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.
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
As with the later "Olympia" (1863) and other works, Manet's composition reveals his study of the old masters, as the disposition of the main figures is derived from Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving "The Judgment of Paris" (c. 1515) after a drawing by Raphael. Raphael was an artist revered by the conservative members of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and his paintings were part of the teaching programme at the École des Beaux-Arts, where copies of fifty-two images from his most celebrated frescoes were permanently on display. "Le Bain" (an early title for "Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe") was therefore, in many ways, a defiant painting. Manet was cheekily reworking Raphael, turning a mythological scene from one of the most celebrated engravings of the Renaissance into a tableau of somewhat vulgar Parisian holidaymakers.