After a quick scan of the shelves, I assembled an impressive collection of art books on a table. Before I finally retired for the night I wanted to see with my own eyes if the things that my new teacher had told me had any significance, however small.

It took me no more than five minutes to hunt down Raphael’s portrait of Leo X. Fovel’s comments didn’t do the painting justice; it was a wonder. The figures radiated tension and expectation. You could almost hear them muttering. The reproduction took up almost the whole page of the encyclopedia I had open in front of me, and just as the Master had said there was the pope revealing the symbolic space in the pages of a large Bible.

“The New Apocalypse sign!” I muttered, as if it was something I’d just discovered myself.

Excited now, I went through the indexes of each of the textbooks I’d collected. Frustratingly, after almost an hour of looking I had not hit upon a single reference to Amadeo of Portugal or his book. My rather tentative new discovery seemed to be dissolving in front of me like a specter.

“Just like Doctor Luis Fovel,” I muttered grimly, but immediately banished the thought. I decided to continue my search taking a different approach. Before I knew it, it was two in the morning. I sat there surrounded by enormous art books containing reproductions of paintings by Raphael, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Leonardo, and by various books on medieval history. In just a few hours, I had amassed more questions than answers, but I had at least learned a few interesting facts about the man who had painted the portrait of Leo X at the same time as the Prado’s The Pearl . I was impressed by the fact that all the historians without exception lauded the young Raphael’s gift for painting. Some suggested that he had inherited the gift from his father, Giovanni Santi, a poet and painter of altarpieces from the Umbria region, who passed on his various skills as early as he could.

Thanks to his father, Raphael was able to apprentice himself at a young age to Perugino, who paved the way for the young prodigy to go to Florence, the mecca for painters at the time. There, as an adolescent, Raphael became immersed in the great cultural and philosophical revolution that had been set in motion by Leo X’s predecessor, Cosimo de’ Medici. In his new city, he met his rivals, Michelangelo and Leonardo, and soon he was on the front lines of the artistic revolution that was blooming in the heart of the city. It was during this period that he started to paint various versions of the Holy Family, scenes that would later make him famous.

His Madonnas are among the loveliest ever painted—female figures that are young, delicate, fine featured—and very beautiful. They radiate lightness as well as sensuality. But against all church logic, Raphael insisted on depicting Mary almost always in the company of two babies.

I read one of the descriptions: “St. John and the baby Jesus are not shown here the way early artists depicted them—as pious idols, sheathed in their holiness. These are real children—happy and mischievous—and yet one can tell that something mysterious and transcendent passes between them.”¹

I took that description as a good sign, a clue that seemed to confirm what Fovel had been telling me hours before in the Prado—that in creating his masterworks, Raphael used information from mysterious sources. Was this an example of one of those mysteries—to show St. John and the baby Jesus as twins? I didn’t think anything of it, though at the time, I had no idea of the oceans of ink that had been devoted to arguments over whether or not Jesus had had a twin brother.

As I saw it—with my rather rudimentary knowledge of biblical history—since both children had been conceived through the Holy Spirit by way of the same archangel, it made sense to me that there would be painters who would want to show them as brothers in their paintings. Or was there another reason? As if that weren’t enough, Luke himself mentions that the mothers are cousins (syggenís), and, while the Gospel does not make clear how closely related they might be, in the Middle Ages it was generally understood that they were first cousins. If that were true, that would make John and Jesus second cousins, which could explain their physical likeness.

That same night I looked for a good reproduction of the Virgin of the Rocks, as Fovel had instructed, and I got another surprise—there was not one but at least two Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo. He had painted the older one of these in 1483, having just arrived in Milan, to decorate the altar of the chapel at San Francesco Grande.

The painting is majestic and tranquil, and clearly has many similarities to Raphael’s The Pearl—particularly in the arrangement of the figures—but there are notable differences as well. I couldn’t help observing once again how much Jesus and John resemble each other. The two children regard each other with a look that appears beyond their years, while the Virgin shields them and an angel seems to fix his gaze firmly on the viewer and to point to one of the boys, as if to say, “This is what you should be looking at.” And that boy is John the Baptist.

I was intrigued by the fact that in the second version of the painting, which now hangs in the National Gallery in London, the angel’s hand is no longer there. In that version, Leonardo works to emphasize the differences between the two boys, painting them with markedly different features. In both of Leonardo’s paintings, this encounter between the two boys takes place against a dark landscape, much as in Raphael’s version. When one looks at the two paintings side by side—The Virgin of the Rocks and The Pearl—it’s not hard to see the influence that Leonardo had on his most ardent admirer.²

Out of everything that I read that night in the university library, nothing impressed me quite so much as the description of Raphael and his arrival in Rome by Giorgio Vasari. A well-known painter and biographer of painters, Vasari was a contemporary of the great geniuses of the Renaissance. It was his description that finally convinced me that there really was a mystery surrounding Raphael.

Having dazzled all of Medici Florence with his talent, Raphael at the age of twenty-five was picked by his friend Bramante to be part of the enormous project to refurbish the Vatican. “There,” writes Vasari, “he was much celebrated by Julius II, and in the Stanza della Segnatura of the papal apartments, he began painting a scene that shows the moment when theologians reconciled both philosophy and astrology with theology. In this scene, he depicts all the great sages of world history, and added certain symbols, as did the astrologers who would add characters from geomancy and astrology to tablets they would send to the Evangelists.’ ”³