Raphael was commissioned by Leo X to produce tapestries for the lower walls of the Sistine chapel in the Vatican to complete the iconographic scheme started by Michelangelo. The Cartoons were sent to Flanders to be woven in 1516 and the tapestries were hung in the Sistine chapel in 1519. The seven surviving Cartoons of the original ten, including the Miraculous Draught of Fishes and The Charge to Peter, were purchased by Prince Charles (later Charles I) in 1623. They were on public display in Hampton Court Palace from 1838, and have been on loan from the Royal Collection to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London since 1865.
Raphael 's Cartoons were seen by many in an age which valued artistic hierarchies as the greatest work of the greatest master of the Renaissance. They were in the same category therefore as the Friezes of the Parthenon (see MP I:33) by Phidias (see MP I:133), seen as the greatest works of classical times. London, seen as the heart of the greatest Empire, provided a home for both (see Shearman, Raphael's Cartoons, pp. 163-164).
Mrs. Jameson, in 1842, commented:
While all Rome was engaging in ecstasies over the rich and dearly paid tapestries, which taken altogether, were not then, and are still less now, worth one of the cartoons, these precious out-pourings of the artist's own mind and hand were lying in the warehouse of the manufacturer in Arras, neglected and forgotten. ( Jameson, Hand-book to the Public Galleries of Art in and near London, p. 385)