Madonna of Foligno

Nobody fully agrees. Traditional accounts say lightning struck Sigismondo de’ Conti’s house in Foligno and he survived unharmed; others tie it to a cannon shell that exploded near him during a siege; a third theory reads the fireball as an actual meteor recorded falling near Crema around 1511. Raphael leaves the exact threat deliberately vague, only the golden orb and the shaken town below survive as clues.

It was meant to carry an inscription explaining the miracle in Sigismondo’s own words, but it was never filled in, possibly because he died in February 1512 before the wording was finalized. The blank tablet is an accidental relic of an unfinished commission, not a deliberate symbol.

Napoleon’s army seized it under the 1797 Treaty of Tolentino and shipped it to the Louvre, where it was even transferred from wood panel onto canvas to survive the journey. It returned to Rome after Napoleon’s defeat and has hung in the Vatican’s picture gallery since 1816; its original home was actually a church in Rome, not Foligno, which it only reached decades later when a descendant of Sigismondo moved it there.