Raphael conquers New York: the complete story of a genius in the Met – World – Arte.it

World – Then in the spring of 2026 the Madonna of Alba temporarily leaves the National Gallery in Washington to arrive on Fifth Avenue in New York, she finds a whole constellation of masterpieces waiting for her. Around that perfect round, symbol of Renaissance harmony, the Metropolitan Museum wants to build with “Raphael: Sublime poetry‘ the first large unitary fresco op Raphael never tried in the United States: more than two hundred worksfrom drawings to altarpieces, from cartoons for tapestries to decorative objects, brought together to follow a fast and decisive career.The exhibition, scheduled from March 29 to June 28, 2026 in the rooms of Met Fifth Avenue, is presented as the first major international exhibition entirely devoted to the Urbino master in an American museum and, due to the size of the loans, as the largest ever organized abroad about his work. It is the culmination of a long curatorial journey: seven years of research, contacts with museums and private collections, diagnostic checks carried out under the guidance of Carmen C. Bambachhead of the Met’s prints and drawings department and already the creator of the great New York tribute to Michelangelo in 2017.

The route follows Raphael’s biography Duchy of Urbino to the papal court. We start from the youth trials, still indebted to the lessons of Perugianto reach full Roman maturity, when the artist is called to decorate the Vatican Chambers and to compete with the ancients, with Leonardo and with Michelangelo. The chronological structure is crossed by thematic cores that emphasize the genesis of the images: studies, variations, second thoughts, close dialogue between paper and color. The common thread is already explicit in the title ‘Sublime Poetry’, which is reminiscent the painter’s trainingson of a court poet, and his familiarity with the humanists of the time, which resulted in a painting capable of translating the intellectual tensions of the Renaissance into images.

The core of the project is the attempt to keep all the faces of the world together Raphaelian laboratory. In addition to the most famous Madonnas, such as the Madonna of Alba from Washington, the exhibition brings together preparatory studies that have been preserved in Europe, for example i Fogli del Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lilleto show the process that leads from a chalk line to a perfectly balanced composition. In addition to the large sacred altar paintings, portraits appear, including the Baldassare Castiglione lent by Louvreconsidered one of the absolute highlights of Renaissance portraiture for its ability to preserve the entire identity of a court intellectual in one glance.

A relevant chapter is devoted to it representation of the feminine. The Met announces special attention to inventions that challenge Western art for the first time in the history of Western art the naked body of the woman as a direct study model, and for the many declinations of Madonna and Childbetween domestic tenderness and liturgical solemnity. In this context work like Lucrezia’s drawing from the Met, capturing the figure just before suicide, dialogues with images of very intimate motherhood, building a path from martyrdom to care, from public tragedy to private feeling.

The international character of the operation is clearly evident from the list of lenders. In addition to the American collections, from National Gallery in Washington already Boston MuseumEuropean institutions such as the appear Louvreil Pradothe National Gallery in Londonthe Uffizi Galleryil British museumI’Albertina of Vienna, theAshmolean the Oxford, la Borghese Gallerythe National Gallery of the Marcheil Copper engraving cabinet of Berlin, i Vatican Museums. In this way, over a few months, a geography fragmented by centuries of circulation, acquisitions, dynastic and collecting transitions is reconstituted.

“Raphael: Sublime Poetry” fits ideally into the season of major exhibitions that, from 2020, have reinterpreted Raphael’s legacy on the occasion of the fifth centenary of his death. After the monumental project of the Quirinale stables in Rome, with more than two hundred works brought together in collaboration with the Uffizi, and beyond the National Gallery’s London retrospectivewhich covered the painter’s entire activity, including paintings, drawings, architecture and applied arts, the focus now shifts to New York, where the artist enters the center of the American museum story.

A non-secondary role is assigned scientific research instruments. The Met announces the inclusion of the latest results from the diagnostic studies carried out on the paintings, with infrared images and technical studies that allow us to follow step by step the construction of the figures, the changes of idea, the distribution of light and color. The dialogue between this evidence and the drawings displayed next to the paintings is intended to give something back Raphael as a completely modern artistaware that each image is the result of a continuous process of verification and correction, and not of sudden inspiration.

The exhibition’s broad perspective also allows us to gauge Raphael’s fortunes in America, where his models have long worked more through reproduction, drawing and copying than through the original. Bringing together in the rooms of the Met canvases that have written the history of European collecting, cartoons for tapestries associated with papal Rome, and preparatory sheets preserved in the drawing cabinets of half a continent, means making tangible for the American public the concrete dimension of a canon that has until now been above all a book, a printed image, the history of art.

The plan, announced in a big way Gallery 899 of the Met Fifth Avenue, which can be visited with the normal museum ticket. Concerts, meetings and an illustrated scientific catalog are planned around the exhibition, intended to collect the results of the preparatory work of the curatorial team and to establish a new state of affairs in the field of studies on Raphael. For a few months, on Fifth Avenue, the Italian Renaissance it will present itself in one of its most complete forms: not as an abstract myth of the perfect painter, but as a living set of works, materials, loans and looks that, five centuries later, still measure our relationship with the idea of ​​beauty.