Resumen de Raphael's 'Siege of Perugia'
Part of a special section on Raphael on the occasion of “Raphael: From Urbino to Rome,” an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, through January 16, 2005. The writer discusses Raphael's drawing The Siege of Perugia (Louvre, Paris). He identifies the subject of the work as an incident from the life of St. Herculanus, the 6th-century bishop and patron saint of Perugia, Italy. Noting that the drawing was probably made in 1505, when Raphael was still active in Perugia, he explains that it represented Raphael's response to the great murals that had been commissioned from Leonardo and Michelangelo for the Sala del Consiglio of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. He suggests that the work was part of a planned civic commission, and he argues that adding it (among others) to Raphael's list of works for Perugia encourages a thorough revision of the traditional emphasis on the years from 1504 to 1508 as “Raphael's Florentine period.”
