Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, “L’ Incendio di Borgo (The Fire in the Borgo)”, (Detail), 1514, Fresco, 670 x 500 cm, Apostolic Palace, Vatican City
Born in early April of 1483, Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known as Raphael, was an Italiam painter and architect of the High Renaissance period of Italy. His artwork is known for its clarity of form, the ease of the composition, and the visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human greatness. Raphael, along with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, form the traditional trinity of great masters of that period.
Raphael’s fresco “L’ Incendio di Borgo”, which is in the Vatican Museums in Rome, depicts an episode taken from the “Liber Pontificalis” concerning the 847 fire which flared up in the neighborhood in front of St. Peter’s Basilica. On that occasion Pope Leo IV imparted a solemn blessing from the Loggia delle Benedizioni, which miraculously extinguished the fire and saved the church and the people. The fresco has the clear intent of being a political allegory that presented Pope Leo IV to his contemporaries as the peacemaker who had put out the flames of the war.
The figures and architectures of the fresco clearly recall and allude to the Virgilian description of the Trojan fire. To the left of the fresco, as seen in the detail above, are Aeneas with his father Anchises on his shoulders, his son Ascanio on the side and his wife Creusa behind. The Corinthian colonnade is reminiscent of the “Temple of the Càstori” , part of the Roman Forum in Rome.