Lecture: Papal Propaganda in the Reformation Era - the Case of Raphael's Stanze

While Michelangelo was finishing work on the Sistine Ceiling, during the first decade of the sixteenth-century, the young artist Raphael was working on a fresco cycle in a room called the Stanza della Segnatura. This cycle was only the first in a sequence of works in several rooms, which are usually simply referred to as the stanze or ‘rooms”. The decorations had various functions, but one consistent theme is the articulation of papal power, particularly as it addressed currents of discontent that would soon lead to the Reformation. This lecture deals with the meanings of the frescoes in terms of how they embody papal propaganda specific to the historical circumstances in the early sixteenth-century.