The Fire in the Borgo

When Leo X inherited these rooms after the death of Julius II, he gave the next one to popes who had carried his own name. Its walls show deeds of Leo III and Leo IV, and this scene, painted in 1514, was the first of them. Raphael made the design, but much of the painting was carried out by his workshop, chiefly by his assistants Giulio Romano and Gianfrancesco Penni.

The story comes from the Liber Pontificalis, the old chronicle of the popes. In 847 a fire broke out in the Borgo, the crowded quarter in front of Saint Peter's. Leo IV appeared at the Loggia of Blessings, gave his blessing, and the flames died down. Raphael set that small figure far back, on the front of the old basilica, and filled the foreground with people fighting the fire and fleeing it. Women carry jars of water, their clothes pulled by the wind, and a naked man lowers himself from a wall.

On the left a young man carries an old man on his back, with a small boy beside them. It is Virgil's picture of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises out of burning Troy, the Trojan ancestor of the Romans set down in a Roman street on fire. Writing a generation later, the biographer Giorgio Vasari singled out the effort in that young man, bent under his father's weight.