The basilica Constantine had raised over the tomb of Peter had stood for nearly twelve hundred years and was structurally failing. Julius II decided not to repair it but to replace it, and in April 1506 he laid the foundation stone of a new church to Bramante's design, accepting the demolition of the most venerable building in Western Christendom. The project outlasted him by more than a century and passed through Raphael, Michelangelo and Bernini, and paying for it drove the indulgence campaigns of the following decades, including the one that Martin Luther attacked in 1517.
His commissions in the Vatican are the reason his face is familiar. He set Michelangelo, a sculptor who protested that he was not a painter, to fresco the ceiling of his uncle's chapel between 1508 and 1512, and put Raphael to work on the papal apartments at the same time, where the School of Athens and the Disputation of the Sacrament were painted a few rooms away. He also commissioned his own tomb, a project that tormented Michelangelo for forty years and produced the Moses.
A quieter document of his reign reached further than any of them. In 1503 he issued a dispensation permitting Henry, prince of Wales, to marry Catherine of Aragon, the widow of his elder brother Arthur, setting aside the prohibition in Leviticus against marrying a brother's wife. Twenty-six years later Henry VIII argued that no pope had power to dispense from divine law, that his marriage had therefore never been valid, and that the papacy could not undo what it should never have granted. Clement VII refused to annul it, and the Church of England separated from Rome.