After a decade-long cleaning and restoration, the Vatican Museums recently unveiled the “last and most important” room in the Apostolic Palace belonging to a group known as the Raphael Rooms.
The process uncovered a “novel mural painting technique” through the application of oil paint directly to the wall and a grid of nails embedded in the walls, according to the Associated Press.
“With this restoration, we rewrite a part of the history of art,” Vatican Museums director Barbara Jatta told the AP.
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The fourth frescoed reception room, painted by the famed Renaissance painter and architect and his students in the 1500s, was dedicated to the Roman emperor Constantine and had its scaffolding finally removed on June 26.
The commission for the Raphael Rooms came from Pope Julius II in 1508, who asked a 25-year-old Raphael Sanzio to decorate a private apartment for the religious leader in the Apostolic Palace.
The decade-long restoration of the room dedicated to Constantine confirmed earlier reports that Raphael applied oil paint directly on the wall, rather than decorate them with frescoes in which paint is applied to wet plaster.
The Associated Press reported that this was confirmed through the discovery by Vatican technicians of two female figures on opposite corners of the hall, Justice and Courtesy, being oil-on-wall paintings rather than frescoes, and the work of Raphael himself.
The famed Renaissance artist died at the age of 37 on April 6, 1520, prior to the hall’s completion. As a result, the remaining paintings in the Constantine room were frescoes by Raphael’s students, Jatta told the Associated Press.
During the cleaning project, Vatican restorers discovered a series of metal nails under the plaster frescos believed to have been drilled into the wall to hold in place the natural resin surface Raphael “had clearly intended” to paint on directly with oil paints.
“From a historical and critical point of view, and also technical, it was truly a discovery,” Fabio Piacentini, one of the chief restorers, told the Associated Press. “The technique used and planned by Raphael was truly experimental for the time, and has never been found in any other mural made with oil paint.”