Raphael
One of his most important papal commissions was the Raphael Cartoons (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum), a series of 10 cartoons, of which seven survive, for tapestries with scenes of the lives of Saint Paul and Saint Peter, for the Sistine Chapel. The cartoons were sent to Brussels to be woven in the workshop of Pier van Aelst. It is possible that Raphael saw the finished series before his death—they were probably completed in 1520. He also designed and painted the "Loggie" at the Vatican, a long thin gallery then open to a courtyard on one side, decorated with Roman-style grottesche. He produced a number of significant altarpieces, including "The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia" and the "Sistine Madonna". His last work, on which he was working up to his death, was a large "Transfiguration", which together with "Il Spasimo" shows the direction his art was taking in his final years—more proto-Baroque than Mannerist.
Raphael’s Ephemeris
"Raphael’s Ephemeris" was first issued as part of an almanac entitled "The Prophetic Messenger" in the early nineteenth century. ‘Raphael’, the name given to one of three archangels in the Old Testament, was in fact one Robert Cross Smith (1795–1832), a former carpenter who had developed an interest in astrology. Smith first used the pseudonym in 1824 when he edited a periodical called "The Straggling Astrologer", later re-published as "The Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century". He also referred to himself as the ‘Royal Merlin’. "The Straggling Astrologer" was a relative failure, but by 1827 Smith had assumed editorship of "The Prophetic Messenger", which was read widely by astrologers of the day, and contributed to a renaissance of interest in astrology in the nineteenth century.