Room 2

Michelangelo’s unfinished bodies, Raphael’s seated pope and Bronzino’s polished mythological figures offer very different surfaces in this room. Together they show how artists working in Florence and Rome responded to powerful patrons and ambitious commissions. In The Entombment by Michelangelo, painted figures stand beside areas left incomplete. Pope Julius II presents one of Raphael’s great patrons as an individual man, while the pope’s building projects and decorated apartments helped establish Rome’s authority. Bronzino’s An Allegory with Venus and Cupid turns a courtly subject into an elaborate puzzle of desire and deception. Look beyond these works to The Raising of Lazarus by Sebastiano del Piombo, incorporating designs by Michelangelo. The collaboration shows that an important painting could involve more than one artist’s ideas and skills. The room’s religious images and portraits belonged to different kinds of setting, from a burial chapel to a court. Comparing their scale, finish and intended audience helps explain why a single century produced such varied ways of giving figures presence.