The Parnassus

This wall came with an obstacle. A window cuts up into the middle of it, and Raphael, painting here between about 1509 and 1511, made the window part of the mountain. The humanists at Julius II's court believed that the Vatican hill outside had once been sacred to Apollo, and this window looks out toward it. So Apollo sits at the summit of Parnassus right above the opening, among laurel trees, with the nine Muses around him and poets climbing the slopes on either side, ancient ones and men of Raphael's own time.

Apollo is not holding a classical lyre. He is drawing a bow across a lira da braccio, a stringed instrument of the Renaissance, the kind a poet of Raphael's day might actually have played. On the left stands the blind Homer, in dark blue, his face lifted, and Virgil is near him. Raphael is generally thought to have taken Homer's head from the Laocoön, the ancient marble group dug up in Rome in 1506 and set up by Julius in his statue court at the Belvedere, turning the priest's agony into the look of a man who cannot see. Lower down on the left sits the only woman among the poets, and she is identified by name on the scroll she holds. It reads Sappho.