IV. Rome under Julius II: the Stanze (1508–1513)

He arrived in Rome in the second half of 1508, at twenty-five, almost certainly on the recommendation of his compatriot Donato Bramante, who since 1506 had been rebuilding St Peter's for Julius II and was the most powerful artist at the papal court. Julius — Giuliano della Rovere, elected in 1503, sixty-five years old, a warrior-pope who led his own armies and whose temper Michelangelo had already fled — had resolved not to live in the Borgia apartments decorated by Pinturicchio for his hated predecessor Alexander VI, and was having a suite of rooms on the floor above redecorated by a team that included Perugino, Sodoma, Bramantino and Lorenzo Lotto. Within months Raphael had displaced them all. Vasari says Julius, seeing what the young man could do, had the other painters' work torn down; the truth seems to have been a little more gradual, and Perugino's ceiling in what became the Stanza dell'Incendio survives. But by 1509 the newcomer was in sole charge of the room now called the Stanza della Segnatura, and the Roman career that would last eleven and a half years had begun.

The Stanza della Segnatura

The room takes its name from the papal tribunal of the Segnatura Gratiae that later met there; in Julius's time it was almost certainly his private library, and the decoration — as John Shearman argued and most scholars now accept — is a painted catalogue of its shelves. On the ceiling, four roundels personify Theology, Philosophy, Poetry and Justice; on the four walls beneath them, the four faculties of knowledge are shown as assemblies of their exemplars. Under Theology, the so-called Disputa (1509): the Church on earth debating the Sacrament on an altar, while above, on a bank of cloud, the Church in heaven — Christ between the Virgin and the Baptist, the apostles and patriarchs, God the Father in glory — confirms the mystery. Under Philosophy, the School of Athens (c. 1509–11): the philosophers of antiquity gathered in a vast Bramantesque vaulted hall, Plato and Aristotle advancing at the centre. Under Poetry, the Parnassus (c. 1511): Apollo among the Muses and the poets of antiquity and of Italy, arranged around the real window in the wall. Under Justice, the Cardinal and Theological Virtues in the lunette, and below, on either side of the window, Justinian receiving the civil law and Gregory IX the canon law.

The Disputa came first, and its many drawings — the largest surviving group for any Raphael composition — show a painter working at the edge of his powers. He began, as the Windsor and Chantilly studies reveal, with a Peruginesque arrangement of two tiers; he moved, sheet by sheet, towards the great semicircular sweep of the celestial court and the animated, discontinuous groups of the earthly church below, in which individual figures — the kneeling youth pointing upward at the left, the old man leaning on the balustrade — carry the eye and the argument. The finished fresco has a curious doubleness: the upper half is hieratic, golden, almost Byzantine in its symmetry; the lower half is a crowd scene of astonishing variety, in which every pose is a gesture of thought. Between them stands the Host in its monstrance, a small white disc at the exact centre of the composition, the pivot of everything. It is the first of Raphael's demonstrations that a vast assembly can be organised around a single small point.

The School of Athens is the demonstration perfected. Everything in it is architecture: the fictive hall, which is a Bramante building (Vasari says Bramante designed it; it is in any case a vision of the new St Peter's), with its coffered barrel vaults receding to a patch of sky; the placement of the two principals at the vanishing point, so that the perspective is the argument — all roads lead to Plato and Aristotle, and Plato points up and Aristotle points out; the disposition of some fifty figures on two levels in groups that are each a little drama of teaching and learning. The cartoon survives in the Ambrosiana in Milan, the only full-scale cartoon for a fresco to come down to us from the High Renaissance, and it shows that the composition was fixed in every figure before the plaster was laid — except one. The brooding figure in the foreground, leaning on a block of marble and writing, is not in the cartoon; technical examination shows he was painted on a separate patch of plaster cut into the finished fresco. He is Heraclitus, and he has Michelangelo's face and Michelangelo's boots. Raphael added him in 1511, after the first half of the Sistine ceiling had been unveiled, a few rooms away, in August of that year. It is at once a homage, a theft and a confession: the painter of harmony acknowledging that there was now another way to paint.

