Raphael’s paintings have long dominated the popular imagination, but a major exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is making a different case: that his drawings, studies, and designs were the engine of his invention from the start.
Opening March 29, “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” brings together more than 200 objects and is the culmination of nearly a decade of research. The exhibition will be shown only in New York, a decision driven by the fragility and significance of several works on view. For visitors, that one-venue run also heightens the show’s central premise: that Raphael’s art is best understood through the relationships between finished works and the preparatory material that shaped them.
The Italian Renaissance artist Raphael (1483–1520) is often introduced through canonical paintings such as “The Marriage of the Virgin” (1504), “The School of Athens” (1509–11), and “The Sistine Madonna” (1512–13). At the Met, however, the emphasis shifts to the paper trail behind that achievement: sketches that test a gesture, studies that solve a foreshortened head, and cartoons that translate an idea into a transferable design.
Curator Carmen C. Bambach, of the Met’s Department of Drawings and Prints, has framed the exhibition around reunions — works made in dialogue with one another but separated by collecting histories, institutional boundaries, and, in some cases, centuries of dispersal. “The exhibition will include many cases of works which are reunited for the first time with their historical companions,” Bambach said at a press presentation in January. She added that her selections often involved borrowing from museums “very little frequented, even by scholars,” noting, “You always find gems.”
Among the reunions highlighted in the exhibition is material connected to Raphael’s “Coronation of the Virgin (Oddi Altarpiece)” (1502–4), a commission for the Oddi family chapel in Perugia’s San Francesco al Prato church. Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari described the altarpiece as Raphael’s first independent painting — a milestone that already signals the artist’s departure from the quieter manner of his teacher, Pietro Perugino. In the main panel, figures appear caught mid-conversation, lending the scene an energetic, social charge.
Today, the Oddi Altarpiece survives in dismantled form: a large main panel and predella now held at the Vatican Museums. At the Met, the predella will be shown alongside drawn studies and cartoons related to the project, reuniting components that once belonged to a single commission. Loans come from the Royal Collection Trust in Windsor, the British Museum, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, and the Louvre.
Two study sheets from Lille focus on the apostle Thomas, whose foreshortened head Raphael worked through on paper before fixing the figure in paint. In the altarpiece, Thomas occupies the center of the lower register and holds the Virgin’s garter. Bambach has pointed to an “ethereal quality” in the drawing that, in her view, does not fully carry over into the finished painting. On the reverse of one sheet, Raphael also experimented with variations for an apostle’s robe — likely James, positioned at the far right of the composition.
“Raphael: Sublime Poetry” is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 29 through June 28. With its emphasis on process and reunion, the exhibition offers a rare chance to see how Raphael’s most celebrated images were built — not only with paint, but with the quick intelligence of graphite and ink on paper.
