Raphael: Sublime Poetry

The first comprehensive international loan exhibition on Raphael in the United States: more than 200 works, over 170 of them drawings, seven years in preparation. Closed 28 June 2026.

This was the first comprehensive international loan exhibition on Raphael ever staged in the United States, and it ran for thirteen weeks. Carmen Bambach, the Marica F. and Jan T. Vilcek Curator in the Met's Department of Drawings and Prints, spent seven years assembling it. More than 200 works were brought together, of which over 170 were drawings.

That ratio is the exhibition's real argument and it is easy to miss behind the famous paintings. A show that is five-sixths works on paper is not a parade of altarpieces; it is an argument about how Raphael thought, made visible by putting finished paintings next to the sheets that produced them. The Alba Madonna came from the National Gallery of Art in Washington and was reunited with its preparatory drawings from Lille - the object and the thinking behind it in one room, which is precisely the material this archive exists to record and which is almost never assembled.

The lender list is the other measure. The Vatican Museums, the Louvre, the Uffizi, the Prado, the National Gallery in London, the Albertina, the Ashmolean, the British Museum, the Galleria Borghese, the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett, the Stadel, Capodimonte, Budapest, Chatsworth, Urbino, Perugia, Bologna, Bergamo, Brescia, Lille, Madrid's Patrimonio Nacional and more. An exhibition on this scale needed a federal indemnity from the Council on the Arts and the Humanities to be insurable at all.

The hang was broadly chronological with thematic sections inside it. It opened in Urbino, where Raphael was born on 6 April 1483, and where his father Giovanni Santi was a court painter and a prolific poet working in a duchy that Federico da Montefeltro had turned into a centre of humanist learning. Santi's own work was shown, which is unusual - he is an obscure figure outside this context - and so was that of Pietro Perugino, to whom Santi sent his son.

The Met made a specific claim in this opening stretch: it gathered paintings and studies made for confraternities by Perugino and by the young Raphael, including what it describes as the first painting entirely in Raphael's own hand, an attribution it says recent conservation work confirms. Then Florence, from 1504 to 1508, where he absorbed Leonardo and began to be spoken of alongside him and Michelangelo, and finally Rome, where the architect Bramante brought him in at twenty-five to work for Julius II and then Leo X.

He was a master painter at seventeen and dead at thirty-seven. The exhibition's most interesting effect, as one reviewer put it, was that the whole arc of an ideal of beauty - born, perfected, then mutating into something else - is visible inside one short career.

The Met stated in advance that the exhibition would pay particular attention to Raphael's depiction of women, from his pioneering use of nude female models to the Madonnas. That is a curatorial choice with consequences, and the show did not entirely soften them.

The Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn came from the Galleria Borghese: a betrothal portrait, advertising its sitter as a marriage prospect, holding a small unicorn that reads both as a symbol of chastity and, if the Met's identification of her as Laura Orsini is right, as her family's crest. On that identification the sitter is thirteen. The Madonnas are mostly blonde, which follows poetic convention rather than Italian fact - the ideal was literary before it was observed. Late in the show the ingratiating surface breaks: studies for the Transfiguration, and the small Ezekiel's Vision, where a tiny prophet is overwhelmed by cherubs and beasts writhing overhead.

A caution on reading that shift. It is tempting to treat the late style as psychological, and one reviewer warned specifically against it: individual expression was not what art in this period was for, and Raphael was selling sophistication to patrons. The change tracks a change in what Rome wanted, from luxurious harmony towards voluptuous drama, more than a change in the man.

Raphael's late career ran on delegation at a scale nobody had attempted: dozens of painters and assistants across scores of decorative commissions. Michelangelo thought it distasteful. It is also the reason Raphael sits awkwardly inside the modern idea that value flows from the hand of the artist - a nineteenth-century notion of connoisseurship that the Gilded Age collectors who built American museums took as given.

Artnet's reviewer noted that the Met's own labels visibly wrestle with this, and it is the honest observation to take away: telling a modern visitor what separates an autograph Raphael from a Giulio Romano is a live problem, not a settled one, and a show five-sixths made of drawings is where the problem is at its sharpest. The School of Athens, his best-known work, could not travel at all - it is a fresco in the papal apartments - and was present only through sketches and an immersive room, which is its own comment on what a loan exhibition can and cannot do.

Critics treated the exhibition as an event that needed no defending and largely got out of its way, while several picked at the framing rather than the contents - the recurring complaint being that the Met marketed a show which did not require marketing.