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Is another mega luxury M&A deal in the works?

After the LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton-Tiffany tie-up and the rumors about a possible Kering takeover of Moncler, speculation is swirling that Prada may be looking for a buyer.

On Thursday, a spokesperson for Prada denied the company was for sale.

But according to sources, Prada’s co-chief executive officers Patrizio Bertelli and his wife, creative director Miuccia Prada, flew to Paris last December to meet with Kering chief François-Henri Pinault. A separate source said that Compagnie Financiere Richemont may be another interested party.

The luxury giant, which specializes in hard luxury, and has a fashion and accessories division that includes Chloé and Dunhill, has been in an acquisitive mood of late, having purchased Buccellati last year and formed a joint venture with designer Alber Elbaz for a new fashion and lifestyle company. An asset such as Prada, one of the most recognizable, directional and established fashion brands around, via an outright purchase or merger, could transform the fortunes of its soft luxury division.

Richemont declined to comment. The company plans to report third-quarter and Christmas trading figures on Friday.

This is not the first time that Prada and Richemont have been linked in a possible deal. Ten years ago this month Prada denied media reports it was in talks to sell a stake to Richemont. In 2011 the Italian company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange after several delays.

Its market capitalization is 74.08 billion Hong Kong dollars, or $9.5 billion. Richemont, which is quoted on the Swiss Stock Exchange, has a market cap of 40.23 billion Swiss francs, or $41.66 billion at current exchange.

In addition, Prada took the leap into online selling in Europe via the Richemont-owned Net-a-porter and the German company, Mytheresa.com.

As reported, sources said LVMH took a serious look at Prada last year, but discussions stopped over the summer and no deal materialized.

Although Prada has always denied it has ever wanted to sell, speculation persists.

In 2018, unveiling a new industrial complex in Tuscany’s Valvigna, the 73-year-old Bertelli said the company was not for sale. “Of course there are suitors looking at us; it’s normal, but we are not selling and we will never sell,” he said at the time.

Bertelli and Miuccia Prada’s son Lorenzo joined the group in September 2017, starting as head of digital communication. He is now head of marketing and communication. In Valvigna Bertelli said his son was “acquiring know-how and experience in communication and is preparing to possibly helm the company if he wants to. We’ll see. We don’t have big problems in management.”

Bertelli also dismissed any idea of retiring. “Retirement is associated to a physical and mental state. It’s a silly myth in an old society.”

Full-price sales, a positive trend in wholesale and a strong performance of its ready-to-wear and footwear collections helped Prada SpA see gains in profits and revenues in the first half last year.

Net profits jumped 46.6 percent to 155 million euros, benefiting from the Patent Box tax relief relating to the years 2015 to 2019.

Sales rose 2 percent to 1.57 billion euros compared with 1.53 billion euros in the prior year. Prada has stopped seasonal markdowns and rationalized its wholesale channel, which were expected to provide results in the second half of the year and the first half of 2020. The group has also upped its investments in digital technology across the business.

Louis Vuitton Beefs Up Management at Burgeoning Men’s Division

Pierre-Emmanuel Angeloglou will take on a "cross-entity role for the men’s category effective Feb. 1, WWD has learned.

Reflecting its scale — and current momentum under men’s artistic director Virgil Abloh — the luxury powerhouse has appointed a charismatic executive to helm it: Pierre-Emmanuel Angeloglou, formerly global brand president of L’Oréal Paris, WWD has learned.

He has been given responsibility “for men’s leather Goods and travel, as well as men’s ready-to-wear, and will have a cross-entity role for the men’s category [except for perfumes]. In these new roles he will report to Delphine Arnault, effective February 1,” according to an internal memo from Michael Burke, Vuitton chairman and chief executive officer.

Arnault is second-in-command at the brand, with the title of executive vice president, products.

Burke’s memo further clarifies that “Touhfa Rahali Tellier, product director, men’s leather goods and travel, and Emiliano Casadei, director, men’s ready-to-wear activities, and their teams will report to Pierre-Emmanuel. Their segments have enjoyed remarkable performance and growth and we are thus strengthening this momentum.”

It’s a new role, and points to even bigger ambitions for the division, whose fall 2020 men’s show was paraded in a giant tent in the Tuileries Garden painted with blue skies on every surface.

It is understood the management reinforcement reflects the complexity and speed of the Vuitton business today, which encompasses a growing number of events, exhibitions, fashion shows, product drops and digital initiatives.

Top luxury brands have had to ramp up their content creation and messaging across such disparate realms as physical windows, digital content and social media, which requires agility.

Angeloglou quietly joined Vuitton last June as director of strategic missions for the brand’s fashion and leather goods.

He spent his first months at the luxury giant as general manager of Benelux and Nordic countries, where he learned about Vuitton’s retail practices and product universe. According to sources, he also proved himself a charismatic leader with a knack for the fashion business.

During Angeloglou’s three-year tenure at L’Oréal Paris, the brand promoted a new vision of femininity, based on people’s own aspirations. L’Oréal Paris tightened its fashion link by hosting two catwalk displays — on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and on the Seine river.

The brand produced capsule makeup collections with Balmain’s creative director Olivier Rousteing and Isabel Marant, among other strong initiatives.

Prior to steering L’Oréal Paris, Angeloglou for three years held the position of general manager of L’Oréal’s Consumer Products Division in North Asia and for four years oversaw that division in Brazil, according to his LinkedIn profile. Angeloglou was also general manager of Lascad in Paris and global vice president of L’Oréal Paris skin care. He joined L’Oréal in 1996 and holds a degree from HEC Paris.

Abloh, who staged his fourth show for Vuitton on Thursday and showed a more tailored, polished side of the brand, has ignited huge excitement around its men’s department.

