Next spring, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will open the Americas’ largest ever exhibition devoted to the Renaissance master Raphael (1483-1520), bringing together more than 200 paintings, drawings, decorative art objects and tapestries. Raphael: Sublime Poetry (29 March-28 June) is being curated by Carmen Bambach, a specialist in Renaissance drawings that are from Italy and Spain and a curator in the Met’s department of prints and drawings. She has been working on this logistically complex show since 2018, when her previous blockbuster, Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman & Designer, closed.
“The seven-year journey of putting together this exhibition has been an extraordinary chance to reframe my understanding of this monumental artist,” Bambach said in a statement. “It is a thrilling opportunity to engage with his unique artistic personality through the visual power, intellectual depth and tenderness of his imagery.”
The exhibition, which will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, will be structured broadly chronologically, tracing Raphael’s career from his early years in Urbino and his prolific Florentine period (around 1504-08) to his final decade as an artist in Rome’s papal court. Special attention will be paid to recent scientific analysis of Raphael’s work and his depictions of women.
The enormous breadth of loans secured by the Met will allow Bambach to reunite finished paintings with preparatory drawings—for example The Virgin and Child with Infant Saint John the Baptist in a Landscape (The Alba Madonna) (around 1509-11) from the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC, will hang alongside studies for it from the Palais des Beaux Arts in Lille.
Raphael, The Virgin and Child with Infant Saint John the Baptist in a Landscape (The Alba Madonna), around 1509-11 National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Andrew W. Mellon Collection. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
Also making the journey to Manhattan will be the Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (1514-16) from the Musée du Louvre, The Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia with Saints Paul, John the Evangelist, Augustine, and Mary Magdalene (around 1515-16) from the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna and Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn (1505-06) from the Galleria Borghese. Other lenders to the Met’s show include the British Museum and National Gallery in London, the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence, the Museo del Prado and Patrimonio Nacional de España in Madrid, the Albertina in Vienna, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, the Szépmüvészeti Múzeum in Budapest, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin and, of course, the Vatican Museums.
The Met’s own collection includes three works by Raphael, most famously the altarpiece he created for the Sant’Antonio convent in Perugia: Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints (around 1504). The museum also owns a panel that was part of that altarpiece’s base, The Agony in the Garden (1504), and a later drawing of Lucretia (around 1508-10).
A spokesperson for the Met confirms that the exhibition will not travel. The last Raphael exhibition of a similar scope in the US was the NGA’s Raphael and America back in 1983, which was aligned with the 500th anniversary of the artist’s birth and included more than 100 objects. A smaller exhibition focused on drawings by Raphael, his teachers and pupils—Raphael and His Circle: Drawings from Windsor Castle—travelled to the NGA, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the J. Paul Getty Museum from 2000 to 2001.
Fans of Renaissance masters may recall that the Met’s 2018 Michelangelo exhibition was visited by the artist’s namesake Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle in its closing days. Only time will tell whether the fictional turtle’s brother, Raphael, distinguished by his red bandana, pair of three-pointed sai and hot temper, will be lured from the New York City sewers to visit Sublime Poetry next year.
- Raphael: Sublime Poetry, 29 March-28 June 2026, Metropolitan Museum, New York
