Raphael Cartoons

The Raphael Cartoons are seven large modello paintings on paper, designs for tapestries, surviving from a set of ten cartoons, by the High Renaissance painter Raphael in 1515–1516. They were sent from Rome to the weavers in Brussels, who cut them into wide strips and had them beside their looms. The set of tapestries was commissioned by Pope Leo X for the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican Palace in Rome, showing scenes from the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles. They are still hung on special occasions below the frescoes of the Life of Moses and the Life of Christ commissioned by Pope Sixtus IV. The cartoons belong to the British Royal Collection but have been on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London since 1865.

The tapestries rivalled Michelangelo's ceiling as the most famous and influential designs of the Renaissance, and were well known to all artists of the Renaissance and Baroque through reproduction in the form of prints. Admiration of them reached its highest pitch in the 18th and 19th centuries; they were described as "the Parthenon sculptures of modern art".