His first products only reached retail stores in January 2019 at a pop-up in Tokyo, and they raked in 30 percent more in the first 48 hours than Vuitton’s blockbuster collaborative collection with Supreme in 2018, Burke told WWD at the time.

It is understood Abloh’s rtw, shoes and leather goods are all checking strongly.

When it reported third-quarter sales last October, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton trumpeted that sales of fashion and leather goods advanced 14 percent in organic terms in the third quarter — and that the sector’s performance in the first nine months of the year was driven by Vuitton, its largest and most profitable brand. It has sales in excess of $10 billion.

At the time, the group underlined the “excellent reception” of the last two women’s wear and men’s wear fashion shows, designed by Nicolas Ghesquière and Abloh, respectively.

LVMH is to report fourth-quarter and full-year results on Jan. 28.

All kinds of babies are good at enticing grown-ups to care for them—including aliens from Star Wars.

Like many people with children or grandchildren, I spent December watching the new Star Wars TV series “The Mandalorian.” Across America, the show led to a remarkable Christmas truce among bitterly competing factions. Rural or urban, Democrat or Republican, we all love Baby Yoda.

In case you spent the last month in a monastic retreat, Baby Yoda is the weird but irresistibly adorable creature who is the heart of the series. (He isn’t actually Yoda but a baby of the same species.) The Mandalorian, a ferocious bounty-hunter in a black helmet, takes on the job of hunting down Baby Yoda but ends up rescuing and caring for him instead. This means finding snacks and sitters and keeping the baby from playing with the knob on the starship gear shift.

Why do the Mandalorian and the whole internet love Baby Yoda so much? The answer may tell us something profound about human evolution.

Humans have a particularly long and helpless infancy. Our babies depend on older caregivers for twice as long as chimp babies do. As a result, we need more varied caregiving. Chimp mothers look after their babies by themselves, but as the great anthropologist Sarah Hrdy pointed out in her 2009 book “Mothers and Others,” human mothers have always been assisted by fathers, grandparents and “alloparents”—people who look after other folks’ children. No other animal has so many different kinds of caregivers.

Those caregivers are what anthropologists call “facultative,” meaning that they only provide care in certain circumstances and not others. Once they are committed to a baby, however, they may be just as devoted and effective as biological mothers. The key factor seems to be the very act of caregiving itself. We don’t take care of babies because we love them; instead, like the Mandalorian, we love babies once we start taking care of them.

In a new paper forthcoming in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Dr. Hrdy and Judith Burkart argue that this led to the evolution of special social adaptations in human babies, since they have to actively persuade all those facultative caregivers to love them. Studies show that babies have physical features that automatically attract care—those adorable, “awww”-inducing big eyes and heads and fat cheeks and little noses, all of which are exaggerated in Baby Yoda. Drs. Hrdy and Burkart think that fat cheeks may be particularly important: A baby’s plumpness may be a signal that it’s especially worth investing in.

The way a baby acts is just as important as the way it looks. Even though babies can’t talk, they gesture and make eye contact. Studies show that human infants already understand and react to the emotions and desires of others. Drs. Hrdy and Burkart argue that these very early abilities for social cooperation and emotional intelligence evolved to help attract caregivers.

They also suggest that once these abilities were in place in babies, they allowed more cooperation between adults as well. All those mothers and fathers and alloparents had to coordinate their efforts to take care of the babies. So there was a kind of benign evolutionary circle: As babies became more socially skilled, they were better at attracting caregivers, and when they grew up they became better caregivers themselves.

So the story arc of “The Mandalorian” is also the story of human evolution. He rescues Baby Yoda, but Baby Yoda also rescues him. For adults, taking care of adorable babies together lets us escape from isolation and conflict so we can care for each other, too.

Social-media giant scraps earlier strategy, seeks other ways to monetize messaging service used by 1.5 billion

Facebook Inc. FB 0.28% is backing away from efforts to sell ads in WhatsApp, in a retreat from a controversial plan that drove the creators of the popular messaging service to resign more than 18 months ago, according to people familiar with the matter.

WhatsApp in recent months disbanded a team that had been established to find the best ways to integrate ads into the service, according to people familiar with the matter. The team’s work was then deleted from WhatsApp’s code, the people said.

The shift marks a detour in the social-media giant’s quest to monetize WhatsApp, which it bought in a blockbuster $22 billion acquisition in 2014 that has yet to pay financial dividends despite the service being used by more than 1.5 billion people globally.

Created in 2009, WhatsApp made money initially from download fees and then a $0.99 annual subscription, but Facebook made the platform free after acquiring it. In 2018 Facebook unveiled plans to generate more revenue from the app that included selling ads.

A year ago, WhatsApp’s then-chief executive, Chris Daniels, called ads a “primary monetization mode” for the company. Facebook formally unveiled prototypes last May for ads in its Status feature, which allows ephemeral postings similar to Instagram’s Stories.

Those efforts are now on ice. The company plans at some point to introduce ads to Status, but for now the focus is on building out money-making features allowing businesses to communicate with customers and better manage those interactions, said one person familiar with the matter.

A WhatsApp spokesman declined to comment.

Facebook’s push to sell ads in WhatsApp was a big factor in the decisions by Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who created the messaging service, to resign from the company, leaving on the table a combined $1.3 billion in deferred compensation, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

In 2016, the two changed WhatsApp’s terms of service to explicitly forbid displaying ads in the app, and complicating any future efforts to do so, according to people familiar with the matter. The men saw their move as creating a potential public-relations problem that Facebook would have to deal with if it tried later to change users’ terms of service, those people said.

While Facebook and its platforms haven’t shied away from changing terms of service in the past, introducing ads on the platform as planned would have required a thorough and formal notification of users.

