The Resurrection

Pope Alexander VI kneels at the left edge of this scene in a cope stiff with gold, hands joined in prayer, his triple-crowned tiara set down on the ground beside him. Above the empty tomb Christ rises in a golden mandorla, while guards in rich armour sleep or start awake. Pinturicchio left most of this room to his workshop, and the museum singles out this portrait of the pope as his own masterpiece.

The likeness had an uncomfortable afterlife. When Alexander died in 1503, his successor Julius II did not want to live surrounded by the memory of a predecessor he despised, and moved to the rooms on the floor above, the ones Raphael would soon paint. The Borgia rooms passed to other uses, lodgings for cardinals who were nephews of later popes, then a picture gallery and a library. Only at the end of the 1800s did Pope Leo XIII have them restored and opened to visitors.