Occasionally artists are also theologians, giving visual form to ideas about God. Such was Raphael, called to fresco Pope Julius II’s apartments in the Vatican in the years that saw Michelangelo at work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Bramante on the new St Peter’s.
Raphael’s theological gift is clear in the pope’s private library – the room later called Stanza della segnatura – in a mural which illustrates the truths of Catholic thought in a way at once simple and compelling. Called the Disputa del sacramento (“Dispute on the Sacrament”), this work celebrates the shared conceptual heritage of medieval Christendom barely six years before Luther opened the divisive season of the Reformation.
