The Raphael Cartoons
Raphael (1483 to 1520) · 1515 to 1516
Seven enormous painted designs by Raphael fill a single high gallery, each showing a scene from the lives of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. They were made in 1515 and 1516 as full-size patterns for tapestries ordered by Pope Leo the Tenth to hang in the Sistine Chapel beneath Michelangelo's ceiling. In the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, Christ sits in a small boat while Peter kneels before him and the nets strain with fish. In Christ's Charge to Peter he hands over the keys of the kingdom, and in the Death of Ananias a man collapses in the crowd. These are among the greatest works of the High Renaissance anywhere outside Italy.
The cartoons were painted quickly in glue-based colours on sheets of paper glued together, then cut into strips for the weavers in Brussels to follow. Because the tapestries were woven from behind, every composition is reversed: Christ blesses with his left hand. Look at the figures, which are calm, monumental and clearly separated, built to be read from across a chapel. Raphael and his assistants used the poses of ancient sculpture and the gestures of actors, and the landscapes, boats and birds are painted with a naturalness that repays a long look. Recent conservation and new lighting have brought out colours that had gone dull.
The strips stayed in Brussels for a century, being reused to weave copies for kings, until Charles the First, then Prince of Wales, bought them in 1623 for the Mortlake tapestry works. They were reassembled and displayed at Hampton Court, and in 1865 Queen Victoria lent them to the new museum in memory of Prince Albert, where they have hung ever since. They remain the property of the Crown. Three of the original ten designs are lost, but the tapestries woven from them still survive in the Vatican.
Did You Know? The cartoons were cut into vertical strips about a metre wide so that weavers could work from them, and the joins can still be seen on close inspection.
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