The Met’s blockbuster Raphael exhibition looks beyond the artist’s idealised Madonnas

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is mounting “Raphael: Sublime Poetry,” described as the Met’s and America’s first comprehensive exhibition on Raphael (1483–1520). The show assembles 237 works, including 33 paintings and 142 drawings, spanning Raphael’s career from Urbino to Papal Rome, with major loans such as The Alba Madonna (c. 1509–11) from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (1514–16) from the Louvre. Curator Carmen C. Bambach says she secured loans through repeated requests and aims to move beyond the “oversaturation” of Raphael’s idealized Madonna imagery by providing broader social and historical context, including material addressing childbirth risks and childhood mortality. The exhibition follows recent Raphael reappraisals at Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale (2020) and London’s National Gallery (2022).

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