This picture represents the moment when the people of Lystra, impressed when Saints Paul and Barnabas heal a cripple (seen on the right), mistake them as gods Mercury and Jupiter and prepare to make sacrifices in their honour before Paul and Barnabas beg them to stop.

This print is in reverse of the Cartoon from which it is derived. 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.

The Cartoons had been cut up into vertical strips, for reasons to do with the manufacture of tapestries, probably in Brussels. They were reassembled and put up on the walls of the King's Gallery at Hampton Court for the first time in June 1697. They were taken down again for part of 1699 to allow for alterations to the ceilings, doors and panelling, resulting in the arrangement seen in later prints by Gribelin. Their installation at Hampton Court marked their transformation from designs to be used in making tapestries into exhibited works of art. This print and its companion 'The Death of Ananias' (Dyce 2473) are the earliest prints which can truly be said to be "of the Cartoons".

This print and its pair are the only two Cartoon prints which Audran executed before his death in 1703. According to George Vertue they were produced in Paris from copies of the Cartoons made by the painter Charles Jervas (ca. 1675-1739). These copies belonged to William III's Secretary at War in Ireland and Jervas' patron, George Clarke (1661-1736). When Jervas stopped in Paris on his way to Rome on a trip funded by Clarke, he seems to have proposed to Audran the engraving of his Cartoon copies. Gérard Audran was an acclaimed French engraver responsible for prints of history paintings by artists such as Charles Le Brun and Nicholas Poussin. At this date theire was no Englilsh engraver, or French engraver resident in England, capable of producing prints on this scale or level of linear complexity.