He painted portraits and religious subjects in oils, and, once he was established, avoided the large fresco schemes that took up so much of the time of Raphael and Michelangelo.

This dramatic and imposing picture, "one of the masterpieces of Venetian narrative painting", was also long attributed to Giorgione; it may have been abandoned about 1508, though the estimated dates vary in the period 1505–1510.

[10] Their technique has developed "from the earlier smooth surface to the application of paint in heavy brushstrokes", and the figure of Saint Sebastian shows awareness of classical sculpture.

[4] The style shows developments "towards a new fullness of form and breadth of movement" that may have been influenced by the Florentine painter Fra Bartolommeo, who was in Venice in 1508.

Early in the year he was sent to Venice by Pope Julius II to buy Venetian support for the papacy in the War of the League of Cambrai.

Sebastiano began by painting mythological subjects in lunettes in the Sala di Galatea in Chigi's Villa Farnesina, under a ceiling just done by Baldassarre Peruzzi.

[14] By about 1515, Sebastiano had befriended and allied himself with Michelangelo, who recruited him "as a kind of deputy for him in painting", he having returned to his backlog of promised projects in sculpture.

Here the composition is highly unusual for this common subject (which Michelangelo had famously sculpted in 1498–99), with Christ lying across the bottom of the picture space, at the feet of a Virgin looking up to Heaven, so that the two figures do not actually touch.

Though no drawing survives, this was Michelangelo's conception, where "an idea of high tragic power is expressed with extreme simplicity in a structure of severe geometric rigour".

[19] In 1516 he painted a similar subject, the Lamentation of Jesus (now Hermitage Museum) using his own composition, and showing his awareness of Raphael's handling of groups of figures.

This was a method first practiced by Domenico Veneziano, and afterwards by other artists; but according to Vasari only Sebastiano succeeded in preventing the colours eventually blackening.

[23] The last major work of the period was the Raising of Lazarus, now in the National Gallery, London, which was commissioned in 1516 by Cardinal Giulio de Medici, archbishop of Narbonne in southern France, and the future Pope Clement VII, in blatant competition, engineered by Michelangelo, with a painting of the same size by Raphael, the Transfiguration.

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.

[24] 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.

[28] 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 1527 he seems to have remained with the pope all through the horrors of the Sack of Rome and his nervous retreat to Orvieto, though he seems to have spent time in Venice in 1528 and perhaps 1529, his first known return there since 1511.

This catastrophe brought to an end the High Renaissance epoch in Rome, scattering Raphael's workshop and the emerging Roman Mannerists, and largely destroying the confidence of patrons.

[32] In 1531 the death of the previous holder allowed Sebastiano to press Pope Clement for the lucrative office of the "piombatore", which he obtained after promising to pay a fixed sum of 300 scudi annually to the other main contender, Giovanni da Udine, who was also a painter, from Raphael's workshop.

[4] Vasari, probably much influenced by Michelangelo, places great emphasis on Sebastiano's turning away from art for a comfortable life as a well-paid courtier from this point, but may overstate the reality.

It is clear that several months after the idea of using oils first appeared, Michelangelo finally and furiously rejected it, and insisted that the whole wall be re-plastered in the rough arriccio needed as a base for fresco.

A large altarpiece of the Birth of the Virgin, still in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, was begun in the late 1530s but had to be finished after his death by Francesco Salviati.

[4] Before his death in 1541, the executor of Agostino Chigi's estate commissioned a large Visitation as a memorial, in Santa Maria della Pace, Rome.

Fragments with some of the over life-size main figures are at Alnwick Castle, in a style of impressive simplicity, the end point of a "tendency to over-generalize appearances and pictorial structures so that they verged on an effect of geometrical abstraction" that had been increasing apparent in his work since his early years in Rome.

[39] After efforts by Daniele da Volterra his remains were moved in 1561 to the predecessor of the Rome Accademia di San Luca.

[42] From early on he was innovative and ready to experiment in compositional details as well as technique, with a special interest in painting in oils on new surfaces, whether plaster, stone, alabaster or slate.

He continued to prefer to draw on light blue paper in black chalk with white highlights, a Venetian habit.

[39] Vasari says that in later life he lived in a fine house near the Piazza del Popolo, keeping a very good table, and often entertaining regular friends as well as visitors.