Altarpiece Fugger

Raphael died in Rome in April 1520, 37 years old, and his workshop passed to two young assistants. Giulio Romano was about 21. Within a year or so he took on this altarpiece for the chapel of Saint Mark in Santa Maria dell'Anima, the church of the German community in Rome, which belonged to the Fuggers of Augsburg, the banking family whose loans had bought Charles V his imperial election in 1519. It was a good commission to be holding in a bad year for the trade. Leo X, the Medici pope who had kept half the artists in Rome in work, died in December 1521, and the conclave chose Adrian of Utrecht, an austere Netherlander with no appetite for paying for pictures. The panel was soaked in the Tiber flood of 1598 and its lower part was repainted by Carlo Saraceni. In 1750 it was moved out of the chapel to the high altar, where it still stands.