V&A audio guide,
five stops, free.

The room is the first clue. It is almost exactly the size of the Sistine Chapel, 546 square metres against 548, and although the room was built for other collections and the cartoons only moved in from Gallery 94 in 1950, the match fits: these seven paintings were made for the Sistine Chapel, or rather to be turned into the tapestries that hung there.

Pope Leo the Tenth commissioned them from Raphael soon after his election in 1513. Michelangelo had finished the ceiling the year before, and the only wall space left was the lowest register, so Leo ordered a set of tapestries on the lives of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and Raphael painted the full-scale designs. Each one is over three metres tall, painted in glue-based distemper on sheets of paper glued together. Raphael was paid a thousand ducats. The weaving in Brussels cost fifteen thousand.

Now look for the vertical seams running down every picture. Before they went to the weavers, the cartoons were sliced into strips about a yard wide, so that each strip could sit beside a loom. Because the Brussels looms worked from behind, everything here came out reversed in wool and silk. The proof is in the room: a seventeenth-century Mortlake weaving of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes hangs facing its own cartoon, in mirror image.

Ten cartoons went to Brussels. Seven came back into history. After the tapestries were delivered, the designs vanished for almost a hundred years, then turned up in Genoa, where in 1623 the young Prince Charles, the future Charles the First, bought them for three hundred pounds. He wanted working patterns for his new tapestry works at Mortlake, and the price says how they were valued: as shop drawings, not as Raphaels. When Charles was executed and his collection sold off, Oliver Cromwell kept these back. In the 1690s the strips were finally rejoined at Hampton Court, and Christopher Wren built them a gallery with green silk curtains against the light.

They still belong to the King. Queen Victoria lent them to this museum in 1865 in memory of Prince Albert, and in the Second World War they were bricked up in a shelter in the basement.

Find The Miraculous Draught of Fishes. Simon, soon to be renamed Peter, kneels in a blue tunic in the boat and Christ raises a hand to bless him, while the catch spills over the side. The tapestry woven from this hung in the Sistine Chapel on the twenty-sixth of December 1519, and Raphael was probably there to see it. Then find Paul Preaching at Athens and the man at the far left in a red cap, listening. That is Leo the Tenth, who paid for all of it, and put himself in the audience.

Nothing is happening. That is the point. The fight is over, the monster is dead, and the hero is sitting on it the way a tired man sits on a wall. Look at his face: not triumph, something nearer to pity, as he looks down at the thing he has just killed.

Antonio Canova was in his twenties when he carved this, newly arrived in Rome from Venice in 1780. The block of marble was a present from his patron Girolamo Zulian, the Venetian ambassador, who let Canova pick the subject, and he chose Theseus and the Minotaur from Ovid. His friend Gavin Hamilton, a Scottish painter and dealer who knew what sold, gave him the advice that made the piece. Do not show the struggle, he said. Show the moment after. A still group would win more praise than a violent one.

He was right. When the finished marble appeared in 1782, people took it for an ancient Greek original and were startled to learn it was new. An engraving by Raffaello Morghen carried the composition across Europe, and Canova was on his way to being the most celebrated sculptor of his age.

Now look at the details Canova hid for you. Theseus holds a club in his left hand and rests his right on the Minotaur's leg. The creature, half man and half bull, lies over the rock in a long reversed S. And down by its left leg, look for coils of thread. That is the ball of thread Ariadne gave Theseus so that he could find his way back out of the labyrinth. The whole story is there, in a few loops of marble.

The group weighs 940 kilograms, and its travels are as good as the myth. By the time it was finished Zulian had been posted to Constantinople, and he let Canova keep it. Canova sold it to an Austrian count, who carried it to Vienna in 1788. In 1822 the Marquess of Londonderry bought it and installed it in Londonderry House in London. When that house was emptied for demolition in the 1960s, the museum bought the marble for three thousand pounds, a third of it from the National Art Collections Fund. It has been in the museum since 1962, resting on its monster, in no hurry at all.

It is 326 centimetres wide and 338 deep, and the museum knows of no other Elizabethan bed anywhere near this size. Before you read a word of the label, walk up to the posts and look for initials cut into the oak, and for small blobs of red wax pressed onto the wood. Those are guests. For more than three hundred years people who slept here carved their names into the bed and sealed their visit with wax, and the marks are still there.

Because this was never a bed for a palace. It was almost certainly built as a stunt, to pull travellers into an inn at Ware in Hertfordshire, twenty-two miles north of London, a day's ride away and a staging post on the road north. The town was full of inns competing for the trade, and one of them had the biggest bed in England.

It worked. The earliest mention comes from a German prince who passed through in 1596 and wrote in his diary of a bed at Ware in which four couples might comfortably lie side by side. Five years later Shakespeare put it into Twelfth Night, where Sir Toby Belch describes a sheet of paper as big enough for the bed of Ware, and he did not need to explain the joke, because his audience already knew. Ben Jonson called it the great bed at Ware in 1609, and the name stuck. The stories grew with the fame. A writer in 1732 claimed it held twenty couples. Somebody painted the date 1463 on the headboard, now faded, to back up a tale that it was made for King Edward the Fourth, and the museum says the carpenter Jonas Fosbrooke, still named as its maker in many books, was invented for a London pantomime in 1839.

Look at the headboard. Two arched marquetry panels, inlaid in the manner of the Dutch designer Hans Vredeman de Vries, divided by three carved figures, two men and a woman, with a satyr at each side. They were once brightly painted, and traces of the paint survive. The bed is a little shorter than it was built: the posts have been cut down and lost their capitals, and the frieze along the top is a replacement. The hangings are modern recreations of period fabrics. Originally, curtains would have closed it on three sides for warmth and privacy, and the museum's own notes record that the bed cords holding up the mattresses were kept taut with special tighteners, which it says is where the phrase sleep tight comes from.

The bed left the inns in 1870 for the Rye House Hotel in nearby Hoddesdon, a pleasure garden with a fairground, where it stood in its own building with a set of antlers on top and the landlord would swear visitors over it for a fee. This museum was offered it in 1865 and refused, calling it a coarse and mutilated relic. In 1931 it changed its mind and paid four thousand pounds, half of it from the National Art Collections Fund, mostly to stop the bed going abroad.

In 2012 it went home for a year. Ware Museum built a room for it, and more than thirty-four thousand people came to see a bed. Then it came back here, to Room 57, carrying four centuries of other people's initials.