Raphael, Staggeringly Revealed --- The Met presents the nation's first comprehensive exhibition on the wide-ranging Renaissance master

“New York -- There was nothing he couldn't do. This was Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari's conclusion about Raphael (1483-1520), the view of his contemporaries and his patrons, and a reasonable conclusion after having seen the magnificent show "Raphael: Sublime Poetry," opening this Sunday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A biographical survey comprising 175 of his works, including 33 paintings and 142 drawings, as well as sundry works by other artists, it allows viewers to observe Raphael's enormously productive, collaborative career and his work across a wide array of media, from drawings to prints to tapestries, and from miniature to monumental. While Leonardo da Vinci struggled to finish his projects, and Michelangelo tended to focus obsessively on the same themes, Raphael completed an astonishing number and variety of commissions in his short life.

 

Why, then, is he so often eclipsed in the popular imagination by Leonardo and Michelangelo? There is a simple explanation: We barely know him. This is the first comprehensive exhibition on Raphael in the U.S. With its illuminating wall text and labels, and an extraordinary number of important loans from European and American collections, the exhibition provides even the most uninformed visitor a full sense of the artist's career and achievements.

 

Met curator Carmen Bambach made the wise decision not to present Raphael as a singular genius, but as a relational one, connected to his father, Giovanni Santi, himself an artist and poet; his teacher Perugino; his contemporaries such as Leonardo (30 years his elder), Michelangelo and the architect Donato Bramante; and his collaborators and students such as Marcantonio Raimondi and Giulio Romano. Across time and media, his drawing practice provides the through line. From his tentative, scratchy early works in pen or metal point to his swift, gestural drawings in black and red chalk, drawing was how he worked out ideas, observed the figure, arranged compositions, and supplied material to be translated into other media such as prints or tapestries.

 

Presented with the work thematically and chronologically, visitors are first introduced to Raphael's origins and education, and then immersed in the world of Raphael's multiple graphic and painted studies of the Madonna and Child. They provide an index of Raphael's sensitivity to artistic changes taking place around him. His "Sketches of Infants; the Virgin and Child" (c. 1507-08) -- loose studies of a moving baby -- share much with Leonardo's renderings of the same subject. The monumentality and twisting pose of Mary in the Alba Madonna (c. 1509-11) reflect his absorption of Michelangelo's Doni Tondo (1505-06) and Sistine Ceiling (1508-12). The value of Raphael's continual iterations on the Madonna theme surfaces in one of his late paintings, "The Holy Family With the Infant St. John the Baptist (The Madonna of the Rose)," c. 1517-18. Closely cropped and dramatically lighted, the tight composition gives the familiar scene a new immediacy and intimacy, leavened by the playful interaction of the Christ child and St. John.

 

A career survey such as this one allows visitors to observe Raphael's permeable visual intelligence, the way he could take in the ideas and innovations he observed in the work of other artists and make them his own. A prime example is his "Portrait of a Young Woman With a Unicorn" (1505-06), probably a betrothal or marriage portrait. The figure's stately pose, folded arms and direct gaze, seen in a three-quarter view against a landscape, offer a striking likeness to the Mona Lisa, while the animal in her lap (a symbol of love and chastity) evokes another of Leonardo's portraits, his "Lady With an Ermine." Although the panel belongs within the tradition of depicting female beauty, it shares its pose and frank gaze with another striking portrait, of Baldassarre Castiglione, Raphael's friend and collaborator. In this case Raphael's sympathetic depiction of his sitter highlights less his external qualities than his lively mind.

 

While the Madonnas and portraits are in some general sense familiar, an unusual and surprising work in the show is a single fresco of a putto bearing a garland, a fragment that research by the curator revealed to have come from a chimney piece in the Vatican apartments. Paired with a deft chalk drawing, it brings into the exhibition several elements otherwise hard to represent at a distance: Raphael's incredible work in fresco (most prominently in the Vatican Stanze, c. 1508-20, the papal apartments that include "The School of Athens"), and the transformation of his work after seeing the Sistine Ceiling. Unlike the soft, pliable versions of the Christ child in his early Madonnas, this is a monumental, muscular putto, using his strength to hold that garland aloft.

 

A series of black-chalk nude studies for the Resurrection in Santa Maria della Pace in Rome shows how Raphael took lessons about the male form from Michelangelo but interpreted it differently, seeing the body as a vehicle of expression and emotion, not just the armature for muscles. There is a languid eroticism to a sheet from the British Museum, "Seated Male Nude and a Right Leg (Studies for the Resurrection, Santa Maria della Pace)," c. 1511-14, in which a man stretches his arms over his head, his eyes downcast and his head tucked into one arm, conveying the sleepy, sensuous feeling of waking up. In another drawing in the series, "Reclining Male Nude With Shield and Sword," a figure, arrayed like an ancient river god, holds himself up while twisting his head around in surprise and dismay.

 

Raphael's female studies improve on those made by his rivals in a different way. Unlike Michelangelo and Leonardo, who seem to have learned about female anatomy primarily by studying ancient Roman statues of Venus, Raphael, in his red-chalk drawings, reveals a real sensitivity to the female form. His "Phrygian Sibyl" (c. 1511-13) for the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria della Pace, rather than flexing her muscles like Michelangelo's versions on the Sistine Ceiling, is relaxed, confident, elegant. In each of these examples, Raphael shows how much he has learned from Michelangelo, but also that he can do him one better, by understanding and representing both anatomy and internal psychology, by conveying through minimal gestures both the beautiful outer shell and the inner life.

 

Although Raphael's "Transfiguration" (1516-20) in the Vatican could not travel, it is represented by an exquisite series of studies in black and red chalk. These include an extraordinary sheet from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, "Heads and Hands of Two Apostles" (c. 1519-20), which features a youthful head and an older, bearded apostle, both viewed from the side. The sheet reveals a remarkably free handling of black chalk, with the paper itself used to indicate highlights, and soft parallel black strokes conveying the face's structure and character. The combination of economy of stroke and emotional depth gives the sheet a feeling of modernity.

 

When Raphael died after a brief illness at age 37, he left unfinished projects, talented students, and a legacy worthy of an artist twice his age. His contemporaries knew what they had lost; they processed through the streets of Rome in mourning and buried him in the Pantheon. Now we know, too.

 

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Ms. Brothers is a professor at Northeastern University and the author of "Giuliano da Sangallo and the Ruins of Rome" (Princeton).” [1]

 

1. Arts in Review -- Art Review: Raphael, Staggeringly Revealed --- The Met presents the nation's first comprehensive exhibition on the wide-ranging Renaissance master. Brothers, Cammy.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 26 Mar 2026: A12.