Pope Paul III's Additions to Raphael's Logge: HisImpresein the Logge

Abstract

Fifteen years ago I made a thoughtless suggestion in reference to Perino del Vaga's contributions to Raphael's Logge1 that has since been accepted by a number of scholars and now threatens to harden into firmly established fact.2 The present article was undertaken as a brief essay to correct that error. But after two years of searching for answers to obvious and reasonable questions, I can offer instead only a series of hypotheses that could eventually prove to be even more misleading than my original supposition: Caveat emptor. The arguments presented here may appear both insignificant and tentative, but in recent years others too have made statements about the Vatican palace that are simply invalid. These mistakes usually seem minor when viewed in isolation, yet they have led to potentially dangerous fallacies. If, for example, one assumes the presence of doors where none existed, one risks confusing the design and functions of entire suites of rooms. If one accepts as part of the original Logge decorat...