The two remaining walls are smaller in scale and quieter in effect. The Parnassus (c. 1511), with its laurel-crowned Apollo playing not a lyre but a Renaissance lira da braccio and its company of Homer, Dante, Virgil, Sappho and Petrarch, is the most purely lyrical of the frescoes and the one in which Raphael's reading of the antique — the Belvedere Apollo was installed in the courtyard in 1511 — is most graceful. The Jurisprudence wall (1511), with its lunette of Fortitude, Prudence and Temperance, marks the end of the room and the first sign of a change: the Virtues have a new Michelangelesque grandeur of limb and a new warmth of colour.

The Stanza d'Eliodoro

The second room, decorated between 1511 and 1514, is the room in which Raphael became a dramatic painter — and the room in which the Sistine ceiling, now fully visible, and the arrival in Rome in 1511 of the Venetian Sebastiano del Piombo, with his knowledge of Giorgione's light and Venetian oil colour, both made their mark. The programme, chosen by Julius in the middle of his war against the French, is political: four miracles of divine protection for the Church. The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple (1511–12) shows the Syrian treasurer who tried to rob the Temple at Jerusalem thrown down by a heavenly horseman and two running youths, while Julius himself, borne on his sedia gestatoria, watches from the left — a warning to anyone who thought of laying hands on the patrimony of Peter. The composition is violently asymmetrical: a void at the centre, where the high priest prays at the distant altar, and the action exploding at the right edge. Nothing in the first room had prepared for this.

The Mass at Bolsena (1512) shows the thirteenth-century miracle of the bleeding Host, which had convinced a doubting priest; Julius kneels opposite the altar, attended by his Swiss guards — the group of guards on the lower right, painted in broad, saturated colour with a freedom the first room never allowed, is among the finest passages of Raphael's fresco and the one most indebted to Venice. The Liberation of Saint Peter (c. 1514), painted around the window on the dark wall, is the first great nocturne of Roman painting: the scene is lit by three sources — the angel's radiance in the central prison, the moon through the clouds at the left, the torch at the right — and the armour of the sleeping guards catches each of them. The Meeting of Leo the Great and Attila (1514) was begun under Julius, who died in February 1513, and finished under his successor, whose portrait was painted over Julius's in the figure of the pope on horseback; it is the least of the four, and the first in which the hand of assistants is visible.

The easel paintings of the Julian years

Meanwhile the easel work of these years set the terms for European painting for two centuries. The Portrait of Julius II (1511–12; the prime version, recognised in 1970, is in the National Gallery in London) is the first modern state portrait: an old man in a chair, seen slightly from above, lost in thought, gripping a handkerchief — power shown as interiority. The Madonna di Foligno (1511–12, Vatican), for the papal secretary Sigismondo de' Conti, and the Sistine Madonna (1512–13, Dresden), a papal gift to the Benedictines of San Sisto in Piacenza, translate the Florentine Madonna into the Roman grand manner: the Virgin no longer sits in a meadow but stands on cloud, in a vision, with saints and donors as intercessors. The Sistine Madonna is the most famous of all Raphael's pictures, and it is worth saying plainly what it is: a woman carrying a child, walking towards us out of a glowing bank of cloud that, on inspection, is made entirely of faces, between a pope and a martyr who gesture her forward, with a green curtain pulled aside to reveal her and two bored child-angels leaning on the sill beneath. It is painted on canvas — one of very few large canvases by Raphael — presumably because it was to travel. The technique is broader and more fluent than anything he had done in Florence; the colour (the pope's gold cope, Barbara's green and rose, the Virgin's red and blue against the luminous grey-gold of the cloud) is the most Venetian he ever achieved.

And for Agostino Chigi, the Sienese banker who financed the papacy and became Raphael's most important private patron, he painted in the villa on the Tiber now called the Farnesina the Triumph of Galatea (c. 1512): the sea-nymph in her shell-chariot drawn by dolphins, wheeling among tritons and nereids and cupids, turning her head away from the clumsy serenade of Polyphemus (painted beside her by Sebastiano). It is Raphael's first full mythology, his most direct answer to Venetian poesia, and the occasion of the most-quoted sentence he ever wrote. Asked by Castiglione where he had found so beautiful a model, he answered (in a letter of 1514 whose authorship has been questioned, but whose substance nobody doubts): "To paint a beautiful woman I should have to see many, and with the condition that you were with me to choose the best. But since there is a shortage both of good judges and of beautiful women, I make use of a certain idea that comes into my mind." The certa idea would have a long afterlife.