Met’s Landmark Raphael Survey Opens With a Provocation: How Much of “Raphael” Was a Team Effort?
A monumental tapestry of a muscular figure wrenching himself out of a rocky hillside closes the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Raphael exhibition — and it does so with a small act of rebellion. In “Saint Paul in Prison” (ca. 1517–21), a powerful forearm seems to punch through the picture’s own border, as if the image cannot be contained. It is an apt final note for a show devoted to an artist long treated as a singular force in Western art. Yet the tapestry’s authorship complicates that story: it is attributed not to Raphael, but to the workshop of the Flemish weaver Pieter van Aelst. Raphael’s role was limited to the preparatory design, and he died before the textile was finished.
That tension — between the myth of solitary genius and the reality of Renaissance production — runs through “Raphael: Sublime Poetry,” which opens to the public Sunday at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) in New York. Organized by curator Carmen C. Bambach over eight years, the exhibition brings together 237 works and is billed as the first U.S. exhibition of its kind devoted to the artist.
Italian painter and architect Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, 1483–1520) is often credited with helping codify pictorial systems that still structure how images are made and read: perspective, balanced composition, and a persuasive sense of spatial coherence. His portraits, too, helped shift the genre toward a more grounded psychological presence, giving sitters a human immediacy that would become a benchmark for later European painting. During his short life, he worked for some of the most powerful patrons of his day, including Pope Leo X and the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi, for whom he designed and decorated a Roman basilica.
The Met’s exhibition, however, insists that Raphael’s achievement cannot be separated from the people around him. His artistic lineage begins close to home — with Giovanni Santi, his father, and with Perugino, his teacher — and extends into the large workshop Raphael built, an approach that was still unusual enough to draw scorn from rivals. Michelangelo, in particular, viewed the workshop model as a debased way of making art. Yet the Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari used the same word for Raphael and for those who worked alongside him: “blessed.”
By including a substantial number of works not executed by Raphael’s own hand, the Met show makes a pointed argument about authorship. Rather than presenting his career as a brief blaze of isolated brilliance, “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” frames it as a complex enterprise — one in which Raphael’s distinctive gift was synthesis: absorbing the innovations of others and refining them into a language that felt inevitable.
The scale of the undertaking also underscores why a U.S. survey of this magnitude has been so rare. Major Raphael paintings are difficult to move, and many are deeply rooted in the collections and histories of their home institutions. The exhibition arrives in New York with notable international ambition, comparable in size to the major Raphael exhibition mounted in Rome in 2020 for the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death, and significantly larger than the National Gallery’s Raphael show in London staged two years later.
Visitors expecting a parade of paintings may find the Met’s emphasis surprising: much of the exhibition is devoted to drawings, a medium that reveals Raphael’s thinking in real time — revisions, refinements, and the collaborative mechanics of a workshop. Still, the museum has secured a select group of celebrated works, with a central section dedicated to painted portraiture. Among the highlights is “Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione” (ca. 1514–15), a touchstone of Renaissance portraiture whose quiet authority has helped define Raphael’s reputation across centuries.
Even in modernism, Raphael’s influence has remained a point of reference. Pablo Picasso is reported to have contrasted him with Leonardo da Vinci, saying that Leonardo “promises us heaven” while Raphael “gives it to us.” At the Met, that “heaven” is presented with a more complicated, and arguably more interesting, premise: Raphael’s greatness was not only what he made, but how he orchestrated making itself.
“Raphael: Sublime Poetry” opens to the public Sunday at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
