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.
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.