The largest of the well-known Raphael Rooms, was partially closed to the public in 2015 due to conservation work.
“In a way, we have rewritten the history of art,” explained Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums, during a June 26 press conference.
The restoration, which began in March 2015 and completed in December 2024, has not only restored the magnifiscence of the frescoes that Pope Leo X commissioned Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520) to paint but also revealed important technical and artistic innovations concerning one of the great workshops of the Renaissance.
The process, carried out in eight phases, began with the wall of “The Vision of the Cross” and concluded with the vault decorated by Tommaso Laureti. The planning of the scaffolding followed the same sequence as the original execution of the paintings, allowing for a diachronic interpretation of the evolution of the complex.
One of the project’s greatest revelations is that two female figures — Comitas and Iustitia — were executed directly by Raphael in oil, an unusual technique for murals at the time. “We knew from sources that Raphael did experiments, but we didn’t know which ones,” Jatta explained.
Thanks to scientific analyses a natural resin heated and applied to the wall was identified. This technique allowed Raphael to make retouchings and achieve a visual unity not possible with traditional fresco.
“This was his last major decorative undertaking and represents a technical revolution,” said Piacentini, who was responsible for the restoration project from the outset. The presence of nails in the wall indicates that Raphael intended to paint the entire room in oils, a project interrupted by his untimely death in 1520 when he was only 37 years old.
The work was continued by his disciples Giulio Romano and Giovanni Francesco Penni, who painted the remaining fresco scenes. “It was a work of years, comparable to that of a team from the Renaissance: Restorers, chemists, engineers, and heritage experts worked as if in a true workshop,” emphasized Jatta, who also praised Persegati’s coordination in the Vatican’s oldest laboratory.
The Hall of Constantine, designed for official receptions and named after the emperor who granted freedom of worship and thus brought Christianity out from the underground with the Edict of Milan (A.D. 313), constitutes a kind of artistic palimpsest (an ancient tablet on which writing could be erased and rewritten). It was decorated over more than 60 years under five pontificates — from Leo X to Sixtus V — with work done by different artists and workshops, making it an exceptional synthesis of 16th-century Roman painting.
Its walls depict four key episodes: “The Vision of the Cross,” “The Battle of the Milvian Bridge,” “The Baptism of Constantine,” and “The Donation of Rome.” All of them symbolize the transition from pagan Rome to Christian Rome and constitute, according to Jatta, “the most politically and programmatically important room in the complex.”
Another highlight of the project is the restoration of the vault painted with an allegorical scene of the triumph of Christianity over paganism by Tommaso Laureti during the pontificate of Sixtus V. Among the discoveries is the visual illusion of a carpet in the center of the vault, simulating a sumptuous fabric painted directly onto the ceiling’s surface.
Replacing the old wooden ceiling, Laureti created an impressive marvel of illusionistic perspective with plays of light and shadow that can now be admired in all its beauty after having been cleaned.
