The Metropolitan Museum of Art has opened its major spring exhibition, "Raphael: Sublime Poetry," the first comprehensive survey of the artist in the United States. Curator Carmen Bambach, exhibition design manager Daniel Kershaw, and research associate Caroline Elenowitz-Hess guide a virtual tour of the show, which brings together over 170 masterpieces and rarely seen works spanning Raphael's career from Urbino to Florence and Rome.
The exhibition matters because it offers an unprecedented opportunity to examine the full breadth of Raphael's output—painting, design, and architecture—in one venue, highlighting his poetic sensibility and intellectual depth. By contextualizing his work within the complex political landscape of Renaissance courts and his relationships with contemporaries like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, the show reaffirms Raphael's enduring status as a pinnacle of artistic perfection.