Kensington vs. The Vatican - The Raphael Tapestries at the V&A

What was your reaction to the state visit of Pope Benedict XVI? Elation? Apathy? Damascene conversion to Catholicism? Did you bask in the sunshine and reflected glory of the pontiff in Hyde Park? Or did you line up behind Peter Tatchell waving the banner for atheism?

Whatever your personal preferences, the visit of Pope Benedict has undoubtedly done good things for the Autumn arts calendar. For the Pope came from the South bearing gifts.

To coincide with the papal visit, the Vatican has loaned four of its Raphael tapestries to the Victoria and Albert Museum.  Britain has been home to Raphael’s original cartoons since Charles I, then Prince of Wales, purchased them in 1623 and the V&A exhibition has reunited tapestries and cartoons for the first time in almost 500 years.  

The tapestries are unbelievably beautiful. What artistry, what detail, what patience! Each hangs five metres high and nearly six wide, woven in wool, silk and gilt-metal wrapped thread with sometimes as many as twenty four wefts per centimetre. Designed to hang in the Sistine Chapel the ten tapestries depict scenes from Christ’s ministry and the lives of Peter and Paul.

Better than the biblical scenes proper are the exquisite embroidered borders. Those running along the base of each tapestry are imagined as bronze reliefs illustrating scenes from the lives of the Medici popes as if they were the epic deeds of the heroes of Troy.

The vertical borders contain sexier and more lugubrious figures. An allegorical portrait of the Four Seasons has Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter done up like burlesque dancers at a particularly racy harvest festival.  Another border depicts the three theological virtues Faith, Hope and Charity looking decorous and chaste in miniature classical temples. Any sense of modesty is scandalously undermined by a pair of buxom, bare-breasted sphinxes holding up the temple of Hope.

The V&A comes out rather well from the exhibition. Beautiful though the Vatican tapestries are they lack the muscular robustness and clarity of the original cartoons. For artworks entering their sixth century, the cartoons are in fantastic nick (there’s been a bit of restoration along the way) and the colours are wonderfully vivid.

These are the most peacock-inclined disciples in Western art. In the Miraculous Draught of the Fishes, Peter wears a tunic in Copacabana lime green, while in the Healing of the Lame Man, Peter (again, who knew the first Pope was such a clotheshorse?) sports cerulean blue and mustard yellow robes. By contrast, the tapestries are muted, washed-out, sun-bleached. The faces of the apostles lose their solemnity and solidity in the transfer from cartoon to tapestry. When the V&A gives the tapestries back at the end of the month they can feel smug that they get to keep the better half of the spoils.

After 500 years, the Raphael cartoons and tapestries stand as testament to the artistic ambition of Pope Leo X. What will Benedict XVI leave on the walls of the Vatican for us to remember him by? If the Popemobile is anything to go by, then papal taste is long due a new Renaissance.