• Art.The secrets of the Sistine Chapel

After 37 years, those who lived Rafael , and for only a week, the Sistine Chapel can be seen again as the artist of Urbino had dreamed it: with the ten wonderful tapestries based on his paintings that will rival Michelangelo's frescoes .

On the occasion of the celebrations for the fifth centenary of the death of Rafael Sanzio (Urbino 1483-Roma 1520), the Vatican Museums exhibit in the Sistine Chapel, from this Monday and for only a week, the tapestries with the Acts of the Apostles San Pablo and San Pedro .

The ten tapestries are exhibited in the Vatican Museums in Raphael's room and were only shown in the Sistine 37 years ago to celebrate the 500 years of the painter's birth and four of them for only one day in 2010, before they were ceded to an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London .

The Sistine Chapel as it was really conceived

Now they are shown again in the place for which they were conceived on "a unique occasion" in which "we can admire so much beauty, that of the divine Raphael, the great Michelangelo and the fourcentists Botticelli , Perugino and Pinturicchio ... ", the director of the Vatican Museums, Barbara Jatta , told Efe.

With the exposition of the tapestries, Jatta explains that the "evangelical message", "the visual catechesis" that represents the Sistine Chapel and "how exactly the Renaissance popes conceived it" are completed. Not even Rafael could see the Sistine with its ten tapestries, since he died four months after the first seven were exposed.

"An incredible emotion", describes Efe Alessandra Rodolfo - head of the tapestry department of the Vatican Museums - to see these works hanging in the place for which they were conceived with their original hooks.

The disassembly and assembly of the spectacular ten tapestries, five meters long and three meters wide, is a delicate operation that was carried out for thirteen hours on Sunday and that employed more than a hundred people.

A higher cost than Michelangelo's frescoes

After the popes Sixtus IV (1471-1484) and Julius II commissioned to decorate the walls and vault of the Sistine to Michelangelo, Leo X (1513-1521) wanted to give his contribution to the pontifical chapel and called the young Raphael to to make some cards with the stories of the apostles to later make a series of tapestries intended to cover the bottom of the walls, which are painted with false curtains.

Between 1515 and 1516 Rafael conceived a great monumental cycle with the stories of the life of Saint Peter and Saint Paul who were sent to Brussels for the realization of tapestries in the famous workshop of the weaver Pieter van Aelst , and the ten works reached the Vatican between 1519 and 1521.

The tapestries made with golden silk threads cost much more, up to five times, they count, than Miguel Angel was finally paid to decorate the entire Sistine.

In addition to the quality of the fabrics, it has been emphasized that Rafael devised a series of scenes such as The Miraculous Fishing , The Handing Over of the Keys , Elima's Punishment, Listra's Sacrifice , or The Paralytic's Cure , little used in the imaginary religious pictorial.

The first seven were presented on December 26, 1619 during the Mass of St. Stephen and the master of ceremonies, Paride de Grassim , in his diaries describes the "stupor and admiration" of those present for "the luxury of refined manufacturing and for the rich iconographic repertoire produced by Rafael's genius. "

Rafael died on April 6, 1520 and the tapestries were only re-exhibited rarely since it was customary to decorate the Papal Chapel only for large ceremonies. The subsequent papal decisions and, it is said that by the jealousy of Michelangelo who did not want the tapestries to rival the frescoes in the vault he painted, gradually relegated the tapestries even to the underground of the Vatican.

On this second occasion in recent history in which the ten tapestries in the Sistine chapel will be exposed again, the question of in which order they were placed is raised again, since there is no documentation.

This week, the lucky visitors of the Sistine Chapel will not only look up to contemplate the vault, the upper walls and the Last Judgment, but will have Rafael's tapestries at an altitude like no other.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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