Inside the epic restoration of the Vatican’s Raphael Rooms

The Hall of Constantine, the fourth and last of the Raphael Rooms in the Vatican to undergo restoration, is sealed off from visitors by a barrier that runs from the marble floor to the frescoed ceiling.

Fabio Piacentini, the Vatican restorer who is directing this final stage, enters a code on the keypad, hands me a hard hat and leads the way inside. The dense crowd of tourists and the ambient hubbub are left behind. Within, the atmosphere is tranquil.

Scaffolding divides the room into six levels connected by staircases and walkways. Snaking up and around the metal framework are vacuum hoses to remove dust. Indirect lighting brings the frescoed walls out of the shadows — a pontiff here; a battle there; landscapes; cityscapes; allegorical figures; apparitions; grotesques; putti. Men and women in white lab coats, papal insignia stitched on the pocket, concentrate on their tasks, looking up briefly to greet us.

At floor level, where a frieze of monochrome historical scenes winds around the room, Piacentini and his colleague, Francesca Persegati, who heads the conservation laboratory for paintings, point out graffiti that was etched into the plaster over the centuries — by casual visitors and expressive clerics — before protective measures were taken.

Brushes between fingers, restorers steady their hands on maulsticks — rods with padded tips that can rest safely on the wall — as they mitigate the damage.

“Sometimes the graffiti will mention an event that has just happened,” Piacentini says, his finger tracing the words Fu fatto Papa Pio IV, the inscription indicating that Pius IV had just been elected. (This would have been Christmas Day, 1559.) Sometimes, he goes on, a person will just write his name. His finger directs my gaze: “Like this — Alessandro.” The restorers nearby laugh and put up their hands as if to say, “It wasn’t us!”

The frescoes in three of these rooms in the Apostolic Palace, including “The School of Athens” and “The Deliverance of Saint Peter”, have been restored to luminous condition and are fully open to the public.

These are the largest and best-known works of the Renaissance master Raphael Santi. He did not complete the fourth room, the Hall of Constantine. On April 6 1520 — Good Friday — as the painting was in its early stages, Raphael succumbed to a sudden fever.

In his Lives of the Artists, the chronicler Giorgio Vasari, who can be unreliable, attributed the illness to the activities of a single night: Raphael had been diverting himself, in Vasari’s words, “beyond measure with the pleasures of love”.

At the time of his death, Raphael had completed plans and drawings for parts of the room. Members of his large and sophisticated studio operation, notably Giulio Romano and Giovan Francesco Penni, took it from there.

“Unfinished” is a word that carries a haunting charge when applied to any work of art. In Raphael’s case, the loss is especially acute. He was young — only 37 — at the time of his death.

Unlike his older and grumpier rival, Michelangelo, Raphael had been a popular figure in Rome. He could wield sharp elbows when it came to competition, but he was also an entrepreneurial diplomat with natural charm who moved with ease at the highest levels of society.

His body was borne by four cardinals in a funeral procession that drew many thousands. To this day, you sometimes find fresh flowers left at his tomb in the Pantheon. (There is talk of opening the tomb to obtain a more clinical determination of cause of death than Vasari provided.)

The restoration of the Hall of Constantine will be nearly finished — and the room will be reopened — this spring, in time for the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death. The restoration work has been supported by a group called the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums.

Reopening the fourth room is one of many events, at the Vatican and elsewhere, to mark the quincentennial.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in Boston, opened an exhibition around Raphael’s warm and intimate portrait of Tommaso Inghirami, the papal librarian, last autumn. The Scuderie del Quirinale, in Rome, will mount a major exhibition that brings in works by Raphael from the Louvre, the Uffizi and elsewhere. An equally ambitious exhibition at the National Gallery, in London in the autumn, will cover the full sweep of Raphael’s career.

At the Vatican, paintings by Raphael and his studio that hang in the Apostolic Palace, and are typically seen only by visiting dignitaries — paintings of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, the patron saints of Rome — will be moved to public display in the Pinacoteca gallery.

There will be attention devoted to Raphael as printmaker and Raphael as architect. In February, the tapestries designed by Raphael for the lower walls of the Sistine Chapel — too delicate for permanent display — will grace the walls again for at least a week, returning the Chapel to the way it looked on St Stephen’s Day in 1519 when they were first hung.

Woven in Brussels from Raphael’s full-scale colour cartoons — each weaver producing no more than 10 square centimetres a day — the tapestries are usually kept suspended on roll-out metal frames in a climate-controlled storage unit, safe from light and insects, under the care of Chiara Pavan and her tapestry-restoration laboratory. (The seven surviving cartoons from which the weavers worked are held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, on loan from the Royal Collection, and will soon be on display in a refurbished gallery.)

“When the tapestries go up, the Sistine Chapel will not look exactly the way it did,” says Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums, who is overseeing much of this activity, “because in 1519, Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ had not been painted yet.”

