to sustain the method, reverted to fresco around his two trial figures, which remained embedded in the walls like a signature interrupted mid-word. The restoration's confirmation was the quincentenary's chief scholarly event, and the two figures — long ignored as workshop filler — now draw the room's closest looking. The hall's political afterlife closed the Stanze's story: in 1527 the Sack's German soldiery scratched Luther's name into the frescoes' lower zones (the graffiti survive, preserved by the restorers as historical record), and the room painted to proclaim empire's submission to the Church was autographed by the empire's mutinous army seven years after its designer's death. No monument of the High Renaissance carries its own refutation so legibly; the restoration kept the scratches, which was right.

The first wall of the Sala di Costantino: Constantine, addressing his army on the Tiber's bank before the battle, turns to the vision — the cross of light in the sky with the Greek words EN TOUTO NIKA, "in this sign conquer" — while the soldiers stir around him, standards and eagles against the sky, the Castel Sant'Angelo's mole and Rome's monuments in the distance; a dwarf jester at the emperor's feet (a court touch the sixteenth century relished). Painted 1520–21 by Giulio Romano and the workshop from the designs Raphael left; the composition — the general's address transformed by the apparition, the army's wheeling mass, the topographic Rome — is the master's late narrative manner carried into the colossal, and the wall's execution is Giulio's hard, energetic early style. The flanking painted popes (Peter enthroned above the scene) and Virtues belong to the room's fictive architecture. The wall was cleaned in the 2015–2024 restoration; its details — the armour, the standards, the portrait heads among the soldiers — recovered their metallic brilliance. The scene fixed the subject's iconography: every later Vision of Constantine, painted or engraved, keeps the address-interrupted-by-heaven arrangement, and Bernini's Constantine at the Scala Regia's foot, a century and a half later, rides out of this room's imagination. As the first wall of the hall it is also the room's thesis: empire receives its sign from heaven, in front of Rome — the argument the Donation opposite completes. A modello for the wall, in the Louvre, preserves the design at the stage Raphael left it, and comparison shows Giulio's changes — the composition condensed, the gestures hardened; the wall is the first full demonstration of what the heir would do with the inheritance, and Mantua's Palazzo Te, five years later, is its sequel. Among the soldiers' heads are portraits of the workshop and court, by tradition; the dwarf, a Gonzaga-style court grotesque, signs Giulio's taste rather than the master's. The wall's topographic Rome — Sant'Angelo's mass, the Borgo's towers — belongs to the school's antiquarian habit and to the room's argument: Constantine's vision happens here, over the city the popes inherited; the Costantino's Rome is the Attila's brought forward, and the ambassadors received beneath it stood before a map of the claim. The wall's restoration recovered a detail the grime had buried: the vision's Greek motto, lettered in gold on the sky, legible again after four centuries — the room's one inscription in the language of the empire it annexes. Giulio's soldiers around it — the crowding standards, the turning horses, the armour's glitter — are his early manner complete, and the wall is, with the Battle beside it, the première of the style Mantua would receive whole in 1524; the Costantino is Palazzo Te's overture, played in the pope's house. The wall was the first thing a received ambassador saw on entering; its address was diplomatic before it was devotional, and its rhetoric — heaven endorsing the house you stand in — was understood by every envoy who bowed beneath it. The restoration's completion in 2024 returned the wall's sky to its metallic dawn; the room now opens the Stanze visit with the brilliance its planners intended, and the Vision's cross, gold on gold, is again the first thing the eye finds — which was always the design.

The third wall of the Sala di Costantino: Constantine, kneeling naked in the font of the Lateran baptistery, receives baptism from Pope Sylvester I (given the features of Clement VII, under whom the wall was painted), attended by clergy and court in the baptistery's centralised architecture — the octagon rendered with archaeological care. Painted 1521–24, after Raphael's death, principally by Gianfrancesco Penni with the workshop; of the room's four walls it is the furthest from the master — designed as well as executed by the heirs, on the room's programme — and its interest is precisely that: it shows the enterprise running on Raphael's momentum without Raphael, Penni's smooth ceremonial manner filling the master's framework. The subject — the emperor kneeling to the pope in the sacrament — is the room's doctrinal hinge: the Donation wall beside it shows the temporal consequence (Constantine giving Sylvester the empire's western rule), and the pair enacted, for the ambassadors received beneath them, the papacy's claim over crowns; that the Donation itself had been exposed as a forgery by Lorenzo Valla seventy years earlier troubled the programme not at all — the walls answered philology with paint. The wall was cleaned in the 2015–2024 restoration. Its Clement-as-Sylvester is the room's last papal portrait, and the kneeling emperor — naked, humbled, historical — is the image the Reformation's pamphleteers turned against Rome within the decade: the room's argument, like the tapestries', was overtaken by its audience. The baptistery's architecture — the Lateran octagon rendered with measured accuracy — is the wall's finest passage and its most Raphaelesque: the setting as protagonist, in the school's late manner; Penni's figures, smooth and processional, fill it without disturbing it. The wall's cleaning in the recent campaign recovered the interior's porphyry and gold; the visitor who gives the room's least wall its minute will find the architecture worth it. Penni's career effectively ends with this wall — he followed Giulio toward Mantua and Naples and died young in 1528 — and the Baptism is his monument: the faithful second's largest surviving statement, the enterprise's smooth style without its engine. History has been hard on him ('il Fattore,' the maker, the doer); the wall, fairly read, shows a real designer of ceremonial space who lacked only what could not be taught. The wall also closes this catalogue's account of the Stanze: begun by a twenty-five-year-old alone in the Segnatura, ended by his assistants' assistants in a hall he never saw finished — sixteen years, four rooms, and the whole arc of the enterprise from hand to institution, walked in five minutes by any visitor who knows what the sequence means. The Baptism's Clement-as-Sylvester also began a run: Clement VII's features served the room's later papal portraits, and the substitution habit — the reigning pope's face on the historical one's office — became standard in papal decoration; the walls' popes are always the present one, which was the point of painting them. The room's four historic popes wear, between them, the faces of two Medici; the family's investment in the hall repaid itself in marble-durable portraiture, and the Sala di Costantino is, among its other identities, the Medici's largest family album. As for the Baptism itself, its quiet virtues — the octagon's measured light, the kneeling emperor's humility staged without abjection, the ceremony's ordered breathing room — are Penni's own, learned from twelve years of the master's spacing; the wall is derivative, decorous and, taken on its terms, entirely successful, which is a fair epitaph for the faithful of any workshop. The recent cleaning has also allowed Penni's palette its due — the pale golds and greys of the baptistery against the courtiers' color — and the wall reads, for the first time in centuries, as the composed ceremony it was designed to be; those who study the late workshop now have, in this room, all four of its registers cleaned and comparable: the master's oil figures, Giulio's battles, Penni's ceremonies, and the ornament shop's frame.

