This study, along with the nude in Birmingham's collection, was intended for a series of Michelangelesque figures of Sibyls and the Four Evangelists in Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge. They seem to be influenced by Burne-Jones's 1872 visit to Italy, when he studied, at length, the figures on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The figure of St Matthew, for which this is a preparatory study, occurs in the central light of the three-light northernmost window in the east wall of the south transept at Jesus College Chapel, executed in 1873-74 by Morris & Co. The figure was used again in Allerton Church, near Liverpool in 1874, and at St Martin's in-the-Bullring, Birmingham in 1877. A finished oil on canvas of the figure of St Matthew is in the collection of the Museo de Arte, Ponce, Puerto Rico.
Two kinds of window are typical of Burne-Jones's glass in this middle period. One is the single figure in a single light. Here we see Burne-Jones bringing his study of the Italian Renaissance masters to bear on the simplest way of filling a narrow Gothic opening. Between 1872 and 1876 he designed eleven windows for the nave and transepts of the chapel at Jesus College, Cambridge, all using single figures. In four of them an Evangelist stands in the central light, with a Sibyl on either side (fig. 9). (The Sibyls were figures from classical lit- erature who, like the Old Testament prophets, were thought to foretell the Christian gospel.) Two skillful studies for Saint Figure 9. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner &c Co. Stained-glass window, south transept, Jesus College Chapel, Cambridge, 1873-74 Matthew survive, one showing the saint naked, the other draped (figs. 10, 11). The imagery of these windows reminds us that Burne-Jones, on his Italian journey of 1871, spent many hours lying on his back in the Sistine Chapel peering through an opera glass. The bulk and mannered posture of the Evangelists is particularly Michelangelesque: "Such is their strength," wrote Martin Harrison and Bill Waters, "that they appear to bulge out of the frame." 23 Their drapery expresses monumentality. That of the Sibyls, as well as the agitated folds of many figures at this time, expresses movement, echoes of Botticelli and Mantegna. It is not a quality that one expects in stained glass, but there are times in Burne-Jones’s windows of this date when the figures seem to dance.