Raphael was both an artist of genius and a shrewd entrepreneur. He operated at times more like a film director or a starchitect

In April, an international conference will be held at the Vatican to discuss what has been learnt in the course of the most recent restoration. Particular focus will be on two figures — the allegorical Justitia (Justice) and Comitas (Friendship) — that Raphael himself may have had a hand in painting right before the fever took him.

Two years ago, news reports from Rome invited such speculation, but the experts I spoke to at the Vatican Museums more recently were careful not to get ahead of themselves.

Connoisseurship is a delicate calling. And Raphael is complicated. He was not a solitaire, like Michelangelo. He was both an artist of genius and a shrewd entrepreneur who managed a busy workshop of accomplished associates. New and urgent commissions came in continually. Some could not be refused. A curator I know put it this way: if Michelangelo was staging a one-man show, Raphael operated at times more like a film director or a starchitect.

That said, Raphael’s hand is distinctive, and he was also an avid student of technique. Fresco painting uses water-based pigments but there are references to his experimentation with oil.

Ulderico Santamaria, director of the diagnostics laboratory at the Vatican Museums, cannot resist inviting me to run my fingertips across the surface of Justitia, noting the texture, and then for comparison running them across another figure nearby.

I hesitate, but he is insistent. “It is allowed to touch,” he says. Then he follows my fingertips with his own. “This is not the same,” he says of Justitia. “Why is it different? Because this is in oil and the other is not.”

To touch that surface is to feel an instant connection with a moment in time. Raphael Santi, a painter from Urbino eager to make his name in the city where it mattered most, arrived in Rome in 1508. Soon thereafter, he was commissioned by Pope Julius II to decorate one of four rooms in the Apostolic Palace intended to serve as the pontiff’s personal apartments.

Raphael may have been recommended to Julius by Donato Bramante, the papal architect, also from Urbino, who was deeply involved with the initial design and construction of St Peter’s Basilica.

The Raphael Rooms lie directly above what are known as the Borgia Apartments — Julius’s predecessor, Alexander VI, had been a member of the Borgia family — and an element of one-upmanship was perhaps at play. Other artists were also working on the rooms, but Julius eventually put the entire commission in the hands of Raphael and his workshop.

Meanwhile, minutes away, Michelangelo was labouring on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He did not welcome visitors and, by some accounts, disliked Raphael. According to Vasari, when Michelangelo was away in Florence, midway through the painting, Bramante let Raphael into the Sistine Chapel to have a look. Raphael was known for adapting style and method, and he was influenced by what he saw.

Restoration of the Raphael Rooms began in the 1980s — the first restoration since the 19th century, when tools and standards were very different. The Vatican restorer Paolo Violini took responsibility for two of the rooms. He brings me to a roped-off corner of the Room of the Segnatura and offers a quick tutorial.

Before coming to Rome, he explains, Raphael had had little experience with frescoes, and as a result you can see his method evolving rapidly.

“The first part of the fresco is painted with a very complicated technique,” Violini says. “Raphael had a cartoon, and to transfer the drawing to the wall he made hundreds of holes to follow the path of the lines, then dusted the holes with charcoal. After that, he used a stylus to connect the dots and draw other lines or incisions in the wet plaster. But as he becomes more confident, he works faster, more fluidly, and he stops using the stylus — and we can see this change as we move in time from one side of the room to the other.”

Violini pauses to point out examples on the walls, which he then illustrates with close-up photographs on a tablet. “His manner of painting also changes,” he continues. “At first, he builds up flesh colours in layers on a base of translucent greenish tint, in the traditional Umbrian way.

“But by the end of the room, the flesh is more liquid and unified, and weightier. Some of his figures are also becoming bigger, brighter, more monumental: he has now seen Michelangelo. And then, in the next room, the Stanza di Eliodoro, after he comes to know the Venetian painters, some of whom are in Rome — or he went to Venice, maybe — he plays more than ever with light and colour.”

We move into the Room of Heliodorus, Violini calling attention to certain details in the frescoes: the way the light from a painted candle seems to be caught in the hair and clothes and jewellery of the painted figures it illuminates; the way an actual window in the room is captured in a trompe l’oeil reflection on the shield of a soldier; the way a delicate blue glaze gives clean-shaven men the appearance of having five o’clock shadows.

“The Deliverance of Saint Peter”, depicting a scene from the Acts of the Apostles, occupies a space above a window on the north wall of this room: glimpsed through a grid of painted black bars, an angel frees Peter from prison while guards around him slumber.

A previous restoration had cleaned the explosion of light that defines the painting but left the angel at the centre untouched, looking as if it were backlit. Now the angel itself glows, almost translucent. “They didn’t understand that the angel is not in front of the light — the angel is the light,” Violini says. “Cleaning this was very emotional for me.”

A restoration on this scale involves many types of investigation. To begin with, there is textual research: a variety of sources from the time — official documents, invoices, notebooks, personal letters, biographical accounts — can shed light on the paintings. Sketches and cartoons are of course invaluable.

