“Raphael: Sublime Poetry” at The Met Awes in Renaissance Star’s First U.S. Retrospective
The exhibition took 17 years to thoughtfully assemble and features impressive loans that have never previously left Europe
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s impressively comprehensive new exhibition, “Raphael: Sublime Poetry,” answers a question: Where does Raphael’s reputation come from? The work of his, that is perhaps most familiar to 21st-century eyes, is the two winged putti at the bottom of his Sistine Madonna. You’ll find souvenir reproductions of the divine tykes for sale all over Rome and Florence despite the painting being in Dresden. Raphael’s ranking as the “prince of painters” reached its high-water mark in his lifetime through the mid-19th century. His inclusion in the short list of great painters of the Italian Renaissance still feels like a given, but Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo’s artwork have superseded his in public awareness. Shockingly, the Met show is his first major U.S. retrospective ever. Curator Carmen Bambach said that the new show aims to restore Raphael’s place alongside da Vinci and Michelangelo as an equal, and not in third place.
Paintings and drawings hang in chronological order, beginning with Raphael’s childhood in Urbino through his apprenticeship with Perugino and early independent commissions. A star moment is the reunification of The Met’s own Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints with its predella panels for the first time since the pieces were split up for sale centuries ago. The devotional work pinpoints Raphael’s shift away from the sweet-faced, small-mouthed visages populous in Perugino (seen on Mary, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and Saint Lucy) and towards showing each face as that of an individual, striking in the real flesh-and-blood Saints Peter and Paul.
Raphael was met with discouraging results when seeking major commissions in Florence. He supported himself with private commissions, including numerous Madonna and Child-themed works. He continued the Renaissance realist trend of showing the Virgin and baby Jesus as a human parent and child in relatable, affectionate moments. Some stellar appearances include The National Gallery’s Alba Madonna and the British Museum’s study for the Mackintosh Madonna. In the painting commonly referred to as The Large Cowper Madonna, a toddler-sized Christ Child tugs playfully at the front of Mary’s dress, as if to say, “It’s time to feed me.”
Portraiture is likewise a dream selection of well-chosen highlights, with multiple loans from the Borghese, including Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn and the masterpiece Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione. Another Borghese standout is La Fornarina, last seen in New York at the Frick in late 2004 to early 2005. The three-stop traveling exhibition twenty years ago and “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” are the only times that the Borghese has allowed La Fornarina, reportedly a portrait of the painter’s mistress, to leave Italy.
In Rome, Raphael’s trajectory changed. Popes Julius II and Leo X could not get enough of him, and gave him so many commissions that it is a wonder that he managed to keep up, even with the aid of many assistants. His work in the Vatican is represented by a wealth of sketches, including his only known drawing of a horse. While the frescos obviously cannot travel, there is a room where the murals from each of his Vatican salons are projected onto all four sides to put the drawings into context.
A later room in the hosting Tisch Galleries has a magnificent loan from Spain: three enormous tapestries made for Phillip II from Raphael’s designs for the Sistine Chapel tapestries. (The original cartoons for the series are at the Victoria & Albert in London.) Today, tapestry is often unfairly relegated to Norma Desmond status among the art forms; 500 years ago, it was a sumptuous star oeuvre for megapatrons to display wealth, taste, and power.
Wandering around the show, it became plausible that the modern dulling of Raphael’s renown had nothing to do with his skill as an artist, and quite a bit to do with the fact that he does not fit the romanticized image of the “tortured artist.” The man born Raffaello Santi was notedly affable. He was easy to work with. He met deadlines. He failed to inflict an inordinate amount of drama on the people around him. He was prolific: his total surviving artistic output exceeds that of Leonardo or Vermeer many times over in quantity. He was not a starving artist, but spent the final years of his life in a Roman palazzo that he bought himself with his plentiful earnings. Even his death at 37 is lacking in requisite theatrical pathos. Giorgio Vasari, Raphael’s most famed early biographer, blamed his death on too much sex. Others have attributed it to overwork. 16th-century medicine, in hindsight, seems like the obvious culprit.
“Raphael: Sublime Poetry” was an effort 17 years in the making for Carmen Bambach. Much gratitude is due to the many worldwide institutions that took part in the exhibit. Due to the fragility of the works, the show will only be on view in New York. The show includes 237 works, 175 of them by Raphael himself, and the majority of which have never been seen in the U.S. before.
“Raphael: Sublime Poetry” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York March 29–June 28, 2026.