eight days, where many people came to see it. According to Marino Sanuto the Younger, "it was like a jubilee, so many people went there." An impressive array of Renaissance artists were brought in to decorate Santa Maria del Popolo, beginning with Raphael. Both paintings by Raphael, Julius II and the Madonna were hung on pillars during feast days or high holy days. The two paintings, nearly the same size, seem as if they were meant to complement each other. Aside from their dimensions, they also both had a strong vertical orientation. The eyes of the paintings were downcast and gave a contemplative feeling. The positioning and lighting within the paintings seems to indicate that they were meant to each flank an altar in the domed chapel. Although the paintings were paired for a time, through change of ownership the "Madonna of Loreto" is now located in the Musée Condé, Chantilly. As a means of indicating Julius' appreciation of the Madonna, which resulted in the pairing of paintings, Julius commissioned the Sistine Madonna in the last year of his life where his adoration is shown by the Pope kneeling at the feet of the Virgin. There are many rival suppositions about the circumstances surrounding the history of the painting after it was removed from Santa Maria del Popolo, partly because there were many copies of the painting and partly due to delays in publication of vital documents. Cardinal Sfondrati In 1591, the Raphael paintings Julius II and what was later called Madonna of Loreto were removed from the church by Paolo Camillo Sfondrati, later Cardinal Sfondrati, nephew of Pope Gregory XIV. In 1608, he sold the paintings to Cardinal Scipione Borghese. Borghese collection The paintings were still recorded as part of the Borghese collection in 1693, as a small inventory number 118 at the bottom left of the London Julius shows. The discovery of this number, hidden by over-paint, in x-ray photographs in 1969 was one of the key pieces of evidence establishing the primacy of the London version. It matches a catalogue of paintings in the Palazzo Borghese in Rome in 1693. The painting presumably left the collection between 1794 and 1797, and its whereabouts are then unknown until it reappears in the Angerstein Collection in London by 1823, and so was acquired by the National Gallery in 1824, initially catalogued as a Raphael, but this attribution was soon