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Just to confirm - there is still a beautiful world out there.

A happy discovery today was Cody Canada and the Departed - a band who play "Red Dirt" music, which comes from Oklahoma and Texas. It was the first time I had listened to their album "3", so called because there are three of them and it is their third album. My favourite track was Sam Hain.

Raphael is usually credited as the painter of the magnificent fresco "The Fire in the Borgo" (1514 - 17) but some believe that although he may have designed it, the actual painting was done by his assistant Giulio Romano.

The painting was commissioned by Pope Leo X.  It shows one of his predecessors, Leo IV (847 - 855).  A fire was raging near to St Peter's in the Borgo San Pietro which the local population could not extinguish. They sought the Pope's help, who made the sign of the cross whereupon the fire went out. If only such miracles were possible today.

Leo X succeeded Pope Julius II, who was known as "the terrible pope." He had been constantly at war with France, the Spanish and the Holy Roman Empire. Leo X, a Medici and son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, became Pope aged 37, having been made a Cardinal aged 14. He immediately began spending money wildly, on the arts and architecture (for example on the renovation of St Peter's itself) as well as on continued fighting. 

Having exhausted "the treasuries of three popes" and his own private fortune, he set out to raise enormous sums by selling ecclesiastical offices to the highest bidders and papal indulgences, whereby rich people could pay to have their sins expunged. These practices were the prime target of Martin Luther who, in 1517, the year "the Fire in the Borgo" was completed, pinned his 95 theses to a church door in distant Wittenberg, triggering the Protestant Reformation.

The painting, showing a Pope Leo, performing a miracle to save his church and people must have appealed to Leo X's self-esteem at a time of dramatic change.