V. Rome under Leo X: the enterprise (1513–1520)

Julius died on 21 February 1513. His successor, elected on 11 March, was Giovanni de' Medici, second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, thirty-seven years old, a connoisseur, a spendthrift and a lover of theatre, music and Latin verse — the pope who is supposed to have said "God has given us the papacy; let us enjoy it." Leo X enjoyed Raphael. In the seven years that remained, the painter's position changed from that of a favoured artist to that of the artistic director of the Roman Church, and his workshop changed from a studio into an institution.

The scale of the enterprise is astonishing even now. On Bramante's death in March 1514, Raphael — who had no architectural training beyond what he had absorbed in Urbino and from Bramante himself — was appointed architect of St Peter's, at fifty gold ducats a month, and began to rethink the greatest building project in Christendom, proposing a longitudinal plan with ambulatories that Serlio preserved. In August 1515 a papal brief made him commissioner of antiquities, with authority over all excavated marbles and inscriptions in Rome and its environs, and it was in that capacity that he undertook, with the help of Fabio Calvo's translation of Vitruvius and a team of draughtsmen, a measured survey of ancient Rome — region by region, building by building — whose purpose and method are described in the famous letter to Leo X drafted with Castiglione around 1519. That letter, which laments the destruction of ancient monuments by the popes' own builders ("how many pontiffs have permitted the ruin and defacement of the ancient temples…") and proposes a rigorous method of architectural drawing in plan, elevation and section, is one of the founding documents of both archaeology and historic preservation. He also designed, in these years, buildings: the little church of Sant'Eligio degli Orefici, the Chigi stables, palaces for Jacopo da Brescia and Giovanni Battista Branconio dell'Aquila in the Borgo, Palazzo Pandolfini in Florence, and above all the Villa Madama on Monte Mario for Cardinal Giulio de' Medici — a suburban villa conceived, in a letter of Raphael's own, as an archaeological reconstruction of the ancient villa suburbana as described by Pliny, with loggias, gardens, a theatre and a hippodrome, of which only a fragment was built.

In painting, the great Leonine commissions were collaborative by design. The third Stanza, the Stanza dell'Incendio (1514–17), named after the Fire in the Borgo — the ninth-century miracle in which Leo IV extinguished a fire by the sign of the cross, here staged as a scene of Virgilian heroism, with Aeneas carrying Anchises and a woman passing a child over a wall — was designed by Raphael and executed largely by the workshop; the other three walls (Coronation of Charlemagne, Oath of Leo III, Battle of Ostia) are recognisably Raphael's only in conception. The fourth, the Sala di Costantino, was begun only in the last months of his life and finished after his death by Giulio Romano and Gianfrancesco Penni. The Loggia of the Vatican palace (1517–19), a thirteen-bay arcade on the second floor, received fifty-two small scenes from Genesis to the Gospels — "Raphael's Bible" — set in a decoration of stucco and painted grotteschi by Giovanni da Udine, who had studied the ornament of the buried rooms of Nero's Domus Aurea and made it, under Raphael's direction, into the ornamental language of the next three hundred years. At the Farnesina, the Loggia of Psyche (1517–18) — the fable of Cupid and Psyche spread across the vault in the form of two fictive tapestries and a series of spandrels, with garlands by Giovanni da Udine so botanically exact that they include the first European depiction of maize — was painted almost entirely by Giulio, Penni and the rest from Raphael's red-chalk drawings; for the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, begun in 1513, he designed architecture, mosaics (executed by the Venetian Luigi de Pace in 1516), sculpture and an altarpiece — the first complete Renaissance chapel conceived by one artist in all its media.

Two projects he kept largely in his own hands. The first was the set of ten cartoons for tapestries of the Acts of the Apostles (1515–16), commissioned by Leo to hang below Perugino's and Botticelli's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, on the very walls Michelangelo had roofed. Seven of the cartoons survive (lent by the Royal Collection to the Victoria and Albert Museum since 1865); painted in glue tempera on joined sheets of paper, at the full scale of the tapestries — some three by five metres — they are the most monumental works of Raphael's hand and, for northern Europe, which knew them through the tapestries woven in Brussels by Pieter van Aelst and through prints, his most influential. The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, the Charge to Peter, the Healing of the Lame Man, the Death of Ananias, the Blinding of Elymas, the Sacrifice at Lystra, Paul Preaching at Athens: here the narrative art that the Baglioni Deposition had struggled towards is finally mastered — a few large figures, clear gestures, one action per picture, the emotion legible across a chapel. The tapestries, which cost Leo something like five times what Julius had paid for the whole Sistine ceiling, were hung in the chapel on 26 December 1519, and Paris de Grassis, the master of ceremonies, recorded that "the whole chapel was struck dumb by the sight of them."

