A Cura do Coxo

In 1515 Raphael took on a commission unlike a fresco or an altarpiece. Pope Leo X wanted a set of tapestries for the lowest tier of the Sistine Chapel walls, and Raphael had to supply full-scale painted designs, called cartoons, for weavers in Brussels to copy thread by thread. This is one of them, worked in bodycolour on sheets of paper joined together. It shows Saint Peter healing a lame beggar at the door of the Temple, the crowd packed between two rows of spiralling, barley-sugar columns. Those twisting columns were believed in Raphael's day to come from Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. More than a century later Bernini echoed them in the great bronze canopy over the altar of Saint Peter's in Rome.