The Vision of the Cross

On 12 April 1520, six days after Raphael died, the Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo wrote to his friend Michelangelo in Florence. He wanted the commission Raphael had left behind, a great hall in the Vatican for Pope Leo X, and he asked Michelangelo to put in a word with the pope's cousin, Cardinal Giulio de' Medici. For a time it seemed to work. By September Sebastiano was complaining that the job had been taken from him again, because Raphael's assistants refused to let him use their master's drawings.

So the assistants painted the hall, and this wall, generally given to Giulio Romano, came first. Constantine stands on a platform addressing his army, in the pose of an emperor speaking to his troops on Roman reliefs such as those of Trajan's Column. Above, angels carry the cross through the sky with the words in Greek letters, in this, conquer. In the distance on the right lies a reconstructed ancient Rome, with Hadrian's tomb by the river, and in the right foreground stands a dwarf, traditionally said to be Gradasso Berrettai, a jester in the Medici household.

Just to the right of the scene, the allegorical figure of Comitas was painted in oil straight onto the wall, and the recent restoration has confirmed it as Raphael's own work.