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March 21, 2026 <\/p>\n
For centuries, the Renaissance master Raphael counted as the obvious third in a trio of geniuses, alongside Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. He was venerated for the lifelike grace of his compositions. But for something like the last 150 years, his star has been fading.<\/p>\n
His sweet Madonnas have come to strike modern eyes as too pious and pretty for their own good. \u201cHe\u2019s very much a Victorian Raphael in people\u2019s minds, and I think it\u2019s done damage,\u201d said Carmen Bambach, a senior curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. To undo that damage, for the past eight years she\u2019s been laboring on \u201cRaphael: Sublime Poetry,\u201d the 237-work survey that opens at the museum on March 29.<\/p>\n
Its paintings, drawings, prints and tapestries should reveal Raphael as an artist for our times: an idealist whose art stayed rooted in the real; an innovator whose experiments shaped later norms; an entrepreneur who knew how to spread word of his art through new technologies.<\/p>\n
To test Raphael\u2019s staying power, I invited Bambach and two other experts in Renaissance art to explore the glories, and significance, of three of her exhibition\u2019s landmark works.<\/p>\n
For Bambach, even the picture\u2019s unlikely beauties get their full force from the hard truths of Renaissance life. Her exhibition highlights the era\u2019s maternal and infant mortality, which took the life of Raphael\u2019s mother and her infant daughter when he was 8. For Raphael\u2019s original viewers, that back story would have given special meaning to the striking good health of the mother and child he painted.<\/p>\n