Papal Apartments/Rafael Rooms

The older papal apartments are now called the Rafael Rooms, several of them, noted for some of the most famous paintings of western art. Every square inch of the large halls is covered in Renaissance art and ornamentation, mostly by Rafael and his students, and I'll just post a few favorites.

The Constantine Room is covered in giant murals about the
Emperor Constantine, who legalized Christianity (Justinian

criminalized all other religions a century later); the ceiling, by

Tommaso Laureti is titled "The Triumph of Christianity Over

Paganism" and has always epitomized for me the Church's

historic intolerance and contempt for the older civilizations
...onto which it grafted itself as soon a possible

Rafael's "Expulsion of Heliodorus" (Protestants: you'll have

to find and read the Book of Maccabees to appreciate this)

Pope Leo the Great meets Attila the Hun at the gates of

Rome; after a brief (armed) fly-by of SS Peter and Paul,

Attila decides to maybe sack some other place; actually, the

meeting occurred near Mantua; interestingly, the worst sack

of Rome occurred in 1527, under ther auspices of the Holy
Roman Emperor, His Most Catholic Excellency King
Charles V of Spain; always stranger than fiction...

Right after the triumph of Christianity over paganism

and Seleucids and Huns, one enters a room glorifying the

ancients; here, one of Rafael's greatest hits, "The School of

Athens," with Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Diogenes,

Pythagoras, Archimedes, et aliud; a time when the Church

was trying to appropriate what it could of the ancient world

Closer up: the guy in the foreground left, lavender tunic, was

added later--Rafael's flattering portrait of his contemporary

Michaelangelo

And Rafael himself, right corner, black hat

Not least of Rafael's problems in doing these rooms was the

challenge of working around doors, windows, HVAC, et

cetera; here is the great painting of the arts, literature, and

music, Apollo and the 7 (9? 12? 40?) muses, blind Homer in

blue on the left, and an interesting prominence for Sappho,

lower left

And then there's the ceiling with all the roundel things (a

causal theory of knowledge espoused here?)