Infrared and ultraviolet analysis offer clues about both the painted surface and what lies beneath it. The material condition of the walls and ceilings must be checked, inch by inch, for cracks and deterioration.

One result of all this close study is a detailed map of the frescoes indicating the order in which each giornata — a day’s work in wet plaster — was painted.

In the Room of the Segnatura, Violini points out an area on the ceiling and says: “That is what Raphael painted on the first day in this room, which also was the first room he painted.”

Then he indicates the seated figure of the philosopher Heraclitus in “The School of Athens”, whose contorted pose calls to mind Michelangelo’s prophets and sibyls in the Sistine Chapel — and whose features are unmistakably those of Michelangelo himself. “And we know that he added this figure late, two years after he finished the rest of the painting,” Violini says.

Dust, soot, wax, water, salt, pollution — the contamination builds up over time, darkening the paint and working its way into the porous plaster. The colours in these rooms were originally vivid, not veiled in the dullish-brown fog I remember from decades ago. And they are vivid once again.

At its most basic, the cleaning of frescoes made on wet plaster — the greater part of the painted surface — involves the application of Japanese paper brushed with ammonium bicarbonate and water, and then the gentle removal of the paper from the surface.

But the restorers have to be careful: any portions of a fresco painted a secco — when the underlying plaster and paint was already dry, making it easier to add detail — have not hardened into structural permanence. They must be treated differently, because a secco painting is soluble in water.

The grid of black metal bars in “The Deliverance of Saint Peter” is entirely a secco, meaning that each of the frescoed squares showing what happens “behind” the grid had to be cleaned without touching the grid itself. (“It took three months,” Violini recalls.)

In areas where there is actual damage to the wall, the restorers do not attempt to reconstruct what is missing, a course of action they might have pursued in another age. Any restorative work must find a way to “declare itself”, as Vatican curator Guido Cornini explains, so that restorers and scholars in the future will be clear about interventions in the past.

The solution in this case: a stippling technique — puntinato — that tints the damaged area in a way that is honest about the intervention but reduces the eye’s perception of damage. Thus, the restorers mitigating the graffiti in the Hall of Constantine will ensure that the words can still be read — they are historical artefacts in their own right — but the room at a glance won’t seem to be covered in chicken scratches.

The Hall of Constantine is the largest of the Raphael Rooms and the most overtly political in its message. The frescoes depict the life of the Roman emperor who converted to Christianity and effectively made it the state religion.

A supposed imperial decree — the Donation of Constantine, now known to be a medieval forgery — was long cited to justify Church authority in temporal matters, including sovereignty over lands in central Italy.

That power was being tested in the early 16th century. Julius II was often at war, personally leading troops into battle. Rome itself would be sacked by German forces in 1527, and you can still see the damage done by the pikes of the Landsknechte to some of the frescoes in the Raphael Rooms.

Designed for certain official meetings and state occasions, the Hall of Constantine was meant as a reminder of the Church’s claims about where its temporal power came from.

The frescoes depict Constantine’s baptism, his vision of the cross, his victory over the emperor Maxentius, and the Donation. The Battle of Milvian Bridge takes up most of the south wall — a sprawling tableau that was rendered in preliminary drawings by Raphael but painted after his death by Giulio Romano.

As we stand before it, Guido Cornini explains that Raphael had also been an archaeologist and was meticulous about historical details — the armour, the weapons, the buildings, the countryside. Down by our feet, emperor Maxentius, on horseback, was about to be swallowed by the Tiber river.

To either side of this painting is where the allegories of Justitia and Comitas can be found. Were they painted in part by Raphael’s own hand? “The sources, some of them, say that Raphael was able to finish up not only drawings for the room,” Cornini explains, “but also some of the painted figures, and that he was experimenting in oil.

“Other sources say that his pupils were responsible for preparing these figures while working strictly from Raphael’s drawings. Raphael was certainly in health right up to the very last minute. And there’s technical evidence that makes these figures distinctive: they are the only ones that are made in oil rather than in fresco, and they were respected as such.

“That is, the painters who made the other frescoes kept the figures done in oil as they were, coming right up to the edge. For now, the only thing to do is to work on the evidence, all of us together” — the art historians, the curators, the restorers, the technicians. “We’ll present our conclusions at the symposium.”

When walking in Rome, a favourite moment comes when moving at night between the energetic clamour of the Campo de’ Fiori and the subdued elegance of the Piazza Farnese, a short connecting street away. The transition between the Sistine Chapel and, up a staircase or two, the Raphael Rooms offers a version of that same contrast. Michelangelo’s compositions are muscular, fleshy, sometimes impossibly kinetic. Raphael’s are calmer, softer, suffused with intelligence.

Barbara Jatta speaks of Raphael’s “beauty and harmony”, and she is right. But I think also of another word. I think of grace, in all its meanings.

Cullen Murphy is the editor at large of The Atlantic. His most recent book is “Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make Believe”

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