The Battle of Ostia

In 1514 and 1515, while this wall was being painted, Pope Leo X was planning a crusade. The Ottoman Turks were the power Italy feared most, and the pope wanted the Christian princes united against them. The fresco gives him a precedent from 849, when a Saracen fleet threatened Rome and Pope Leo IV backed a league of ships from Naples, Amalfi and Gaeta that met it off Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber. A storm finished what the fighting began.

The ninth-century pope sits on the left with the features of Leo X, giving thanks, while the sea battle goes on behind him. In the foreground prisoners are hauled out of the boats and forced to kneel before him. Raphael made the design, and much of the painting is generally given to his workshop, Giulio Romano in particular.

Raphael's own studies for it survive, and one of them travelled a long way. A red chalk sheet with two male nudes for this scene is now in the Albertina in Vienna. On it Albrecht Dürer wrote, in German, that Raphael of Urbino, so highly esteemed by the pope, had made these figures and sent them to him in Nuremberg in 1515, to show him his hand.