On entering the Raphael Court, I immediately sensed that I was stepping into a special venue at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London. The vast, dimly lit room displays the seven surviving large-scale cartoons Raphael created to produce tapestries Pope Leo X commissioned to rival Michelangelo’s magnificent ceiling at the Sistine Chapel. The handsome court was redesigned to conspire more intimately with the Renaissance artist’s preparatory drawings, creating a spectacular experience that was an unexpected highlight of my European museum explorations in September.

Before my trip, I learned about the cartoons and tapestries from Will Durant’s book The Renaissance, and I got a sense of their significance. Leo X recruited Raphael, then the most celebrated artist in Europe, to design 10 tapestries featuring key episodes from the lives of St. Peter and St. Paul, the founders of the Christian Church. The tapestries were intended to be displayed in the papal chapel during ceremonial occasions.

Only while visiting the V&A did I discover that the cartoons were housed there. I was eager to see them, having in the back of my mind Durant’s description: “They are among the most remarkable drawings ever made. Raphael lavished here all his knowledge of composition, anatomy, and dramatic effect….” (p. 506)

Each drawing consists of some 200 paper pages pasted together to dimensions from nearly 10 feet high to as wide as 16 feet. They are painted and framed, appearing as artworks in themselves and exhibited along the court’s two longest walls. The surviving cartoons are:

These drawings feature virtually all-male subjects, many animated in expressions, gestures and movements and who wear garments of various colors, the latter a signature innovation of Raphael’s painting technique. As I slowly walked through the dark, quiet court with my Sony and iPhone cameras, my photographer's eye was drawn to Christ's Charge to Peter. Here, Raphael places Christ, wearing a white robe to symbolize his resurrection, alongside a herd of sheep to the far left, while his disciples fill the central scene wearing varying shades of red, yellow, green and blue costumes.

The Miraculous Draught of Fishes is a similarly asymmetrical composition wherein Christ again is farthest left sitting in a small boat as he blesses Simon (later renamed Peter), who kneels before him in prayer. St. Andrew stands with his arms spread wide, resembling the startled St. James in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. In the neighboring boat, Apostles James and John bend over to pull a fish net from the lake while their father Zebedee navigates with a paddle.

The Raphael Court reopened in 2021 after extensive renovations in which the re-designers took cues from the cartoons. They found their inspiration to repaint the walls from light to dark in the blues, grays and greens of the background landscapes. Also, the rails on the platform in The Death of Ananias, another cartoon full of animated subjects and diverse colors, provided the design for eight wooden benches that line the center of the court. Each bench is sleekly curved, features a backrest at one end, and their dark-blue padding matches the walls.

“That use of really simply detailed timber joinery became an inspiration for the treatment of the framework of these benches,” said Matt Somerville, an associate for Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, the firm that renovated the Raphael Court.

“They are among the most remarkable drawings ever made.”

— Will Durant

I sat on the benches to contemplate each cartoon and stood beside or behind them to guide me to the best vantage points to capture glare-free images of the glass-covered artworks. I only partially succeeded, as my photos here attest, despite a lighting system that is aligned to minimize such reflections.

Other fixtures create pools of light on the black-and-white mosaic tiled floor and highlight the court’s white archways and molded ceiling. Architecture, another signature of Raphael’s grand scale paintings, figures prominently in the cartoons, from strong columns to stately columns, as embodied in Paul Preaching at Athens.

With his assistants, Raphael designed and painted the cartoons probably from about June 1515 to December 1516. Once completed, the drawings were sent to Pieter van Aelst, a Brussels-based weaver whose workshop produced the tapestries. Seven tapestries were displayed on the Sistine walls in December 1519, before Raphael’s death the following April, and the remaining three in December 1521, after Leo X had died earlier that month.

“With a linear perspective hardly ever seen in tapestries before, Raphael's drawings started a revolution in tapestry design, blurring the boundary between painted works and woven textiles,” reads a sign in the Raphael Court.

During the 1500s, Raphael’s tapestries served essentially as templates for various cartoons, including for Francis I of France around 1533 and Henry VIII of England about 1542, both of which were destroyed. During the early 17th century, the seven surviving cartoons reappeared in Genoa. Prince Charles, the future Charles I, bought the cartoons and brought them to England in 1623. The lone tapestry exhibited at Raphael Court, based on his The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, was created in 1636-37 at the Mortlake factory near London that was built by Charles’ father, James I.

**The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (Tapestry)**

Near the close of the 17th century, the cartoons were framed as paintings, and Queen Victoria in 1865 lent them to the Victoria and Albert Museum (then called South Kensington Museum), where they have since remained on loan from the Royal Collection Trust. Raphael’s 10 tapestries are permanently on display at the Vatican Museums.

“With a linear perspective hardly ever seen in tapestries before, Raphael’s drawings started a revolution in tapestry design.”

After returning from Europe, I was roused to learn more about the story of the cartoons and tapestries. I also encountered several of Raphael's paintings in London and Paris and unexpectedly developed a newfound appreciation for his art. I bought the book Raphael: From Urbino to Rome and read that he habitually created preliminary sketches for his paintings, and that

“His interest lay…in perfecting his designs in advance so that they could be reproduced in paint with little adjustment. This explains why his cartoons often have the appearance of works of art in their own right rather than everyday workshop patterns, and also why so many of them survive.” (p. 142)

I was also curious to know what made the court makeover so impressive. I discovered that the re-designers took a fundamentally integrative approach. They utilized the cartoons to determine the appropriate colors, furnishings, and other modifications needed to transform the room's tone and enhance the gallery-goers’ experience.

My visit to the V&A reinforced the significance of the environment we surround ourselves in. Whether in a home, restaurant or museum, enhanced architecture, decor and ambiance can profoundly enrich human experiences. At Raphael Court, I was certainly more energized to engage more passionately with some of “the most remarkable drawings ever made.”

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