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Raphael arrived in Rome around 1508, in his mid-20s, just as the city was reinventing itself as the capital of Christendom. Pope Julius II was pulling down the old Saint Peter's to raise the largest church in the world, and he wanted his private apartments in the Vatican frescoed to match his ambition. He gave the walls to the young painter from Urbino. In the room now called the Stanza della Segnatura, Raphael painted the School of Athens, a marble hall crowded with the philosophers of antiquity, Plato and Aristotle at its vanishing point, arguing their way down the centuries.

Just along the corridor, behind locked doors, Michelangelo was up on his scaffold painting the Sistine ceiling at the same time, in secret. The story goes that Raphael got a look at the unfinished ceiling and understood at once how much bigger and stranger Michelangelo's figures were than anything else then being painted. He answered quietly: into the School of Athens he added a single brooding figure sitting alone on the steps, leaning on a block of stone, in Michelangelo's own heavy manner, a tribute and a piece of competition at once.

Raphael made it look easy in a way Michelangelo never did. He was gracious, handsome, wildly productive, ran a busy workshop, and was loved at the papal court in a way the difficult Michelangelo was not. Under the next pope, Leo X, he was practically the artistic director of Rome. And then it stopped. In April 1520 he fell ill with a fever and died within days, at 37, on the 6th of April, which by one old account was also the day he had been born. Rome gave him a state funeral, and he was buried, at his own request, inside the Pantheon, the ancient temple that had already stood there for centuries before he ever arrived.