WhatsApp is among the quartet of popular Facebook services, along with Instagram, Messenger and the core Facebook platform, that attract a combined 2.8 billion monthly users. Though Facebook’s eponymous social network is its biggest moneymaker, analysts believe that product is growing more slowly than Instagram and WhatsApp.

The decision to focus WhatsApp on commercial interactions reflects the way the service is used by most of its users around the world. In the U.S. and many European countries, WhatsApp is used largely for interpersonal communication. But many users in developing nations—who are the majority of WhatsApp’s users—have also adapted the platform to commerce and customer service, and the company has sought to accommodate them.

In addition to helping businesses respond to simple customer-service requests, WhatsApp’s tools allow for sorting and responding automatically to customer service queries. They also let businesses display in-app product catalogs. Advertisers on Facebook and Instagram can choose to shuttle users who click or tap on ads in those platforms directly into chats in WhatsApp.

WhatsApp also has said it is testing projects related to payments in India, where the service is hugely popular.

Facebook and WhatsApp were strange bedfellows from the beginning. Messrs. Koum and Acton are known as privacy advocates and showed open disdain for the commercial applications of the service. In a 2012 blog post, they called ads “insults to your intelligence.”

Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg became one of the world’s richest people largely by selling opportunities to advertise to those who came to the social network to connect with friends and family.

Advertising accounted for about 98% of Facebook’s revenue in the third quarter.

At the time of the WhatsApp deal, Mr. Zuckerberg said he agreed with Mr. Koum that ads weren’t a good fit for messaging services. After Facebook changed its position on the matter, the WhatsApp founders clashed with Mr. Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, leading them to resign.

Facebook’s underlying business has remained healthy and a favorite of investors even as it continues to face sharp criticism for its handling of user privacy, misinformation and other matters. Over the past 12 months, Facebook shares are up more than 50%, almost doubling the gains of the S&P 500.

Attorney general’s earlier service, telecom experience shaped his views; some bureau officials were stunned by his rebuke of Apple over Pensacola shooter’s iPhones

WASHINGTON—When Attorney General William Barr returned to the Justice Department last year, law-enforcement officials briefed him on how encryption and other digital-security measures were hindering investigations into everything from child sex abuse to terrorism.

Mr. Barr was surprised and puzzled, according to people familiar with the meeting. The government was struggling with similar problems when he first served as attorney general nearly 30 years ago, he told advisers. Why had they not been solved?

With a series of speeches, a sharply worded plea to Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and, now, a direct challenge to Apple Inc., Mr. Barr has intensified a long-running fight between law enforcement and technology companies over encrypted communications, potentially setting up a showdown with Silicon Valley. Some agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation also worry his forceful approach could sour valuable relationships they have fostered with technology companies.

Mr. Barr is disturbed not only by the potential harm that encryption technologies can cause law-enforcement investigations but also by what he sees as tech companies’ ability to essentially defy court orders, people close to him said.

He views the current conflict as similar to one that was emerging when he led the Justice Department in the early 1990s, they said, when law enforcement’s wiretapping efforts were disrupted by newly emerging digital technology.

Some within the department have praised Mr. Barr, who is also a former top telecom lawyer, for prioritizing the issue and calling on Apple to help the government unlock two iPhones belonging to a Saudi aviation student who killed three people at a Navy base in Pensacola, Fla. He said authorities had secured a court order within a day of the Dec. 6 shooting allowing them to search the phones but hadn’t received substantial help from the technology giant.

An Apple spokesperson disputed that characterization, saying the company’s “responses to their many requests since the attack have been timely, thorough and are ongoing.”

“We don’t want to get into a world where we have to spend months and even years exhausting efforts when lives are in the balance,” Mr. Barr said at a news conference on Monday. “We should be able to get in once we have a warrant that establishes that criminal activity is probably under way.”

The FBI said its technical experts agreed that further outreach to Apple was needed after efforts to access the phones were unsuccessful. Mr. Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray have been publicly in lockstep. FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich, who joined the attorney general on Monday, said he wanted to echo Mr. Barr’s points about law enforcement’s struggles with encryption. But notably, Mr. Bowdich also highlighted the FBI’s partnerships with tech companies.

Some senior FBI officials say privately they are worried that Mr. Barr’s sharp tone could undermine relationships with technology companies they have worked hard to develop, people familiar with the matter said.

The bureau relies on close partnerships with tech firms in a range of investigations, with companies complying with legal requests for data and troubleshooting technical obstacles that agents may struggle with, current and former officials said. Large tech firms also are frequently victims of crimes with national-security or counterintelligence implications, including cyberattacks and employee espionage, and law-enforcement agencies want those companies to report such issues, the officials said.

Some FBI officials were stunned by Mr. Barr’s rebuke of Apple, the people familiar with the matter said, and believe the Pensacola case is the wrong one to press in the encryption fight, in part because they believed Apple had already provided ample assistance to the probe.

The question for FBI officials is always whether a public spat with a major technology company is “worth the cost in terms of time, effort and damage to the FBI’s relationship with the tech sector,” said former FBI general counsel Jim Baker, who was involved in a high-profile 2016 clash with Apple over a locked phone also belonging to a dead terrorist. The standoff was resolved when a contractor hired by the bureau was able to get into the phone.

Apple, too, was surprised by Mr. Barr’s stance and is strategizing about its next steps, including the possibility of a legal fight, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Senior Justice Department officials said they view their push as a necessary step in investigating the Florida terrorist attack. The gunman’s locked phones could offer valuable clues about whether he conspired with others overseas, they said.

Mr. Barr became the top lawyer at a big firm—GTE, now Verizon Communications Inc. —in 1994, when Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, requiring telecom companies to enable their services and equipment to comply with law-enforcement surveillance requests. He has said he finds it absurd that tech companies would be exempt from such rules.

