page_title: Raphael Rooms
section_title: The Baptism of Constantine
hierarchical_section_title: Raphael Rooms / Sala di Costantino / The Baptism of Constantine
context_page_description: The four Raphael Rooms form a suite of reception rooms, now part of the Vatican Museums in Vatican City. They are famous for their frescoes, painted by Raphael and his workshop. Together with Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes, they are the grand fresco sequences that mark the High Renaissance in Rome.
  The Stanze, as they are commonly called, were originally intended as a suite of apartments for Pope Julius II. He commissioned Raphael, then a relatively young artist from Urbino, and his studio in 1508 or 1509 to redecorate the existing interiors of the rooms entirely. It was possibly Julius' intent to outshine the apartments of his predecessor Pope Alexander VI, as the Stanze are directly above Alexander's Borgia Apartment. They are on the third floor, overlooking the south side of the Belvedere Courtyard.
  Running from east to west, as a visitor would have entered the apartment, but not following the sequence in which the Stanze were frescoed, the rooms are the Sala di Costantino, the Stanza di Eliodoro, the Stanza della Segnatura, and the Stanza dell'Incendio del Borgo.
  After the death of Julius in 1513, with two rooms frescoed, Pope Leo X continued the program.
context_section_description: The third painting in the sequence, The Baptism of Constantine, was most likely painted by Gianfrancesco Penni, and shows the emperor being baptised by Pope Sylvester I in the Lateran Baptistery at Rome, following the account of Constantine's baptism given in the Acts of Sylvester and the Liber Pontificalis (and not the different deathbed version recounted in Eusebius's Life of Constantine).
caption: The Baptism of Constantine
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