The second was the Transfiguration. In 1516 or early 1517 Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, the pope's cousin and later Clement VII, commissioned two altarpieces for his cathedral of Narbonne: from Raphael, a Transfiguration; from Sebastiano del Piombo, a Raising of Lazarus. Everyone understood it as a contest, and everyone understood that behind Sebastiano stood Michelangelo, who supplied him with drawings. Sebastiano's picture (now in London) was finished by 1519. Raphael's was still on the easel when he died. It is a double picture — above, Christ floating in light on Tabor between Moses and Elijah, the three apostles dazzled on the ground; below, in the darkness of the valley, the other nine apostles failing to cure a possessed boy, who writhes at the right while a kneeling woman, seen from behind in the centre, turns to them in appeal — and its unity is the unity of argument: the power that is absent below is present above, and the boy's rolling eyes and the apostles' pointing hands direct us to the only cure. The lower half is the darkest, most dramatic, most Venetian painting Raphael ever did; the upper half is the most weightless. It was placed at the head of his bier in his house on 7 April 1520, and Vasari says that the sight of the living painting above the dead painter "made the heart of everyone who looked burst with grief."

The portraits and the Fornarina

Running through these years is a series of portraits that, taken together, constitute the most complete gallery of a social world any painter has left before Velázquez. Baldassare Castiglione (c. 1514–15, Louvre): the courtier as a sober harmony of grey, black and white, the hands folded, the eyes engaging ours with exactly the measured candour the Cortegiano prescribes — a picture that Rembrandt sketched at an auction in Amsterdam in 1639 and imitated in his own self-portraits. Tommaso Inghirami, the fat, squinting, brilliant Vatican librarian, painted so that his walleye becomes a glance of inspiration. Cardinal Bibbiena, the pope's witty secretary, to whose niece Raphael was betrothed. The double portrait of Andrea Navagero and Agostino Beazzano, the Venetian humanists, turning towards each other. The Florentine banker Bindo Altoviti, looking over his shoulder with his hand on his heart. And the pope himself: Leo X with his cousins Cardinals Giulio de' Medici and Luigi de' Rossi (1518, Uffizi), painted for the wedding of the pope's nephew in Florence, in which the myopic pope sits with a magnifying glass over an illuminated manuscript, a chased silver bell at his elbow, the velvet of his mozzetta and the damask of his sleeve rendered with a tactile exactness that made Vasari write that "the velvet has its nap, the damask shines and rustles" — a picture that Titian studied and that is the direct ancestor of every papal portrait down to Velázquez's Innocent X and Bacon's screaming popes.

And there are the women: La Velata (c. 1513–16, Pitti), a young Roman woman in a silk sleeve of almost Baroque extravagance, veiled as a bride; and La Fornarina (c. 1518–20, Palazzo Barberini), half-naked, with Raphael's name on her armlet, the myrtle and quince of Venus behind her and a turban on her head. Vasari says Raphael loved a woman to distraction and that his friends had to install her in his house so that he could work; later tradition identified her as Margherita Luti, a baker's daughter (fornarina) from Trastevere, and made of her a legend that Ingres painted five times and that has done more to fix the popular image of Raphael than any of his altarpieces. Whether the two pictures show the same woman, whether either shows Margherita, and whether the Fornarina — whose handling is coarser than Raphael's own and which was probably finished by Giulio — is a portrait, an allegory or an act of possession, remain open questions. What is not open is that in these two pictures the painter of the ideal Madonna painted desire.

The death

He died, Vasari says, of a fever contracted after a night of excess, made fatal by physicians who bled him when they should have restored him; the modern diagnosis is a Roman fever of some ordinary kind, aggravated by bloodletting, in a man who had been working for twelve years at a pace that no one has ever equalled. He had time to make his will, leaving money for the restoration of one of the tabernacles of the Pantheon as his tomb, and to receive the sacraments. He died on the evening of Good Friday, 6 April 1520, in the house Bramante had built in the Borgo. Leo wept. The humanists wrote verses; the ambassadors wrote dispatches; a crack appeared in the palace wall and was taken for a portent. He was buried in the Pantheon, beneath an altar with Lorenzetto's statue of the Madonna del Sasso, under an epitaph by Pietro Bembo that remains the finest epigram written about any artist:

Ille hic est Raphael, timuit quo sospite vinci / rerum magna parens et moriente mori. Here lies Raphael: while he lived, great Nature feared to be outdone; and when he died, she feared to die.

Maria Bibbiena, the cardinal's niece, to whom he had been betrothed since 1514 and whom he had never married, had predeceased him; she was buried at his side. The workshop — Giulio, Penni, Perino, Giovanni da Udine, Polidoro — completed the Sala di Costantino, the Transfiguration's lower corners, the Farnesina, the Villa Madama, and then dispersed across Italy, carrying the style to Mantua, Genoa, Naples and beyond. In 1527 the Sack of Rome scattered what was left. The Raphael bottega, as an institution, lasted seven years after its founder. The Raphael manner lasted three centuries.