Head of a man looking up to the left: a cartoon for a tapestry

A fragment of a cartoon for the tapestry of Saint Paul preaching at Athens in the Vatican. The head, in reverse, appears in the lower left corner of the composition. That tapestry was part of the set of ten based on the Acts of Apostles, for which seven of the orginal cartoons are in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The tapestries were woven in Brussels in the studio of Pieter van Aelst and were mostly delivered by 1519. The present drawing was probably part of a larger cartoon copied from that of Raphael and executed in reverse before being used for the tapestry. Two other fragments of cartoons for the same cycle from the Jabach collection, of approximately the same size and probably by the same hand as the present drawing, are in the Louvre, D. Cordellier and B. Py, Raphael, son atelier, ses copistes, Paris, 1992, nos. 392-3.
The series of tapestries was intended to be hung below the narrative frescoes that were part of Pope Sixtus IV's original scheme for the decoration of the chapel, replacing the trompe l'oeil hangings already in place.