Portrait of Pope Julius II

In 1510 the pope who ordered this portrait grew a beard, and swore not to shave it off until the French had been driven out of Italy. Julius II was that kind of man. He led armies in person, and Romans called him il papa terribile, the fearsome pope. Raphael painted him around 1511, just back from a hard campaign in the north, and broke with the way popes were shown. Instead of a stiff figure facing us in majesty, here is an old man seated at an angle, looking down, absorbed in his own thoughts. Contemporaries said it felt so alive that people shrank from it as if he were really there. The small gold acorns crowning his chair are a quiet pun on his family name, della Rovere, which means oak. This is the same pope who had Michelangelo up on the Sistine scaffold and Bramante pulling down the old Saint Peter's to build it anew, both underway while he sat.