The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple

Raphael set this story in the Temple of Jerusalem, in the second century before Christ, and then carried a living pope into it. The episode comes from the Second Book of Maccabees. A Syrian king sends his minister Heliodorus to seize the treasure kept in the Temple. The high priest Onias prays, and the answer is a rider in golden armour on a terrible horse, with two young men who beat the intruder out.

Raphael painted it in 1511 and 1512, in a room the pope used for private audiences, and he pushed the action out to the edges. Far back, at the altar under the gilded domes, Onias kneels in prayer. On the right the horse rears over Heliodorus, who has fallen with the stolen treasure spilling beside him, while the two youths rush in. The middle of the wall is left almost empty, a long open aisle running back into the building.

On the left, outside the story altogether, Julius II is carried in on his portable throne and watches without alarm. This was a pope who spent much of his reign fighting to win back the lands and revenues of the Church, and here he looks on as heaven itself drives a thief out of a sanctuary. The men shouldering his chair are portraits too. In one of the bearded bearers Vasari recognised the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi, and that identification has been accepted ever since.