Raphael’s Transfiguration had been commissioned alongside a companion altarpiece, The Raising of Lazarus, designed by Michelangelo (and executed by Michelangelo’s devotee, Sebastiano del Piombo). These two altarpieces were seen as a head-to-head competition between the two greatest living painters: Raphael and Michelangelo. Today, as when the paintings were unveiled side by side shortly after Raphael’s death, Raphael’s Transfiguration is considered the far superior painting and the pinnacle of the High Renaissance.

Margherita Luti—subject of some of Raphael’s most famous paintings including his Sistine Madonna—went into a convent shortly after the painter’s death; she was never publicly acknowledged as his wife, but an armband engraved with the painter’s name and an erased ruby ring in his famous nude portrait of her—called La Fornarina, “The Baker’s Daughter”—have long fanned rumors that their union was sealed.

Raphael served as Official Papal Architect from his appointment in 1514 until his death in 1520. Michelangelo did not receive an appointment to that position for another twenty-five years, in 1546, under Pope Paul III, when the sculptor was seventy-one years old.

Today, Pope Alexander VI’s old rooms—with Pinturicchio’s frescoes—are open to anyone visiting the Vatican. So are Pope Julius’s private apartments, now affectionately called “The Raphael Rooms.” Raphael’s apartments and Chigi Palace (now known as the Villa Farnesina) are two of the most visited artistic sites in all of Rome—behind, of course, Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling.

For over three hundred years, up until the mid-nineteenth century with the rise of the Pre-Raphaelites (who opposed the establishment’s glorification of Raphael’s idealistic style) and the Impressionists (who turned away from the classical paintings of the academy), Raphael was the artist to whom all other painters aspired, the definition of sprezzatura in art and life: the appearance of ease in achieving harmony, balance, and grace, even in the face of adversity.

Note

Author’s Note

Raphael, Painter in Rome is a work of historical fiction. All fictions in this novel are based on a knowledge of and respect for the history, but I did take artistic liberties to serve the story, illuminate human truths about Raphael’s character and his art, and explore the cultural and political dynamics of the Italian Renaissance. And, yes, sometimes to entertain. If I have inspired even one reader to learn more about Raphael or the Renaissance or to visit a museum, then I’ve done my job.

That being said, this story and these characters are based on over twenty-five years of research in Italian Renaissance art (including an undergraduate degree in fine arts/art history from Vanderbilt University, a semester at the University of Pisa, and studying briefly in an Italian Renaissance PhD program); multiple trips to Rome and the Vatican (in addition to the rest of Italy); and an intensive study of Raphael’s biography, drawings, and paintings.