The Chigi Chapel or Chapel of the Madonna of Loreto () is the second chapel on the left-hand side of the nave in the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. It is the only religious building of Raphael which has been preserved in its near original form. The chapel is a treasure trove of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and is ranked among the most important monuments in the basilica. History In 1507 Julius II granted assent to the acquisition of a chapel in the church to his friend, the wealthy Sienese banker and financier of the Roman Curia, Agostino Chigi. Chigi had bought the second chapel in the north aisle, and its dedication was changed by a papal bull on 3 December 1507 from Saints Sebastian, Roch and Sigismund to the Madonna of Loreto, whose shrine Agostino was passionately devoted, and Saints Augustine and Sebastian. The bull also stated that the chapel was meant to be a mausoleum for Agostino and his heirs, "wishing to trade earthly things to heavenly and transitory to eternal by fortunate exchange." The chapel was most probably rebuilt from scratch with Raphael as the architect. A ground plan attributed to the artist was preserved in the Uffizi in Florence, it was presumably drawn at the beginning of the work around 1512. An inscription on the dome marked the completion of the mosaics in 1516. In the following years Lorenzetto worked on the architectural decoration of the chapel and the statues under Raphael's patronage. The main iconographic theme of the chapel was the Resurrection; and visually it represented a marriage between Christianity and classical antiquity. Agostino Chigi was buried in the half-finished chapel on 11 April 1520, and Raphael himself had died a few days before Agostino. Agostino Chigi's widow, Francesca Ordeasca commissioned the mosaicist, Luigi da Pace on 31 May 1520 to create another set of mosaics for the planned decoration of the tambour and the spandrels, but she died in the same year on 11 November. The simultaneous death of the artist, the patron and the patron's widow stymied work on the chapel. Agostino's younger brother, Sigismondo Chigi commissioned Lorenzetto to go on with Raphael's plan in 1521. But the work advanced slowly and the death of Sigismondo in 1526 left everything in limbo. Vasari records in his Lives, speaking about the statues of Jonah and Elijah: "... the heirs of