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<\/p>\nWith the last half-millennium in mind, Raphael has arguably been the most important artist of the western canon, casting his harmonious spell everywhere from the frescoed walls of the Vatican\u2019s Apostolic Palace to centuries of seminars in provincial art academies. But over the past 150 years or so, he has begun to run a distant third to his mononymous rivals, Michelangelo and Leonardo, whose personal biographies, professional dramas, and artistic excesses and eccentricities have made them far better suited to a post-Romantic idea of an artist.<\/p>\n
This has begun to change in recent years though, with major exhibitions reframing the artist at Rome\u2019s Scuderie del Quirinale in 2020 and the National Gallery in London in 2022. Now, it is the turn of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to get US audiences to look at him afresh.<\/p>\n
Raphael: Sublime Poetry is the Met\u2019s\u2014and indeed, America\u2019s\u2014first comprehensive show about the Urbino-born artist (1483-1520). Gathering 237 works in total, including 33 paintings and 142 drawings by the artist, the show spans the whole of his career, establishing his artistic and intellectual origins in the courtly world of Renaissance Urbino and culminating in his supreme place in Papal Rome.<\/p>\n
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Raphael, The Virgin and Child with Infant Saint John the; Baptist in a Landscape (The Alba Madonna) (around 1509-11<\/p>\n
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington<\/p>\n
The number of major loans is eye-popping. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, has lent The Alba Madonna (around 1509-11); the Mus\u00e9e du Louvre in Paris is loaning Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (1514-16); and the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence has sent a number of red-chalk studies. Furthermore, the Albertina in Vienna, Oxford\u2019s Ashmolean Museum, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Devonshire Collections at Chatsworth have sent their superb studies for The Transfiguration, Raphael\u2019s enormous final painting.<\/p>\n
A priceless gathering<\/p>\n
The challenge in doing a Raphael show can seem chiefly organisational. How, for instance, did the Met manage to get so many museums and collections to part with so many priceless works? By sheer persistence, says the show\u2019s curator Carmen C. Bambach. \u201cI never took \u2018no\u2019 at face value,\u201d she says, adding that she went back so many times with repeated requests that it just \u201cbecame easier to say yes\u201d. Then a larger challenge\u00a0began to kick in: how could the Met make the case for Raphael to a museum-going public in the 2020s?<\/p>\n
For centuries, Raphael was best known, and most loved, for his idealised depictions of the Madonna and Christ Child, leading to countless imitations. Bambach calls the phenomenon \u201can oversaturation\u201d that \u201cseverely tarnished\u201d the motif to such an extent that she herself concedes it can be now viewed as \u201csaccharine\u201d. Her solution? Present a much wider \u201csocial and historical context\u201d of motherhood and childhood mortality. Before viewers experience the full flowering of Raphael\u2019s sublime Madonnas, they will encounter objects and images that attest to the agony and sheer danger of childbirth. Bambach is exhibiting the so-called Book of Wax, an account book on loan from a convent in Urbino that catalogues funeral expenses of Raphael\u2019s own mother and newborn sister in 1491. And Florence\u2019s Museo Nazionale del Bargello is loaning Verrocchio\u2019s Death of Francesca Pitti Tornabuoni (around 1480), a harrowing marble relief dramatising the death of both a mother and her newborn.<\/p>\n
Although Bambach had been thinking about the show for some time, she got the final go-ahead in 2018 after Max Hollein became the museum\u2019s director. Hollein\u2019s instinct, he now says, was to go all-in. \u201cI said to Carmen, \u2018let\u2019s think about this in a really ambitious way\u2019.\u201d That meant broadly including both paintings and drawings, and confining the venue to the Met alone\u2014resulting in \u201ca major financial commitment\u201d, he says, \u201cbecause you can\u2019t divide up costs\u201d.<\/p>\n
The eight-year lead-up to the show has been a period of intensive travel for Bambach, as well as Rachel Mustalish, conservator in charge of the Met\u2019s paper conservation team.<\/p>\n
Research leads to reattribution<\/p>\n
Bambach\u2019s examination of the Modello Drawing for the Altarpiece of the Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia in Paris led to a reattribution of the work from Raphael\u2019s assistant Gianfrancesco Penni to the master himself. In New York, that work will be joined by the 2.5m-tall painting itself (around 1515-16), on loan from the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna. \u201cI\u2019m just ecstatic to have it,\u201dBambach says.<\/p>\n
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The Modello Drawing for the altarpiece painting The Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia (around 1515-16). The drawing has now been reattributed to Raphael<\/p>\n
Paris Mus\u00e9es \/ Mus\u00e9e des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Mustalish and her team have been travelling to a number of British collections, equipment in hand, to examine Raphael drawings on site. Back in New York, Mustalish has been working wonders on the Met\u2019s own Raphael drawings, including almost entirely removing a mysterious stain from a red-chalk drawing (around 1506-07). The stain had marred the baby belly of Saint John the Baptist, lower left, and is now scarcely visible to the naked eye.<\/p>\n
Hollein admits that he is anxious about \u201cdelivering something really interesting\u201d to a world\u2019s worth of Renaissance experts. But in the short-term he has another concern\u2014the weather. Having gone through New York\u2019s two major winter storms this year, he says, speaking in late February, \u201cI\u2019m more focused on not having snow that might delay shipments.\u201d<\/p>\n