Rome
As one approached the city, a landscape, the main lines of which were in harmonious proportion, prepared the traveller for the contemplation of Rome – of the Urbs, as the Latins called her, of the Aurea Roma, as she was styled in the Middle Ages. In the month of April 1508, Raphael was still in Florence, but by September of that year he had settled in Rome, and appears to have been at once employed by the Pope.
Raphael did not as yet know his own strength, and the sight of the mighty works there kept, the outcome of noble minds and of so lofty a civilisation, increased his powers tenfold, giving him the will as well as the power to rival his glorious predecessors. Though second to classic Rome, Christian Rome was none the less rich in glorious recollections and magnificent monuments. Fifty basilicas presented to the regard of the faithful their superb rows of marble monoliths, their precious mosaics and enamels, their gilded tabernacles. These buildings told of the victory of Constantine, of the exploits of Charlemagne – whose image shone in the recess of many an apse; of the struggles of the Church with the Empire. Crescentius, the Otlios, Robert Guiscard, Arnaud de Brescia, Frederick Barbarossa, Charles of Anjou, Cola di Rienzi, tribunes of the people and reformers, adventurers and sovereigns, had traversed the scene and marked their passage by rich endowments, by terrible devastations, or by grand schemes which, if never realised, were none the less graven in the memory of the people. A series of immutable monuments proclaimed the magnificence of the sovereign pontiffs, from the bronze gates of St Paul-without-the-Walls, brought back from Constantinople by Hildebrand, the future Gregory VII, and the fresco by Giotto commemorating the splendour of the jubilee celebrated in 1300 by Boniface VIII, to the splendid creations of the Popes of the 15th century. It may be said that the history of the Middle Ages was written there in indelible characters, and not only the history of Rome, but that of the whole of Christendom.
