The Raphael Rooms

The Vatican's Stanze di Raffaello (Raphael Rooms) are a series of papal apartments frescoed by Raphael with the School of Athens and other masterpieces

The School of Athens fresco in the Raphael rooms of the Vatican.

Pope Julius II didn't like his predecessor's digs (the Borgia Apartments; we'll get to those), so in 1508—just a few months after commissioning Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel down the hall—Julius hired Raphael to decorate these new chambers.

As Raphael's fame and commissions grew, he turned more of his attention away from this job and his assistants handled much of the painting in the first and last rooms you visit. But in the Stanza della Segnatura and Stanza d'Eliodoro (the first two actually painted), the master's brush was busy.

The Stanza dell'Incendio

Painting Over Masterpieces
Artistic commissions have been rife with controversy long before N.E.A. grants were contested in the U.S. Congress. Many were outraged in 1508 when the Pope allowed a young upstart from the boondocks to whitewash over frescoes by Castagno, Piero della Francesca, Signorelli, Perugino, Sodoma, and Peruzzi and cover the walls with his own works. But today, these Raphael Rooms are considered some of Western art's greatest masterpieces. Michelangelo fared no better, not even 40 years after he was already established as the world's greatest living artist. There was plenty of grumbling when, in order to paint the Sistine Chapel's Last Judgment in 1535, the master had to destroy the two Perugino frescoes on that wall

The first room, the Stanza dell'Incendio, was actually the third one painted (1514–17), during the reign of Pope Leo X (also a Raphael fan), which explains why the frescoes detail exploits of previous popes named Leo.

The best of the frescoes depicts the Borgo Fire, which swept the neighborhood around the Vatican in AD 847 and was extinguished only when Pope Leo IV hurled a blessing at it from his window in the background. The setting, though, is classical, showing Aeneas carrying his jaundiced father Anchises and leading his son Ascanius as they escape the fall of Troy (eventually, according to Virgil, Aeneas will make it the village started by Romulus and found the city of Rome).

Although pupils like Giulio Romano painted most of this fresco, some experts see the master's hand at work in the surprised woman carrying a jug on her head and possibly in the Aeneas group.

The Stanza della Segnatura

The second room is perhaps the highlight, the Stanza della Segnatura (1508–11), containing Raphael's famous School of Athens. This mythical gathering of the philosophers from across the ages is also a catalog of the Renaissance, with many philosophers actually bearing portraits of Raphael's greatest fellow artists, including his mentor the architect Bramante (on the right as balding Euclid, bent over as he draws on a chalkboard), Leonardo da Vinci (as Plato, the bearded patriarch in the center pointing heavenward), and Raphael himself (looking out at us from the lower right corner next to his white-robed buddy Il Sodoma).

In the midst of painting this masterpiece, Raphael took a sneak peek at what his heretofore rival Michelangelo was busy painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel down the hall. He was so impressed that he returned to the School of Athens and added in a sulking portrait of Michelangelo (as Heraclitus) sitting on the steps in his stonecutter's boots. (We know he added it because his original cartoon, or full-scale preparatory drawing, survived)

It was a true moment of growth for the cocky young master, who realized even he could learn from the genius of another. In fact, he soon adapted his style and color palate, reflecting Michelangelo's influence.

Another important fresco here is the Disputation of the Sacrament, with three more portraits. Toward the middle of the right side, half-hidden behind a golden-robed church dignitary, stands a dour-looking man in red with a laurel-leaf crown—the Tuscan poet Dante, whose Inferno revolutionized Italian literature by using the Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin, and became the basis for the Italian language.

Look also on the far left for a pious-looking man in black with just a wisp of white hair remaining—it's a portrait of the monastic painter Fra' Angelico, whose great work in Rome lies just after these rooms. Bramante (again) bends over the railing in front and thumps a book (probably arguing some finer point of architecture).

The Stanza di Eliodoro

The third room, the Stanza di Eliodoro, was painted from 1510 to 1514. The title fresco, Heliodorous Expelled from the Temple, shows the king's lackey trying to carry out orders to steal a Hebrew temple's sacred objects; a heavenly knight appears to help the faithful chase him off while a time-traveling Pope Julius II—a warrior pope whose own battle against enemies of the Church this fresco is metaphorically celebrating—looks on from his litter to the left.

There's also the darkly dramatic Freeing of St. Peter from Prison, a Renaissance example of using "special effects" (the angel's brilliant glow would be enhanced by the natural light streaming through the window below).

Another scene shows Pope Leo I (bearing Julius II's face) calling forth the armed and floating Sts. Peter and Paul in AD 452 to scare off a marauding Attila the Hun—the miracle actually happened at Mantua, but Raphael painted a Roman aqueduct and the Colosseum into the background! Pudgy-faced Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, a Raphael patron and soon-to-be successor to Julius as Pope Leo X, looks on from his horse at the far left.

The Miracle of Bolsena depicts the origin (1264) of the feast of Corpus Christi, when a Bohemian priest who doubted transubstantiation (the miraculous transformation of wafer and wine into the body and blood of Christ) was saying mass in the town of Bolsena and the Eucharist wafer suddenly began to drip blood onto the altar cloth. Attending the scene at the lower right are members of the papal Swiss Guards; this detail provided some of the historical evidence upon which the Guards' current retro-Renaissance outfits are based.

The Stanza di Constantino

The Vatican Museums
Pinacoteca (Painting Gallery)
Rapahel Rooms
Sistine Chapel
Pio-Clementine Museum
Modern Religious Art
Chiaramonti/New Wing
Gregorian Egyptian Museum
Gregorian Etruscan Museum
Gregorian Profane Museum
Pio Christian Museum
Missionary-Ethnological Museum
Vatican Gardens

The fourth room, the Stanza di Constantino (1517–24), is the least satisfying and was largely painted after Raphael's death according to his hastily sketched designs. Giulio Romano and Rafaellino del Colle adapted some of their master's cartoons into the newly fashionable Mannerist style of painting.

They probably did most of the Battle at the Milvian Bridge (Emperor Constantine the Great fights his would-be deposer Maxentius), the Vision of the Cross (under whose miraculous sign the emperor wins), and the Donation of Rome (the now-converted Emperor Constantine gives princely power over Rome to Pope Silvester I), while a less apt pupil of Raphael's finished off the cycle with a weak Baptism of Constantine.

BORGIA APARTMENTS/CHAPEL OF NICHOLAS V

After visiting the Raphael Rooms' Sala di Constantino, you pop out into the Sala dei Chiaroscuro, with a 16th-century wooden ceiling bearing the Medici arms and a little doorway in the corner many people miss and most tour groups skip. Their loss.

Through this doorway is the Vatican's most gorgeous hidden corner, the closet-size Chapel of Nicholas V (1447[nd]49), colorfully frescoed floor-to-ceiling with gentle, early Renaissance Tuscan genius by that devout little monk of a painter, Fra' Angelico.

The Borgia Apartments downstairs from the Raphael Rooms were occupied by the infamous Spanish Borgia pope Alexander VI, and are now hung with bland pieces of modern art. But the walls and ceilings retain their rich frescoes, painted by Pinturicchio with wacky early-Renaissance Umbrian fantasy. A co-pupil of Raphael’s under master Perugino, Pinturicchio had a penchant for embedding fake jewels and things like metal saddle studs in his frescoes rather than painting these details in. And while his art is not necessarily at its top form in these rooms, they're worth a run-through.

From here you can climb back up and head straight to the Sistine Chapel, or continue downstairs to visit the Modern Art Museum first.