A note on sources closes the entry: the division of the Costantino's hands rests on Vasari (who assigns the room), on the payment documents (which name Giulio and Penni), on the modelli (Louvre, Chatsworth), and now on the restoration's technical stratigraphy; the Baptism's attribution to Penni is the convergence of all four, and it is as secure as workshop attributions get. The wall may stand, in this catalogue, for the whole class of works where 'by Raphael' means 'by the thing Raphael built' — the majority class of the last section, and the honest sense of the word for everything after 1517. The reader who has followed this catalogue from the Baronci angel will recognise the symmetry: the career opens with a boy's hand inside an old man's contract, and closes with old hands inside a dead man's design. Between the two lies everything above; and the Baptism, neither the best nor the least of it, has the distinction of being the end. Endings suit catalogues better than careers; Raphael's career, as the essay accompanying this catalogue argues, did not so much end as distribute itself — into the school, the prints, the buildings, the doctrine — and the Baptism's smooth anonymous competence is one of its many continuations. The reader closing this entry has reached 1524; the copies section that follows reaches the nineteenth century; the distribution has not stopped yet. A wall by the faithful Penni, cleaned and legible after five centuries, is as good a place as any to observe that an enterprise built on teachable design does not die with its designer; it merely stops improving — which is, in the end, the only difference the connoisseurs have ever been able to measure. On that measured difference this catalogue's judgements, like everyone's, finally rest. The reader is invited to test them against the images at every entry; that standing invitation is the catalogue's method and its whole point. The room finished, the shop dispersed; the Baptism is the enterprise's last completed page, and it closes the book the Baronci contract opened twenty-four years and three hundred entries earlier.

A second set of tapestries woven from Raphael's cartoons, in the Palazzo Ducale at Mantua: the Acts of the Apostles rewoven in Brussels, probably in the 1520s, for the Gonzaga — Federico II Gonzaga, Giulio Romano's patron, who would have known the designs through his painter — and hung in the ducal palace, where they remain, in a room arranged for them in the eighteenth century. The Brussels workshops, which kept Raphael's cartoons after the Vatican set was delivered, wove the series repeatedly for European courts — sets survive at Mantua, in Madrid (the Habsburg set), in Vienna, in Dresden, in Berlin, and elsewhere — and the Mantua set is among the earliest and most complete of these re-editions, with borders different from the Vatican's. The existence of the re-weavings is the measure of the designs' fame: the Raphael cartoons were, for a century, the most reproduced compositions in Europe, not in print but in cloth, and the Northern courts' knowledge of the Roman High Renaissance came largely through them. The Mantua set was restored in the twentieth century; it is less rich than the Vatican's (no gold thread) but well preserved, and it is shown in the palace's Appartamento degli Arazzi. Wikidata records the set without an article; it is listed here as the first of the re-weavings and as the Gonzaga's own Raphael.

A panel, in the Vatican Pinacoteca: the Coronation of the Virgin painted for the Franciscan nuns of Monteluce at Perugia — the commission with the longest history in Raphael's career. The nuns contracted with him in 1505, on the recommendation "of many citizens" and of the fame of the Oddi Coronation, for an altarpiece of the Virgin's coronation "like the one at Narni" (Ghirlandaio's); he took the advance and, for twenty years, did not paint it — renegotiations in 1516 and reminders followed, and at his death the picture existed as a design; Giulio Romano and Penni painted it in 1525 to discharge the estate's obligation, dividing the work (Giulio the upper Coronation, Penni the lower apostles at the tomb, by the usual account), and the nuns received their altarpiece a generation after ordering it. Taken to Paris in 1797, it returned to the Vatican in 1815. The picture is thus a posthumous Raphael in the strictest sense — contracted from the living master, delivered by the dead one's heirs — and its two-zone composition, the empty flowering tomb below and the Coronation above, is the Oddi altarpiece's scheme revisited by the shop in the hard bright manner of the 1520s. Its documentary trail (the contracts survive) is the best-recorded case of Raphael's contractual practice and its afterlife: the estate as workshop, the design as asset, the name as guarantee. As painting it is the heirs'; as a document it is the whole story of the enterprise in one frame, and the Vatican hangs it, fittingly, in the room where the Oddi Coronation — the twenty-two-year-old's version of the same subject — faces it across twenty years and one death.