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Before entering inside the sistine chapel in the vatican museum, visitors can spend some minutes of their sightseeing visiting the Raphael rooms.
In 1507 pope Julius II decided to move out of the traditional papal suite in the Vatican palace to the rooms directly above it, because he hated the frescoes painted by his precedessor Alexander VI Borgia.
To decorate his new apartments, Julius revived a plan that enabled his uncle, pope Sixtus IV, to fresco the vast interior of the sistine chapel within the space of two years: he hired a team of artists to work on different parts of the suite simultaneously, confident that the pressure of competition would make them all do their best work, and as quicly as possible. Among the painters he assembled was a young man from Urbino, Raphael Sanzio, a distant relative of the pope's architect Donato Bramante.
When Julius died, Raphael had completed not quite two rooms in a suite of three smalller chambers and one spacious hall, now called tha sala di Costantino. The papacy passed to pope Leo X Medici in 1513, who adjusted the themes of the frescoes to fit his own pontificate. At the same time, Raphael's reputation had grown to the point where his commissions greatly outnumbered his ability to fulfill them, despite the help of his large, meticulously organized workshop; the last of the three rooms that comprise the Stanze vaticane was executed by Raphael's assistants, and both artist and pope had died well before Raphael's workshop put the finishing touches on the Hall of Constantine for the pope Clement VII.
The three Stanze vaticane, as the papal apartments are called today, formed the center section of a more extensive suite.It began with a Bramante built entrance loggia that faced the city of Rome, and continued into a small assembly hall that gave in turn onto the much larger Sala di Costantino. The pope's bedroom was tucked into a space between the Sala di Costantino and the room called Sala di Eliodoro. Two more rooms of the same size followed, the Stanza della Segnatura and finally the Stanza dell' Incendio,which opened into the fabric of the large defensive of the large defensive tower built into the Vatican palace by Pope Alexander VI.
The current names of these rooms are mostly based on the subjects of the frescoes on their walls: the Sala di Costantino shows scenes from the life of the Emperor Constantine, the Stanza di Eliodoro, takes its name from an episode of the Bible depicting the attempt to steal the Menorah from the temple of Jerusalem, the Stanza dell' Incendio from the fresco Fire in Borgo, related with the fire that damaged the vatican when the Turks sacked Rome in 847 AD. The Stanza della Segnatura is the " Signing room " and takes the name from the activity that once took place within it: here the popes put their signature to the bulls and other documents generated in massive numbers by the papal bureaucracy. But this room served also as private library of Julius II with three hundred books stored in wooden cabinets that were destroyed in the 1527 sack of Rome.
Julius seems to have given artists comparative freedom, not for lack of interest ( his surprise visits to the Sistine chapel to ask Michelangelo whether he had finished yeat are legendary ) but because he seems to have known how to delegate responsibility. For the intricate details of the Stanza della Segnatura, the pope may have given significant responsibility for their actual design to the artists themselves: this certainly seems to be the case for Raphael, whose drawings for some of the Stanze frescoes show major changes as he thought through the room's design.