Raphael's Sistine Chapel tapestries

Raphael: Cartoons and Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel, at V&A, Seven magazine review

The reuniting of Raphael's Sistine Chapel tapestries and their original designs is little short of a miracle . Rating * * * *

By Michael Prodger 
Published: 5:18PM BST 17 Sep 2010

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For Catholics, the visit of Benedict XVI to these shores is a blessing but there is a tangible reason for those of us outside his flock to be grateful too. The Pope has facilitated the loan of four of the Vatican's legendary Acts of the Apostles tapestries and until October 17 they will hang in the Victoria and Albert Museum alongside the Raphael Cartoons, the seven full-sized designs from which the tapestries were woven.

Pieter van Aelst, that both tapestries and designs have been seen together.

It is a sight neither Raphael nor Leo X, the Medici Pope who commissioned them, ever saw. The paper cartoons are far too delicate to travel and, when it comes to loans, the Vatican is not an institution known for its charity, so it is unlikely that this opportunity will occur again.

Tapestries now occupy a lowly rung on the art-appreciation ladder but they used to be at the very top. Because the weaving required teams of highly skilled craftsmen working with luxurious materials, they were both more desirable and more costly than almost all paintings. But as the colours of their wools, silks and gilt-metal-wrapped threads have faded over the centuries, so their reputation has faded, too.

The very existence of the Vatican tapestries is, however, an indication of just whatde luxe items they were: Raphael was paid 1,000 ducats for his designs but each individual tapestry cost 1,500 ducats to weave.

Leo X commissioned the tapestries for a very specific place and purpose. Between them, Sixtus IV and Julius II, his two predecessors on the papal throne, had enlarged and beautified the Sistine Chapel so that it was the artistic centre of the Christian world as well as 'the first chapel of Christendom'. Its ceiling and walls had been decorated by Botticelli, Perugino, Ghirlandaio and, literally above all, Michelangelo.

When Leo became Pope he wanted to leave his mark on this jewel box too. So in 1515 he ignored Michelangelo, Julius II's favourite, and turned instead to Raphael. He commissioned 10 designs from him for tapestries showing the acts of St Peter and St Paul – the saints on whom the papacy was built – to hang around the chapel's lower walls.

There was perhaps more than a touch of mischief in the Pope choosing the suave younger artist and setting him to work in the same space in direct competition with the older, craggier residing genius. The rivalry between Raphael and Michelangelo and the contrast between their styles and personalities became one of the great set pieces of Renaissance art.

The challenge spurred a new monumentality and sense of drama in Raphael. He drew the designs himself – there are six of his preparatory drawings on show at the V&A too – before he and his assistants scaled them up into the huge 3m x 4m cartoons. These were made by pasting together up to 200 sheets of paper, and once complete they were then cut into metre-wide strips and sent to Flanders for the weavers to copy.

The cartoons came to these shores in 1623 when the future Charles I bought them for the Royal Tapestry Manufactory at Mortlake, but it wasn't until the 1690s that the strips were reassembled and the designs could be appreciated as works of art in their own right.

They are, perhaps, a rather overlooked national treasure these days but in 1725 Jonathan Richardson called them 'the best history pictures that are anywhere now in being' and John Wilkes, the political radical, declaimed in 1777 that they were 'the pride of our island'.

The four tapestries at the V&A represent The Miraculous Draught of Fishes,Christ's Charge to Peter, The Healing of the Lame Man and The Sacrifice at Lystra. All show Raphael's designs in reverse because the weavers worked from the back of the hangings. The colours have not all aged well. Five hundred years has seen the luminescence dull and the gilt-thread tarnish so that The Healing of the Lame Man, for example, has been reduced to a palette of just red, blue and beige.

As a result some of the weavers' virtuosity has been lost too. But not all: there is a clump of foliage in the corner of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes that is not there in Raphael's design – it is a delightful piece of pure show-offery. The weavers also added a spattering of gold stars to Jesus' robe in Christ's Charge to Peter to give a sparkle they clearly thought was missing, and they felt at liberty to change some of Raphael's colours, too.

More than enough of the tapestries' original majesty does remain, however, that to imagine them in the 16th-century Sistine Chapel is an easy feat – wrapping the space at eye level, the candlelight picking out the gold in the wefts, the velvety colours glowing, and the material softly rippling.

For the opportunity to see this assembly of such history-laden objects, visitors of whatever faith – or none – should offer up a silent prayer to Pope Benedict.

This review also appears in Seven magazine, free with The Sunday Telegraph