{"id":1849348,"date":"2026-03-25T15:31:06","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T12:31:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1849348"},"modified":"2026-03-25T15:31:06","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T12:31:06","slug":"raphael-at-the-met-review-a-must-see-show-the-greatest-influencer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1849348","title":{"rendered":"Raphael at the Met, Review: A Must-See Show the ‘Greatest Influencer’"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/DP-44735-118-JPG-Original-300dpi.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tThe closing image of the Metropolitan Museum of Art\u2019s Raphael blockbuster, opening to the public on Sunday, is of a muscular man bursting out of a craggy hillside. As he does so, one jacked forearm blows right through the frame that surrounds him. Part of a monumentally scaled tapestry called Saint Paul in Prison<\/em> (ca. 1517\u201321), it\u2019s a ferocious picture of unbridled masculinity, bulging pecs and all. It might be read as the logical parting shot for a retrospective about a man whose paintings changed art history forever.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut there is a wrinkle in that reading: the textile is not attributed to the Renaissance painter himself but to the workshop of Flemish artist Pieter van Aelst, since Raphael\u2019s sole contribution was only its cartoon, which isn\u2019t at the Met. Raphael died the year before the tapestry was completed, but the fact that van Aelst continued on without him suggests this Italian painter wasn\u2019t necessary to finish the job. Tough going for an artist who was named a \u201cmaster\u201d by one of his patrons when he was just 17 years old.<\/p>\n

\n\tFew would argue with that designation, both then and now. Raphael\u2019s paintings helped establish rules of perspective and composition that remain in use today; his portraits vested his subjects with an earthbound humanity that was largely missing from the genre prior to him. He worked on commission for powerful individuals, including Pope Leo X and the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi, whose namesake Roman basilica Raphael both designed and bedecked with his own paintings, and he laid the groundwork for future movements such as Mannerism and Neoclassicism.<\/p>\n

\n\tFast forward five centuries to the days of modernism, and you can still find Raphael admirers. \u201cLeonardo da Vinci promises us heaven,\u201d Pablo Picasso is reported to have said. \u201cRaphael gives it to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

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A gallery of the Met\u2019s Raphael retrospective is devoted to his portraits, which humanized his sitters in a way that was rare for his time.<\/span>Photo Eileen Travell\/Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tBut Raphael did not arrive at this version of heaven by himself. There were artistic forebears along for the journey, most notably the painters Giovanni Santi and Perugino, respectively the wunderkind\u2019s father and mentor. And there were also all the people Raphael employed in a sizable workshop, at the time an unusual means of production\u2014and one that rankled his enemy Michelangelo, who saw Raphael\u2019s method as a lowly one. There is a reason why, in his famed Lives of Artists<\/em>, Renaissance-era art historian Giorgio Vasari used the same word to describe both Raphael and all the people on his team: \u201cblessed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHow blessed are we, then, to have this Met show, whose 237-work checklist includes quite a few works that are not<\/em> by Raphael, imploding the notion that his short career was less a thunderclap of self-made brilliance than one big group project. His true mastery lay in his ability to synthesize the innovations of others and make them his own.<\/p>\n

\n\tCurator Carmen C. Bambach spent eight years organizing this astonishing survey, titled \u201cRaphael: Sublime Poetry.\u201d It\u2019s the first show of its kind ever staged in the US, likely because of all that traveling Raphael\u2019s finest works entails. (This may explain why some of his greatest paintings are not in New York, most notably his famed Sistine Madonna<\/em>, which remains in Dresden, where it has lived ever since 1794, with just one decade-long exception.) Equally impressive is the fact that it\u2019s about the same size as another Raphael mega-show staged in Rome in 2020, on the 500th anniversary of the artist\u2019s death, and about two times as large as another held at London\u2019s National Gallery two years later.<\/p>\n

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Among the rare loans in the Met\u2019s Raphael show are three textiles that haven\u2019t left Madrid since the 16th century.<\/span>Photo Eileen Travell\/Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tMuch of the Met show is drawings, which is sure to disappoint some who want to see his paintings. Still, no expense has been spared in bringing a select few world-famous Raphaels to the Met. The show\u2019s centerpiece is a gallery devoted to Raphael\u2019s painted portraits. Here, the star is Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione<\/em> (ca. 1514\u201315), featuring a diplomat whose baggy eyelids communicate long nights of devotion to his work. The painting is typically held by the Louvre, which hasn\u2019t loaned the painting to the US in two decades. There\u2019s also Portrait of a Young Woman<\/em> (ca. 1507\u201308), which features a model set against a field of thick blackness. You can make out her a few wisps of brown hair that have fallen askew, and that makes her just like the rest of us: imperfect, and therefore perfectly human.<\/p>\n

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Raphael, Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione<\/em>, 1514\u201316.<\/span>\u00a9RMN-Grand Palais\/Art Resource, New York\/Mus\u00e9e du Louvre<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tHead down a darkened hallway, and you arrive in front of three large tapestries that rise more than 15 feet in the air. Woven by a Brussels workshop two decades after his death using the artist\u2019s cartoons, these tapestries depict narratives from Acts of the Apostles that Raphael rendered as sprawling crowd scenes. The textiles haven\u2019t left Madrid since they were acquired in the mid-16th century by Philip II of Spain.<\/p>\n

