The Liberation of Saint Peter

This subject suited two popes in turn. Before his election, Julius II had been cardinal of San Pietro in Vincoli, Saint Peter in Chains, the Roman church that keeps the chains said to have bound the apostle in Herod's prison. A painting of those chains falling away was his kind of subject. Julius died in February 1513, and the fresco is dated 1514, by which time the pope was Leo X. Leo, as Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, had been taken prisoner by the French after the battle of Ravenna in April 1512 and had escaped some weeks later, so a story of a captive freed by heaven could now be read for him as well.

The scene wraps around a real window in three parts. In the middle, behind a heavy iron grille, an angel bends over the sleeping Peter, who is chained between two guards. On the right the angel leads him out past soldiers dozing on the steps. On the left the guards are waking up and raising the alarm. It all happens at night, and Raphael lit it from several sources at once. There is the glow of the angel, a torch, the moon in a clouded sky and the first light of dawn, and he picked out their reflections one by one on the soldiers' armour.