Based on his experience in telecom, Mr. Barr said in July, he reserves “a heavy dose of skepticism for those who claim that maintaining a mechanism for lawful access would impose an unreasonable burden on tech firms, especially the big ones.”

Mr. Barr and other department officials have given little public indication of their next move. The administration has begun discussing ways to solve the problem through legislation, Mr. Barr said.

Administration officials have an ally in Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“You’re going to find a way to do this or we’re going to do this for you,” Mr. Graham told tech companies at a hearing late last year.

While lawmakers of both parties have been openly critical of Apple, there is little indication of broad bipartisan interest in mandating government access to encrypted communications.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has recently amplified the company’s defense of privacy, touting it in ads. The public’s understanding of privacy and encryption issues has deepened, too, in the wake of hacking scandals. And any court challenge the Justice Department makes to Apple’s policies risks a decision that makes it even harder for the department to gain access to phones.

“There’s a risk that you wind up with a situation worse than the status quo,” said Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and co-founder of a strategic advisory firm that has worked with tech companies, including Apple, on security issues.

Mr. Chertoff said a court ruling against the Justice Department could limit access to widely available forensic tools that allow investigators to get into phones in some situations, for instance. “It’s not clear to me why this fight is advantageous to anybody,” he said.

Leading assembler of Apple’s iPhone has sought to diversify its revenue streams

Foxconn Technology Group intends to make a big push into electric cars through a joint venture with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, as the leading assembler of Apple’s iPhone seeks new sources of growth and profits.

Hon Hai Precision Industry, as the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer is formally known, is in talks to set up a business with the Italian-American automaker. The venture would develop and manufacture electric cars in China and run networks of connected wireless vehicles, the company said in a Taiwan Stock Exchange filing late on Thursday. 

The tie-up would mainly focus on the Chinese market, a Hon Hai executive said. Hon Hai and FCA are each set to hold 50 per cent in the new company. The executive said he expected a contract between the two to be signed in the first quarter. 

The venture would fit into Foxconn’s long running campaign to diversify its business. The company depends on Apple for almost 50 per cent of its revenues, but growth and profits from smartphones have increasingly been outpaced by those from electric car components and assembly, robotics and healthcare. 

Foxconn has tried for almost a decade to make inroads into automotive electronics, but revenues from the segment have been small. The group has invested in several Chinese companies involved in transportation and electric cars. They include ride-hailing group Didi Chuxing, batterymaker CATL, and electric vehicle companies Byton and Xpeng Motors. 

Foxconn intends to pitch itself as a manufacturer of modules and components for electric vehicle makers, according to plans discussed by company executives.

News of a tie-up comes a month after FCA agreed to merge with France’s PSA. The deal will create the world’s fourth-largest automaker and could boost FCA’s development of electric vehicle technologies. 

FCA will launch its first fully electrically powered vehicle this year. It has previously focused less on electric cars than some competitors, but has changed course to comply with Chinese policies aimed at lowering emissions. 

The Chinese government has pressured automakers to build more battery-powered cars, despite phasing out some subsidies for clean energy vehicles. Chinese electric vehicle sales fell for the sixth straight month in December.

An FCA spokesperson in China did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Five hundred years after the artist’s death, experts are restoring the last of four rooms he designed at the Papal Palace

The Hall of Constantine, the fourth and last of the Raphael Rooms in the Vatican to undergo restoration, is sealed off from visitors by a barrier that runs from the marble floor to the frescoed ceiling.

Fabio Piacentini, the Vatican restorer who is directing this final stage, enters a code on the keypad, hands me a hard hat and leads the way inside. The dense crowd of tourists and the ambient hubbub are left behind. Within, the atmosphere is tranquil.

Scaffolding divides the room into six levels connected by staircases and walkways. Snaking up and around the metal framework are vacuum hoses to remove dust. Indirect lighting brings the frescoed walls out of the shadows — a pontiff here; a battle there; landscapes; cityscapes; allegorical figures; apparitions; grotesques; putti. Men and women in white lab coats, papal insignia stitched on the pocket, concentrate on their tasks, looking up briefly to greet us.

At floor level, where a frieze of monochrome historical scenes winds around the room, Piacentini and his colleague, Francesca Persegati, who heads the conservation laboratory for paintings, point out graffiti that was etched into the plaster over the centuries — by casual visitors and expressive clerics — before protective measures were taken.

Brushes between fingers, restorers steady their hands on maulsticks — rods with padded tips that can rest safely on the wall — as they mitigate the damage.

“Sometimes the graffiti will mention an event that has just happened,” Piacentini says, his finger tracing the words Fu fatto Papa Pio IV, the inscription indicating that Pius IV had just been elected. (This would have been Christmas Day, 1559.) Sometimes, he goes on, a person will just write his name. His finger directs my gaze: “Like this — Alessandro.” The restorers nearby laugh and put up their hands as if to say, “It wasn’t us!”

The frescoes in three of these rooms in the Apostolic Palace, including “The School of Athens” and “The Deliverance of Saint Peter”, have been restored to luminous condition and are fully open to the public.

These are the largest and best-known works of the Renaissance master Raphael Santi. He did not complete the fourth room, the Hall of Constantine. On April 6 1520 — Good Friday — as the painting was in its early stages, Raphael succumbed to a sudden fever.

In his Lives of the Artists, the chronicler Giorgio Vasari, who can be unreliable, attributed the illness to the activities of a single night: Raphael had been diverting himself, in Vasari’s words, “beyond measure with the pleasures of love”.

At the time of his death, Raphael had completed plans and drawings for parts of the room. Members of his large and sophisticated studio operation, notably Giulio Romano and Giovan Francesco Penni, took it from there.