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Raphael, Drapery Study of a Standing Figure for the Disputa, Stanza della Segnatura (recto); Figure Studies and a Draft of a Petrarchan Sonnet (verso)<\/em>, ca. 1509\u201311.<\/span>Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tIn between are a vast array of drawings by Raphael: carefully rendered faces turned up toward the heavens; scrawled studies for arms, some made in preparation for larger works; a delicate depiction of Madonna and child, both having fallen asleep against each other in postpartum exhaustion. These drawings are classic Raphael: a sketch featuring several images of the Christ Child\u2019s fat foot, one rendered right above the other, portrays this sanctified infant in a way that feels unusually human. It\u2019s worth remembering, as Bambach points out, that Raphael didn\u2019t come up with that technique for drawing. His rival, Leonardo da Vinci, some 30 years his senior, did. Raphael, however, would improve on his forebear\u2019s technique by sketching even more furiously, causing his drawings to occasionally devolve into scribbles.<\/p>\n

\n\tBambach\u2019s show moves cleanly and chronologically, starting off before Raphael even came into his own as an artist. Much of the first two galleries are devoted to his dad, Giovanni Santi, who spent nearly half a century writing an epic poem about the mercenary Federico de Montefeltro. (The illuminated manuscript produced for it, thick enough to do serious damage if dropped on one\u2019s foot, has made it to the Met\u2014it\u2019s a beauty.) Santi was also a painter of handsome, if somewhat straitlaced, religious scenes; one in the Met show features a gargantuan female saint standing atop a landscape filled with recognizably Italian pine trees. He was among the many artists of his day to render Biblical figures larger than life, in an effort to raise them to higher importance than the humans who worshipped them.<\/p>\n

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Some of the true stars of the Met\u2019s Raphael retrospective are drawings.<\/span>Photo Eileen Travell\/Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tRaphael was born in 1483, about 44 years into Santi\u2019s manuscript project, and he picked up his father\u2019s mantle early on. Working under the tutelage of Perugino, who imparted rarified knowledge about perspective, Raphael started out painting Christian scenes that enlist his mentor\u2019s triangular compositions with one tweak: Raphael\u2019s figures are all the same size. In a processional banner produced while Raphael was still a teenager, you get the sense that if the penitent Saints Sebastian and Roch rose up, they\u2019d stand about as tall as the crucified Jesus Christ they pray before. Works like that one demonstrate that Raphael was a responsive viewer, working both with and against the conventions of his peers to engineer his own voice, as most of the best artists so often do.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 1504, Raphael relocated to Florence, where he began working under the sign of Leonardo, by then an established Renaissance master. Before its section on the Florentine stretch of his career, the Met show is dominated primarily by Raphael\u2019s drawings done in pen, a tool that allows for the sharp, precise linework. In Florence, however, he started utilizing charcoal and chalk, allowing him to translate Leonardo\u2019s signature sfumato haziness to paper. In one unforgettable drawing dated to ca. 1507, Raphael uses both mediums to mark out Saint Catherine of Alexandria\u2019s flowy drapery, which looks as soft to the touch as it might feel to wear it.<\/p>\n

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Raphael, The Annunciation<\/em>, ca. 1503\u20134.<\/span>\u00a9RMN-Grand Palais\/Art Resource, New York\/Photo Michael Urtado\/Mus\u00e9e du Louvre<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tAt 24, Raphael was already established by the time he made that drawing, but he only got more famous once he moved in 1508 to Rome, where he spent the rest of his short life. The big commissions for Popes Julius II and Leo X\u2014most notably The School of Athens<\/em>, produced for the former\u2014are not here, since they are site-specific frescoes. But even without them, you get a sense of his artistry through works such as The<\/em>Madonna of Divine Love <\/em>(ca. 1516\u201318), in which an infantile Saint John kneels before his cousin, the Baby Christ. Wits its harmonious triangular composition and furtive gazes, the painting seems like pure Raphael, but it is in fact the work of many artisans. Raphael only applied the final layer of paint; he\u2019s forced to share the credit at the Met with Giulio Romano, his assistant.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The Met\u2019s Raphael retrospective reunites the Colonna Altarpiece for the first time since it was broken up centuries ago.<\/span>Photo Eileen Travell\/Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tAnother artist who worked closely with Raphael was Marco Raimondi, a close friend whose intricate engravings brought Raphael\u2019s compositions to the masses. Look at Raphael\u2019s 1508\u201310 drawing of Lucretia, a Roman noblewoman whose rape triggered the destruction of an entire monarchy, and then admire Raimondi\u2019s engraving based on it. Working with that sketch in mind, Raimondi adds more folds to her sheer dress and an entire landscape around it. Well after Raphael\u2019s death in 1520 at the age of 37, the Lucretia works kept coming: the exhibition\u2019s final galleries include two majolica plates based on the same composition. The Raimondi drawing and the painted plates show that others picked up where Raphael left off. Affirming his rightful place in the canon, the master would continue to teach aspiring artists for centuries.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn her introductory wall text, Bambach terms Raphael \u201cone of the greatest influencers of all time.\u201d That feels like a calculated bit of pandering, but it\u2019s also close to the truth, as those last galleries reveal. For example, there\u2019s The Vision of Ezekiel<\/em> (ca. 1515\u201316), in which God floats through the clouds alongside a winged horse. For years, the painting was attributed to Romano. According to Bambach (and the painting\u2019s owner, the Uffizi Galleries in Florence), the painting is by none other than Raphael, whose ability to impact others around him is still coming into focus.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/DP-44735-118-JPG-Original-300dpi.jpg?w=1024″] The closing image of the Metropolitan Museum of Art\u2019s Raphael blockbuster, opening to the public on Sunday, is of a muscular man bursting out of a craggy hillside. As he does so, one jacked forearm blows right through the frame that surrounds him. Part of a monumentally scaled tapestry called Saint Paul […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1849348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1849348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1849348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1849348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1849348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1849348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}