During the Renaissance, the woven decorative fabrics known as tapestries provided powerful ways of telling stories in the absence of the printed word, and of displaying the wealth and status of their owners because only the very rich could afford them.
The best of those works have endured for centuries, including cartoons (large paintings) created by the artist Raphael to serve as designs for tapestries woven to hang in the Sistine Chapel in the early 16th century.
About 100 years after Raphael’s death in 1520 at age 37, the Prince of Wales, who later became the British King Charles I, ordered tapestry makers in Mortlake, England to weave duplicates of Raphael’s Vatican tapestries. Six of these works are the centerpiece of an exhibition titled “Raphael – The Power of Renaissance Images: The Dresden Tapestries and Their Impact,” which will be presented at the Columbus Museum of Art from Friday, July 15 to Sunday, Oct. 30.
The tapestries will be among 50 works that include two drawings by Raphael that were studies for his cartoons; two full-size facsimiles of those cartoons; works by Renaissance and Baroque masters influenced by the tapestries, including Albrecht Durer, Nicolas Poussin, Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt van Rijn; 19th-century works that illustrate the tapestries’ continued impact; and portraits of the powerful individuals involved in production and acquisition of the tapestries, including Charles I and Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, who brought them to Dresden, Germany in the 18th century.
The tapestries stayed in Dresden and were restored in the late 20th and early 21st centuries by the Old Masters Picture Gallery, one of Germany’s great art museums and part of the Dresden State Art Museums. The restored tapestries made their debut at the Dresden museum in 2020. This is the first time they have traveled outside of Europe. They were originally scheduled to come to Columbus in 2020 to mark the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death, but the exhibit was delayed for two years because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“They’ve had a remarkable history, sort of like an Indiana Jones adventure,” said David Stark, chief curator emeritus of the Columbus museum. “Somehow they survived the massive bombing of Dresden in World War II and the era of Communism afterward, when Dresden was in East Germany. One section of the exhibition is dedicated to telling the story of their odyssey over the years.”
Dresden and Columbus have been sister cities since 1992. This is the third time since 1999 that the art museums of the two cities have cooperated in an exhibit.
“Some years ago, the Dresden museum director suggested several possible loans to Columbus, and we decided the tapestries would have the most interest,” Stark said. “Earlier this year, in April, we loaned our painting by Edward Hopper, Morning Sun, to the Dresden museum, where it was the focal point of an exhibition centered around it. We look forward to the continuation of such exchanges in future years.
“Before photography, ways to disseminate images were limited,” Stark continued. “One approach was to replicate works in the same medium, often to scale. A key example is the set of tapestries in our exhibition, woven from the cartoons by Raphael that were used as templates for the Vatican set of tapestries.
“Even though Raphael did not weave any of the tapestries (the weaving was done on looms in strips), they were all based on his cartoons,” Stark said. “In a similar way, Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t actually build the structures attributed to them, but the buildings resulted from their designs.”
The compositions and imagery of the tapestries also were distributed widely across Europe through prints such as etchings and engravings, which could be duplicated in multiples. There are many examples of such prints, (plus drawings), in the exhibition, either faithfully copying Raphael’s compositions or incorporating various figures or passages for entirely different subjects.
The word “cartoon” might bring an animated image of Charlie Brown, Mickey Mouse or Homer Simpson on a newspaper page or the movie or television screen to mind, but in the art of tapestry weaving, it refers to the full-scale paintings transformed by weavers into images on cloth.
Raphael’s cartoons for the Vatican tapestries were acquired by Charles I and have remained in England. Today, they are installed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and are considered “valued national treasures whose art historical importance contributed to discourses about British cultural identity,” according to the catalog accompanying the Columbus exhibition.
The tapestries depict scenes from the lives of Sts. Peter and Paul and were commissioned by Pope Leo X, in part to reinforce the authority of the papacy at a time when he was in conflict with Martin Luther, whom he eventually excommunicated.
The catalog suggests the pope also may have wanted “to surpass the magnificence of Michelangelo’s (Sistine Chapel) ceiling fresco, painted at the behest of his predecessor Pope Julius II.”
Stark said the religious difficulties of the era also show themselves in the tapestries, with the Vatican version depicting the Apostles and others with halos, which are absent in the English tapestries. He also notes that besides the Dresden tapestries, many other sets woven from Raphael’s original cartoons or copies of them were produced during the 16th and 17th centuries, some in Brussels (where the Vatican tapestries were woven), and others at Mortlake.
Besides the Dresden museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other museums are loaning items for the exhibition.
“This will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see masterpieces which have never been in the United States before and are not likely to be here again, at least for a number of years,” Stark said.
“Seeing the scope of these tapestries – their size, beauty, color and technique – will be a moving experience. Viewers will rarely have an opportunity to see such a rich, diverse assemblage of Renaissance art again.”
The exhibition is supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. Tickets are available to museum members now and will be on sale to the general public beginning Friday, July 1. The cost is $25 for adults and $16 for students and senior citizens.
Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday through Sunday and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday. The museum is closed on Mondays. For more information, go to www.columbusmuseum.org.
