This engraving is in the same direction as Raphael's Cartoon of the subject but differs from it in some details. In this print Raimondi has provided a more urban background setting and turned the building behind St Paul into a ruin. The so-called Raphael Cartoons are seven full size designs for tapestries by the great Italian Renaissance artist Raphael (1483-1520). They illustrate passages from the Bible concerning the lives of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. None of them is smaller than ten feet high by thirteen feet wide. They belong to Her Majesty the Queen and have been on loan to this museum since 1865. The earliest print relating to the Raphael Cartoons dates from 1516, the year in which Raphael received final payment for the commission. It inaugurates an extraordinary case study in the history of printmaking, stretching over more than four hundred and fifty years and across a wide range of printmaking techniques.

Marcantonio Raimondi was the most admired engraver of his generation, active in Rome in the second decade of the sixteenth century. In a total output of around two hundred and fifty engravings, some fifty of them are based on compositions by Raphael. Their association is the most important example of a collaboration between a painter and a printmaker in the history of European printmaking. This is because to subsequent generations of art lovers both were revered as leading figures in their fields.