Pope Clement VII, in blatant competition, engineered by Michelangelo, with a painting of the same size by Raphael, the Transfiguration. Both were supposed to hang in Narbonne Cathedral. Michelangelo supplied at least drawings for the figure of Lazarus and the two men supporting him (British Museum), but probably did not do any work on the painting itself, if only because he was only briefly in Rome during the time it was painted. When the two paintings were hung together in the Vatican, just after Raphael's death in 1520, both were praised, but the Raphael generally preferred, as has remained the case ever since. In the early 1520s Sebastiano completed the Borgherini Chapel with a Transfiguration in the semi-dome above his Flagellation. The combination shows the influence of the Apocalipsis Nova, a contemporary text that prophesied the coming of an "Angelic Pastor" who would bring a new age of peace. Michelangelo was among many reformist Catholics interested in the text. The Flagellation represents "the current, corrupted state of Christianity and the Transfiguration the glorious future to come". 1520–1531 The death of Raphael in 1520, immediately before the exhibition of the two rival paintings intended for Narbonne, left Sebastiano clearly the leading painter operating in Rome. As his letters show, he immediately attempted to secure for himself the "Sala dei Pontefici", Raphael's next Vatican project, but was frustrated by Raphael's workshop, armed with the master's drawings, and his own inability to enlist Michelangelo's help, as the pope had told him to work exclusively on the long-promised Tomb of Pope Julius II. In the following years Sebastiano mostly avoided very large commissions for churches, and concentrated on portraits, where he had a considerable reputation, and religious easel paintings, such as his Visitation for France (1518–19, now Louvre), and his Madonna of the Veil (c. 1525), a very successful adaptation of Raphael's Madonna di Loreto. To both of these types he brought his refined monumental classicism. His career in the decade was greatly impacted by outside events. In 1522 there was plague in Rome, and he may have left Rome for a long period; there is little evidence of his activity for over a year. In 1523 Giulio de Medici became Pope Clement VII, and thereafter Sebastiano seems to have been a part of Vatican court life. He painted a number of portraits of the pope, and other paintings for him. In 1527 he