“Unfinished” is a word that carries a haunting charge when applied to any work of art. In Raphael’s case, the loss is especially acute. He was young — only 37 — at the time of his death.

Unlike his older and grumpier rival, Michelangelo, Raphael had been a popular figure in Rome. He could wield sharp elbows when it came to competition, but he was also an entrepreneurial diplomat with natural charm who moved with ease at the highest levels of society.

His body was borne by four cardinals in a funeral procession that drew many thousands. To this day, you sometimes find fresh flowers left at his tomb in the Pantheon. (There is talk of opening the tomb to obtain a more clinical determination of cause of death than Vasari provided.)

The restoration of the Hall of Constantine will be nearly finished — and the room will be reopened — this spring, in time for the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death. The restoration work has been supported by a group called the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums.

Reopening the fourth room is one of many events, at the Vatican and elsewhere, to mark the quincentennial.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in Boston, opened an exhibition around Raphael’s warm and intimate portrait of Tommaso Inghirami, the papal librarian, last autumn. The Scuderie del Quirinale, in Rome, will mount a major exhibition that brings in works by Raphael from the Louvre, the Uffizi and elsewhere. An equally ambitious exhibition at the National Gallery, in London in the autumn, will cover the full sweep of Raphael’s career.

At the Vatican, paintings by Raphael and his studio that hang in the Apostolic Palace, and are typically seen only by visiting dignitaries — paintings of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, the patron saints of Rome — will be moved to public display in the Pinacoteca gallery.

There will be attention devoted to Raphael as printmaker and Raphael as architect. In February, the tapestries designed by Raphael for the lower walls of the Sistine Chapel — too delicate for permanent display — will grace the walls again for at least a week, returning the Chapel to the way it looked on St Stephen’s Day in 1519 when they were first hung.

Woven in Brussels from Raphael’s full-scale colour cartoons — each weaver producing no more than 10 square centimetres a day — the tapestries are usually kept suspended on roll-out metal frames in a climate-controlled storage unit, safe from light and insects, under the care of Chiara Pavan and her tapestry-restoration laboratory. (The seven surviving cartoons from which the weavers worked are held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, on loan from the Royal Collection, and will soon be on display in a refurbished gallery.)

“When the tapestries go up, the Sistine Chapel will not look exactly the way it did,” says Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums, who is overseeing much of this activity, “because in 1519, Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ had not been painted yet.”

In April, an international conference will be held at the Vatican to discuss what has been learnt in the course of the most recent restoration. Particular focus will be on two figures — the allegorical Justitia (Justice) and Comitas (Friendship) — that Raphael himself may have had a hand in painting right before the fever took him.

Two years ago, news reports from Rome invited such speculation, but the experts I spoke to at the Vatican Museums more recently were careful not to get ahead of themselves.

Connoisseurship is a delicate calling. And Raphael is complicated. He was not a solitaire, like Michelangelo. He was both an artist of genius and a shrewd entrepreneur who managed a busy workshop of accomplished associates. New and urgent commissions came in continually. Some could not be refused. A curator I know put it this way: if Michelangelo was staging a one-man show, Raphael operated at times more like a film director or a starchitect.

That said, Raphael’s hand is distinctive, and he was also an avid student of technique. Fresco painting uses water-based pigments but there are references to his experimentation with oil.

Ulderico Santamaria, director of the diagnostics laboratory at the Vatican Museums, cannot resist inviting me to run my fingertips across the surface of Justitia, noting the texture, and then for comparison running them across another figure nearby.

I hesitate, but he is insistent. “It is allowed to touch,” he says. Then he follows my fingertips with his own. “This is not the same,” he says of Justitia. “Why is it different? Because this is in oil and the other is not.”

To touch that surface is to feel an instant connection with a moment in time. Raphael Santi, a painter from Urbino eager to make his name in the city where it mattered most, arrived in Rome in 1508. Soon thereafter, he was commissioned by Pope Julius II to decorate one of four rooms in the Apostolic Palace intended to serve as the pontiff’s personal apartments.

Raphael may have been recommended to Julius by Donato Bramante, the papal architect, also from Urbino, who was deeply involved with the initial design and construction of St Peter’s Basilica.

The Raphael Rooms lie directly above what are known as the Borgia Apartments — Julius’s predecessor, Alexander VI, had been a member of the Borgia family — and an element of one-upmanship was perhaps at play. Other artists were also working on the rooms, but Julius eventually put the entire commission in the hands of Raphael and his workshop.

Meanwhile, minutes away, Michelangelo was labouring on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He did not welcome visitors and, by some accounts, disliked Raphael. According to Vasari, when Michelangelo was away in Florence, midway through the painting, Bramante let Raphael into the Sistine Chapel to have a look. Raphael was known for adapting style and method, and he was influenced by what he saw.

The Hall of Constantine, the fourth and last of the Raphael Rooms in the Vatican to undergo restoration, is sealed off from visitors by a barrier that runs from the marble floor to the frescoed ceiling.

Fabio Piacentini, the Vatican restorer who is directing this final stage, enters a code on the keypad, hands me a hard hat and leads the way inside. The dense crowd of tourists and the ambient hubbub are left behind. Within, the atmosphere is tranquil.

Scaffolding divides the room into six levels connected by staircases and walkways. Snaking up and around the metal framework are vacuum hoses to remove dust. Indirect lighting brings the frescoed walls out of the shadows — a pontiff here; a battle there; landscapes; cityscapes; allegorical figures; apparitions; grotesques; putti. Men and women in white lab coats, papal insignia stitched on the pocket, concentrate on their tasks, looking up briefly to greet us.

