St. Michael Vanquishing Satan

Raphael painted this large Saint Michael in 1518, and it was never meant to stay in Italy. Pope Leo the Tenth commissioned it as a diplomatic gift for the king of France, Francis the First, part of the careful alliance between the papacy and the French crown, and tied to the marriage of the pope's nephew to a French noblewoman. The archangel comes down with one foot pressed on the back of Satan, sword raised, wings spread against a smoking dark. Raphael was running a huge, busy workshop by now, and scholars think his pupil Giulio Romano deepened the blacks to sharpen the drama. It was among the last things Raphael saw finished. He died two years later, in 1520, at 37.