ABSTRACT
IF it is true that the challenge of architecture to painting awoke in Raphael the sublime style, his passage through the school of architecture will have offered him more than merely a glance at the new calling in which he had not yet tried his hand. Here also he must have undergone an upward progression from the earthly to the other-worldly, from the attainable to the desirable, from pious exaltation to heroic flight. Grown to maturity, he found in architecture the means of uniting both worlds, this world and the world of the beyond. The building of St Peter’s, combined with the disposition of the great Pope, determined the destiny of Raphael in this sphere also; even before he himself became director of the Fabbrica di San Pietro, he was already under the spell of the great purpose that, thanks to the Pope and Bramante, the architect after his own heart, sought expression for the highest aspirations of the time.