At floor level, where a frieze of monochrome historical scenes winds around the room, Piacentini and his colleague, Francesca Persegati, who heads the conservation laboratory for paintings, point out graffiti that was etched into the plaster over the centuries — by casual visitors and expressive clerics — before protective measures were taken.

Brushes between fingers, restorers steady their hands on maulsticks — rods with padded tips that can rest safely on the wall — as they mitigate the damage.

“Sometimes the graffiti will mention an event that has just happened,” Piacentini says, his finger tracing the words Fu fatto Papa Pio IV, the inscription indicating that Pius IV had just been elected. (This would have been Christmas Day, 1559.) Sometimes, he goes on, a person will just write his name. His finger directs my gaze: “Like this — Alessandro.” The restorers nearby laugh and put up their hands as if to say, “It wasn’t us!”

‘Donation of Rome’, Hall of Constantine. A supposed imperial decree — the Donation of Constantine, now known to be a medieval forgery — was long cited to justify Church authority in temporal matters © Alessandro Furchino Capria

The frescoes in three of these rooms in the Apostolic Palace, including “The School of Athens” and “The Deliverance of Saint Peter”, have been restored to luminous condition and are fully open to the public.

These are the largest and best-known works of the Renaissance master Raphael Santi. He did not complete the fourth room, the Hall of Constantine. On April 6 1520 — Good Friday — as the painting was in its early stages, Raphael succumbed to a sudden fever.

In his Lives of the Artists, the chronicler Giorgio Vasari, who can be unreliable, attributed the illness to the activities of a single night: Raphael had been diverting himself, in Vasari’s words, “beyond measure with the pleasures of love”.

At the time of his death, Raphael had completed plans and drawings for parts of the room. Members of his large and sophisticated studio operation, notably Giulio Romano and Giovan Francesco Penni, took it from there.

“Unfinished” is a word that carries a haunting charge when applied to any work of art. In Raphael’s case, the loss is especially acute. He was young — only 37 — at the time of his death.

Unlike his older and grumpier rival, Michelangelo, Raphael had been a popular figure in Rome. He could wield sharp elbows when it came to competition, but he was also an entrepreneurial diplomat with natural charm who moved with ease at the highest levels of society.

His body was borne by four cardinals in a funeral procession that drew many thousands. To this day, you sometimes find fresh flowers left at his tomb in the Pantheon. (There is talk of opening the tomb to obtain a more clinical determination of cause of death than Vasari provided.)

‘Justitia’, Hall of Constantine. Some experts believe that Raphael himself may have had a hand in painting the allegorical ‘Justitia’ (Justice) and ‘Comitas’ (Friendship), right before the fever took him © Alessandro Furchino Capria

The restoration of the Hall of Constantine will be nearly finished — and the room will be reopened — this spring, in time for the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death. The restoration work has been supported by a group called the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museums.

Reopening the fourth room is one of many events, at the Vatican and elsewhere, to mark the quincentennial.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in Boston, opened an exhibition around Raphael’s warm and intimate portrait of Tommaso Inghirami, the papal librarian, last autumn. The Scuderie del Quirinale, in Rome, will mount a major exhibition that brings in works by Raphael from the Louvre, the Uffizi and elsewhere. An equally ambitious exhibition at the National Gallery, in London in the autumn, will cover the full sweep of Raphael’s career.

At the Vatican, paintings by Raphael and his studio that hang in the Apostolic Palace, and are typically seen only by visiting dignitaries — paintings of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, the patron saints of Rome — will be moved to public display in the Pinacoteca gallery.

There will be attention devoted to Raphael as printmaker and Raphael as architect. In February, the tapestries designed by Raphael for the lower walls of the Sistine Chapel — too delicate for permanent display — will grace the walls again for at least a week, returning the Chapel to the way it looked on St Stephen’s Day in 1519 when they were first hung.

Woven in Brussels from Raphael’s full-scale colour cartoons — each weaver producing no more than 10 square centimetres a day — the tapestries are usually kept suspended on roll-out metal frames in a climate-controlled storage unit, safe from light and insects, under the care of Chiara Pavan and her tapestry-restoration laboratory. (The seven surviving cartoons from which the weavers worked are held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, on loan from the Royal Collection, and will soon be on display in a refurbished gallery.)

“When the tapestries go up, the Sistine Chapel will not look exactly the way it did,” says Barbara Jatta, director of the Vatican Museums, who is overseeing much of this activity, “because in 1519, Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ had not been painted yet.”

Raphael was both an artist of genius and a shrewd entrepreneur. He operated at times more like a film director or a starchitect

In April, an international conference will be held at the Vatican to discuss what has been learnt in the course of the most recent restoration. Particular focus will be on two figures — the allegorical Justitia (Justice) and Comitas (Friendship) — that Raphael himself may have had a hand in painting right before the fever took him.

Two years ago, news reports from Rome invited such speculation, but the experts I spoke to at the Vatican Museums more recently were careful not to get ahead of themselves.

Connoisseurship is a delicate calling. And Raphael is complicated. He was not a solitaire, like Michelangelo. He was both an artist of genius and a shrewd entrepreneur who managed a busy workshop of accomplished associates. New and urgent commissions came in continually. Some could not be refused. A curator I know put it this way: if Michelangelo was staging a one-man show, Raphael operated at times more like a film director or a starchitect.

That said, Raphael’s hand is distinctive, and he was also an avid student of technique. Fresco painting uses water-based pigments but there are references to his experimentation with oil.

Ulderico Santamaria, director of the diagnostics laboratory at the Vatican Museums, cannot resist inviting me to run my fingertips across the surface of Justitia, noting the texture, and then for comparison running them across another figure nearby.

I hesitate, but he is insistent. “It is allowed to touch,” he says. Then he follows my fingertips with his own. “This is not the same,” he says of Justitia. “Why is it different? Because this is in oil and the other is not.”

