Pope Julius II Ordering Bramante, Michelangelo and Raphael to Build the Vatican and Saint Peter's

To see this painting you have to look up. It fills the ceiling of a room in the Sully wing that now holds Egyptian sculpture from the age of Ramesses, though it has nothing to do with Egypt. In 1826 the French state ordered painted ceilings for a new suite of galleries, named the Musée Charles X after the king, and this room went to Horace Vernet, for 18,000 francs. Ingres's Apotheosis of Homer was painted for another ceiling in the same suite.

Vernet chose a Renaissance pope. Julius II sits in his chair while a large plan of a church is unrolled before him, with Bramante, Michelangelo and Raphael among the courtiers and clerics around him. The three really did work for Julius in the same years, Bramante on the new Saint Peter's, Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Raphael on the papal apartments, though no record has them standing before him together like this. Vernet showed the canvas at the Salon of 1827. The same year another painter, Abel de Pujol, was given the curved coves around it, which he painted under Vernet's direction with four sham reliefs and four gold medallions.