Raphael
This first of the famous "Stanze" or "Raphael Rooms" to be painted, now known as the "Stanza della Segnatura" after its use in Vasari's time, was to make a stunning impact on Roman art, and remains generally regarded as his greatest masterpiece, containing "The School of Athens", "The Parnassus" and the "Disputa". Raphael was then given further rooms to paint, displacing other artists including Perugino and Signorelli. He completed a sequence of three rooms, each with paintings on each wall and often the ceilings too, increasingly leaving the work of painting from his detailed drawings to the large and skilled workshop team he had acquired, who added a fourth room, probably only including some elements designed by Raphael, after his early death in 1520. The death of Julius in 1513 did not interrupt the work at all, as he was succeeded by Raphael's last Pope, the Medici Pope Leo X, with whom Raphael formed an even closer relationship, and who continued to commission him. Raphael's friend Cardinal Bibbiena was also one of Leo's old tutors, and a close friend and advisor.
Agostino Chigi
In Rome, Chigi's three artistic commissions involving Raphael remain the most prominent monuments of his contemporary fame: a chapel in Santa Maria della Pace; his mortuary chapel, the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo; and the suburban villa known since 1579 as the "Villa Farnesina", all of them intended to give substance to his legend. His splendid villa that he built on the shore of the Tiber, in Trastevere, bears the name of its later owners: Villa Farnesina ("illustration"). For its design, Chigi employed the Sienese painter Baldassare Peruzzi, virtually untried as an architect. Sebastiano del Piombo, Giovanni da Udine, Giulio Romano, Sodoma and Raphael were called upon to provide the decoration. Here Raphael frescoed his "Triumph of Galatea". Here Chigi held sumptuous repasts. In order to show his contempt of money, he was said to have all the silver dishes thrown into the river after the end of the parties; however, his servants were secretly ready to recollect them with nets draped under the windows. The villa called the "Viridario" in Chigi's time served as banking facility as well as residence, setting Chigi apart from the ordinary run of bankers in Rome, who normally resided in a "piano nobile" directly above but unconnected to their street-level "botteghe".