To touch that surface is to feel an instant connection with a moment in time. Raphael Santi, a painter from Urbino eager to make his name in the city where it mattered most, arrived in Rome in 1508. Soon thereafter, he was commissioned by Pope Julius II to decorate one of four rooms in the Apostolic Palace intended to serve as the pontiff’s personal apartments.

Raphael may have been recommended to Julius by Donato Bramante, the papal architect, also from Urbino, who was deeply involved with the initial design and construction of St Peter’s Basilica.

The Raphael Rooms lie directly above what are known as the Borgia Apartments — Julius’s predecessor, Alexander VI, had been a member of the Borgia family — and an element of one-upmanship was perhaps at play. Other artists were also working on the rooms, but Julius eventually put the entire commission in the hands of Raphael and his workshop.

Meanwhile, minutes away, Michelangelo was labouring on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He did not welcome visitors and, by some accounts, disliked Raphael. According to Vasari, when Michelangelo was away in Florence, midway through the painting, Bramante let Raphael into the Sistine Chapel to have a look. Raphael was known for adapting style and method, and he was influenced by what he saw.

Fabio Piacentini, restorer © Alessandro Furchino Capria

Paolo Violini, restorer © Alessandro Furchino Capria

Restoration of the Raphael Rooms began in the 1980s — the first restoration since the 19th century, when tools and standards were very different. The Vatican restorer Paolo Violini took responsibility for two of the rooms. He brings me to a roped-off corner of the Room of the Segnatura and offers a quick tutorial.

Before coming to Rome, he explains, Raphael had had little experience with frescoes, and as a result you can see his method evolving rapidly.

“The first part of the fresco is painted with a very complicated technique,” Violini says. “Raphael had a cartoon, and to transfer the drawing to the wall he made hundreds of holes to follow the path of the lines, then dusted the holes with charcoal. After that, he used a stylus to connect the dots and draw other lines or incisions in the wet plaster. But as he becomes more confident, he works faster, more fluidly, and he stops using the stylus — and we can see this change as we move in time from one side of the room to the other.”

Violini pauses to point out examples on the walls, which he then illustrates with close-up photographs on a tablet. “His manner of painting also changes,” he continues. “At first, he builds up flesh colours in layers on a base of translucent greenish tint, in the traditional Umbrian way.

“But by the end of the room, the flesh is more liquid and unified, and weightier. Some of his figures are also becoming bigger, brighter, more monumental: he has now seen Michelangelo. And then, in the next room, the Stanza di Eliodoro, after he comes to know the Venetian painters, some of whom are in Rome — or he went to Venice, maybe — he plays more than ever with light and colour.”

We move into the Room of Heliodorus, Violini calling attention to certain details in the frescoes: the way the light from a painted candle seems to be caught in the hair and clothes and jewellery of the painted figures it illuminates; the way an actual window in the room is captured in a trompe l’oeil reflection on the shield of a soldier; the way a delicate blue glaze gives clean-shaven men the appearance of having five o’clock shadows.

“The Deliverance of Saint Peter”, depicting a scene from the Acts of the Apostles, occupies a space above a window on the north wall of this room: glimpsed through a grid of painted black bars, an angel frees Peter from prison while guards around him slumber.

A previous restoration had cleaned the explosion of light that defines the painting but left the angel at the centre untouched, looking as if it were backlit. Now the angel itself glows, almost translucent. “They didn’t understand that the angel is not in front of the light — the angel is the light,” Violini says. “Cleaning this was very emotional for me.”

A restoration on this scale involves many types of investigation. To begin with, there is textual research: a variety of sources from the time — official documents, invoices, notebooks, personal letters, biographical accounts — can shed light on the paintings. Sketches and cartoons are of course invaluable.

Infrared and ultraviolet analysis offer clues about both the painted surface and what lies beneath it. The material condition of the walls and ceilings must be checked, inch by inch, for cracks and deterioration.

One result of all this close study is a detailed map of the frescoes indicating the order in which each giornata — a day’s work in wet plaster — was painted.

In the Room of the Segnatura, Violini points out an area on the ceiling and says: “That is what Raphael painted on the first day in this room, which also was the first room he painted.”

Then he indicates the seated figure of the philosopher Heraclitus in “The School of Athens”, whose contorted pose calls to mind Michelangelo’s prophets and sibyls in the Sistine Chapel — and whose features are unmistakably those of Michelangelo himself. “And we know that he added this figure late, two years after he finished the rest of the painting,” Violini says.

Dust, soot, wax, water, salt, pollution — the contamination builds up over time, darkening the paint and working its way into the porous plaster. The colours in these rooms were originally vivid, not veiled in the dullish-brown fog I remember from decades ago. And they are vivid once again.

At its most basic, the cleaning of frescoes made on wet plaster — the greater part of the painted surface — involves the application of Japanese paper brushed with ammonium bicarbonate and water, and then the gentle removal of the paper from the surface.

But the restorers have to be careful: any portions of a fresco painted a secco — when the underlying plaster and paint was already dry, making it easier to add detail — have not hardened into structural permanence. They must be treated differently, because a secco painting is soluble in water.

The grid of black metal bars in “The Deliverance of Saint Peter” is entirely a secco, meaning that each of the frescoed squares showing what happens “behind” the grid had to be cleaned without touching the grid itself. (“It took three months,” Violini recalls.)

In areas where there is actual damage to the wall, the restorers do not attempt to reconstruct what is missing, a course of action they might have pursued in another age. Any restorative work must find a way to “declare itself”, as Vatican curator Guido Cornini explains, so that restorers and scholars in the future will be clear about interventions in the past.

