ABSTRACT
In the Vatican, in a large vaulted room once designed to be the private library of the pope, called the Stanze della Segnatura, is Raphael’s majestic fresco, Disputa, or Disputation over the Sacrament. Nested under the vault and filling one of the dome-shaped sides of the wall, the fresco is one of the finest representations of authority in Western civilization. Immersed in the neo-Platonic intellectualism of his time, which glorified art as a “new instrument of an investigation of reality in all its complexity”, Raphael self-consciously used his painting as a way to transcend the images of his composition (Becherucci 1969: 90). In this, his most brilliant creation, he drew what is certainly the finest line-and-block chart ever drawn.
