Raphael Rooms
Between 1509 and 1511, Raphael also completed another work on the wall opposite the "Disputa". This third painting, entitled "The School of Athens", represents the degrees of knowledge or the truth acquired through reason. The fresco's position as well as the philosophers' walk in direction of the Holy Sacrament on the opposite wall suggested the interpretation of the whole room as the movement from the classical philosophy to the true religion and from the pre-Christian world to Christianity. It was meant to reside over the philosophical section of Pope Julius II's library. It is perhaps Raphael's most famous fresco.
Sebastiano del Piombo
The death of Raphael in 1520, immediately before the exhibition of the two rival paintings intended for Narbonne, left Sebastiano clearly the leading painter operating in Rome. As his letters show, he immediately attempted to secure for himself the "Sala dei Pontefici", Raphael's next Vatican project, but was frustrated by Raphael's workshop, armed with the master's drawings, and his own inability to enlist Michelangelo's help, as the pope had told him to work exclusively on the long-promised Tomb of Pope Julius II. In the following years Sebastiano mostly avoided very large commissions for churches, and concentrated on portraits, where he had a considerable reputation, and religious easel paintings, such as his "Visitation" for France (1518–19, now Louvre), and his "Madonna of the Veil" (c. 1525), a very successful adaptation of Raphael's "Madonna di Loreto". To both of these types he brought his refined monumental classicism.