Raphael: The Disputation of the Sacrament

Raphael: The Disputation of the Sacrament is Raphael’s fresco of 1509–10 in the Stanza della Segnatura of the Vatican Museums, painted for Pope Julius II as part of a room-sized argument about knowledge and belief. Below, theologians and saints gather around the Eucharist; above, the Trinity and the heavenly court answer the debate with vision. Its poised symmetry and lucid space turn doctrine into lived experience, a High Renaissance claim that faith and reason belong to one ordered world.