Vatican apartments – after Raphael

The Vatican was amazing… everywhere you turned there was something you’ve seen in your art history books all your life… I found this little border detail in one of the Pope’s apartments, across from the very famous “School of Athens” painting by Raphael. What amazed me about this was the simplicity of it, but how much it achieved “dimension” from about a metre… in spite of it merely being tone and tint on a warm grey plaster background. I expect that the original was not by Raphael, but one of his “school”.