V&A Museum - Raphael Court

• Location: London, UK

The Raphael Court within the Victoria & Albert Museum is one of the UK’s most dramatic gallery spaces and it displays the Raphael Cartoons.

The Raphael Cartoons are lent to the V&A from the Royal Collection by Her Majesty The Queen. Measuring around 5 x 3 meters each, the Cartoons are designs commissioned in 1515 by Pope Leo X for a series of tapestries in the Sistine Chapel illustrating the lives of St Peter and St Paul. Seven of 10 original designs survive, and were brought to Britain in the 17th century by the Prince of Wales, later Charles I. They remained in the Royal Collection and were lent to the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) by Queen Victoria in 1865 in memory of Prince Albert.

To mark the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death, the V&A decided to undertake a major refurbishment of the Gallery. The improvement works included installation of state-of-the art lighting and a darker colour scheme for the walls to help focus visitors’ eyes on the Cartoons’ vibrant palette. The interpretation was also enhanced, with high-definition, infrared and 3D scans of the Cartoons available for visitors to explore.

As the gallery is one of the key event spaces for the V&A, one of the major challenges for the refurbishment was to improve the acoustic quality in terms of speech intelligibility. An acoustician worked with the design team to carry out 3D acoustic modelling of the space and provided an options appraisal. The solution agreed was to implement high level ceiling panels suspended from the roof. The result was an installation that improved the acoustic performance of the space without having a detrimental effect on the aesthetics of the room.

The works were undertaken with the Raphael Cartoons in place, requiring a large amount of upfront planning and stakeholder engagement to ensure adequate protection.

Client:
V&A Museum

Services Provided:-
Project Management, Contract Administration