The exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum will display four of the ten tapestries designed by Raphael for the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. These are the original tapestries from the only series designed by Raphael of which examples survive, and are comparable with Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling as masterpieces of High Renaissance art. Exhibition open 8 September – 17 October 2010.
Raphael, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes Photo © Vatican Museums
The tapestries are displayed alongside the full-size designs for them – the famous Raphael Cartoons, which have been on display in the V&A since 1865. This is the first time that the designs and tapestries have been displayed together – something Raphael himself never witnessed. The tapestries have not been shown before in the UK.
The tapestries, of the Acts of St Peter and St Paul, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, Christ’s Charge to Peter, The Healing of the Lame Man, and The Sacrifice at Lystra, were made for the Sistine Chapel almost 500 years ago. Raphael was commissioned by Pope Leo X to design these great tapestries, which were woven in Brussels, Europe’s leading centre for tapestry-weaving, and then sent to Rome for display. As the cartoons remained in Brussels, Raphael himself never saw the cartoons beside the tapestries woven from them. Several European monarchs, including Henry VIII, later commissioned copies of the tapestries which were made from the cartoons in Brussels. In 1623 Charles I, while Prince of Wales, had the Cartoons brought to England to have his own set woven in the Mortlake tapestry workshops, and they have remained in England ever since.
The exhibition has been made possible by a collaboration between the V&A and the Vatican Museums and is generously supported by Michael and Dorothy Hintze and the Hintze Family Charitable Foundation, with further support from the Patrons of the Arts in the Vatican Museum.
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