Raphael at the Vatican

This is a picture of Rome that was painted in Rome. Horace Vernet signed it there in 1832, while he was running the French Academy at the Villa Medici, and sent it to Paris with seven other canvases for the Salon of 1833. He found the scene in the life of Raphael published in 1824 by the French scholar Quatremère de Quincy. In the Vatican's courtyard of Saint Damasus, below the loggias Raphael decorated, the young master has set up a makeshift easel and is sketching a peasant woman with her child while his pupils crowd round to watch. The figure at the lower left is Michelangelo, his great rival, looking on. For a painter famous for battles and cavalry charges, a canvas nearly four metres tall on the life of Raphael was a bid for the most prestigious kind of subject. The French state bought it straight from him in February 1833, and for years it hung in the Luxembourg museum, the Paris gallery for living artists, before it came to the Louvre.