The wife and I had to pass through the Vatican Museums to get to the Sistine chapel, which lay at the end, and was to be the highlight of the route. But we did not mind making our way through what seemed like an infinite series of rooms, every one of which offered a trove of priceless artwork, and demanded a long, serious viewing, and this alas, in view of the limited time and the big crowd, we could only spare a few minutes of.
Among the rooms were those of Raphael, in which particularly the tapestries were found depicting various scenes from the lives of Peter and Paul. And for these, we made sure to delay a little to see for ourselves why they were considered as among the greatest treasures of the Renaissance.
One of the tapestries was “The Miraculous Draught of Fishes.” This was a rendering of the scene narrated by Luke in his Gospel about Jesus on the Lake of Gennesaret, after preaching from Peter’s boat to the crowds, and telling him, “Put out into deep water and pay out your nets for a catch,” which Peter was pessimistic about but willing to go along with, “Master, we worked hard all night long and caught nothing, but if you say so, I will pay out the nets.” When this was done, the catch was so huge that the nets began to tear, and they had to ask for help from their companions in the other boat, which like the first was filled with fish to almost sinking.
Seeing this, Peter fell at the knees of Jesus and said, “Leave me, Lord; I am a sinful man.” This moment was what Raphael portrayed in the tapestry.
It is a powerful and dramatic composition. His hands clasped, Peter kneels before Jesus who sits on one end of a boat brimming with fish. Someone behind Peter spreads his arms in amazement, while in the other boat their companions bend down to pull up the nets heavy with fish. We see the future in the distance with the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica. The dawn sky has seagulls, and the shore cranes. The sky birds suggest sin and apostasy, the shore birds watchfulness.
In fact, Raphael did not weave the tapestry himself. This was done by skilled workers in Brussels, to whom Raphael’s designs, called “cartoons,” were delivered to be used as guide.
Luke’s account of the miraculous catch has to do with trusting the Lord and relying on his promise of help, especially when one finds oneself in the teeth of disappointment.
Might not this be Raphael’s case, too? In effect, he was called to set out into the unknown when Pope Leo X commissioned him to make the designs or cartoons for the tapestries to be hung in the newly finished Sistine Chapel. He must have felt the need to prove himself, first, because he would be pitted against Michaelangelo, who disliked him, and under whose famous ceiling the tapestries would be hung, and, second, because he would be venturing into a different area of creativity—making cartoons for tapestries. While the test of his designs was the tapestries themselves, the cartoons have become masterpieces in their own right.
Every successful work of art is a miracle. That Raphael could make those designs, and that despite their complexity the weavers in faraway Belgium could weave them into tapestries without Raphael’s supervision, this was nothing short of miraculous.
And the viewers, such as ourselves, like the companions of Peter in the boat, could only join the artist’s cry of unworthiness and gratitude, seeing that the weave of gold and silver fibers in the tapestry of their lives are but the daily miracles that result from their utter dependence on and trust in God.