The solution in this case: a stippling technique — puntinato — that tints the damaged area in a way that is honest about the intervention but reduces the eye’s perception of damage. Thus, the restorers mitigating the graffiti in the Hall of Constantine will ensure that the words can still be read — they are historical artefacts in their own right — but the room at a glance won’t seem to be covered in chicken scratches.

The Hall of Constantine is the largest of the Raphael Rooms and the most overtly political in its message. The frescoes depict the life of the Roman emperor who converted to Christianity and effectively made it the state religion.

A supposed imperial decree — the Donation of Constantine, now known to be a medieval forgery — was long cited to justify Church authority in temporal matters, including sovereignty over lands in central Italy.

That power was being tested in the early 16th century. Julius II was often at war, personally leading troops into battle. Rome itself would be sacked by German forces in 1527, and you can still see the damage done by the pikes of the Landsknechte to some of the frescoes in the Raphael Rooms.

Designed for certain official meetings and state occasions, the Hall of Constantine was meant as a reminder of the Church’s claims about where its temporal power came from.

The frescoes depict Constantine’s baptism, his vision of the cross, his victory over the emperor Maxentius, and the Donation. The Battle of Milvian Bridge takes up most of the south wall — a sprawling tableau that was rendered in preliminary drawings by Raphael but painted after his death by Giulio Romano.

As we stand before it, Guido Cornini explains that Raphael had also been an archaeologist and was meticulous about historical details — the armour, the weapons, the buildings, the countryside. Down by our feet, emperor Maxentius, on horseback, was about to be swallowed by the Tiber river.

To either side of this painting is where the allegories of Justitia and Comitas can be found. Were they painted in part by Raphael’s own hand? “The sources, some of them, say that Raphael was able to finish up not only drawings for the room,” Cornini explains, “but also some of the painted figures, and that he was experimenting in oil.

“Other sources say that his pupils were responsible for preparing these figures while working strictly from Raphael’s drawings. Raphael was certainly in health right up to the very last minute. And there’s technical evidence that makes these figures distinctive: they are the only ones that are made in oil rather than in fresco, and they were respected as such.

“That is, the painters who made the other frescoes kept the figures done in oil as they were, coming right up to the edge. For now, the only thing to do is to work on the evidence, all of us together” — the art historians, the curators, the restorers, the technicians. “We’ll present our conclusions at the symposium.”

When walking in Rome, a favourite moment comes when moving at night between the energetic clamour of the Campo de’ Fiori and the subdued elegance of the Piazza Farnese, a short connecting street away. The transition between the Sistine Chapel and, up a staircase or two, the Raphael Rooms offers a version of that same contrast. Michelangelo’s compositions are muscular, fleshy, sometimes impossibly kinetic. Raphael’s are calmer, softer, suffused with intelligence.

Barbara Jatta speaks of Raphael’s “beauty and harmony”, and she is right. But I think also of another word. I think of grace, in all its meanings.

JPMorgan’s stellar profits show banks can make money despite tougher rules

Eager to cover JPMorgan results for the first time in 2011, I bounced out of bed in an unfamiliar Manhattan apartment, gashed my head on a protruding book shelf and took a taxi to hospital. I listened to Jamie Dimon’s conference call from the emergency room.

I survived — and so has Mr Dimon. The JPMorgan boss has now spent 14 years at the helm of what has become the largest US bank by assets; at its latest results this week he broke records, reporting $36bn of annual profits and a 19 per cent return on tangible common equity that marked the best since 2007.

JPMorgan’s performance was so impressive that it presents headaches for the rest of the industry — and potentially for Mr Dimon himself.

Returns this high were no longer supposed to be possible. After the 2008 crisis, banks were forced to hold more equity, increasing their cushion against losses and depressing returns. 

As a result, many banks’ returns on equity languish in the single digits, below their cost of capital. Shareholders have responded by withdrawing their funds. For most of the industry, the last decade has been a miserable quest for a viable business model. Zombie banks prowl the earth.

Banks in Europe are in an especially abject state. JPMorgan’s market capitalisation of $430bn is higher than the combined value of Barclays, Société Générale, Standard Chartered, UniCredit, Credit Suisse, UBS, BBVA, Royal Bank of Scotland, Crédit Agricole, ING and Lloyds.

JPMorgan’s surging share price has seen the bank enter the top-10 most valuable companies in the world, vying with global tech giants — ahead of Intel and Samsung, and closing in on China’s Tencent. 

The comparative strength of the US economy is helpful, but it cannot be the only explanation. After all, Mr Dimon is also embarrassing Wall Street rival Goldman Sachs, whose once stellar profits have dimmed and whose new gambits, such as consumer banking, are yet to pay off. 

You can point to JPMorgan’s boost from consolidation. Mr Dimon swooped on Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual in 2008. But he was only in a position to strike those deals because he had protected his own balance sheet. And if crisis-era acquisitions were all that mattered then Barclays, which picked up the core of Lehman Brothers, and Bank of America, which bought Merrill Lynch and Countrywide, would be worldbeaters too.

For his envious rivals around the world, there are no perfect excuses. JPMorgan’s triumph gives the lie to the idea that it is impossible to make serious profits under tougher industry rules. 

But that also creates a problem for Mr Dimon himself. For years he has railed against regulations, warning of dire consequences and complaining that European banks have unfair advantages from “anti-American” rules. That argument looks increasingly futile.

His broader complaint against the capital surcharges imposed on the biggest banks — “my biggest issue,” he said in the regulatory section of his last shareholder letter — is also undermined. 

Even before the latest stellar quarter, Mr Dimon seemed to recognise he was on precarious ground: “Outperformance is not ordained from above and may not always be the case,” he wrote last year. True enough, but until JPMorgan’s star fades, his pleas for leniency will fall on deaf ears.