Dr. Rocky Ruggiero

More than a decade before Raphael decorated the apartments of Pope Julius II, the Perugian painter Pinturicchio frescoed the apartments of Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) one floor below. Five of the six rooms were decorated in a complex iconographic scheme that in many ways prefigured the program of Raphael’s Stanze. For a pope best known for his immorality, ferociousness and nepotism, the sophisticated imagery of the paintings combines both Christian and classical subjects and instead reveal a particularly enlightened patron who displayed discerning taste in employing one of Italy’s most celebrated painters to decorate his apartments.