norman lebrecht
April 25, 2026
The Met Museum’s big Spring exhibition is Raphael: Sublime Poetry. In this guided tour, the Exhibition’s curator Carmen Bambach, Daniel Kershaw, Exhibition Design Manager, and Caroline Elenowitz-Hess, Research Associate, virtually explore it for our benefit.
A true titan of the Italian Renaissance, Raffaello di Giovanni Santi (1483–1520) – better known as Raphael – matched ambition with lyricism to create works with both intellectual heft and emotional depth, a necessary skill in the complex political landscape of Renaissance courts.
The son of a painter and poet, Raphael engaged with the foremost writers and thinkers of his age in Rome, displaying a poetic sensibility that captivated his peers and the generations that followed. In his short life of only 37 years, he achieved such profound success as a painter, designer, and architect that he was regarded as the pinnacle of artistic perfection for centuries after his death.
Raphael: Sublime Poetry is the first comprehensive exhibition on Raphael in the United States, and brings together more than 170 of the artist’s greatest masterpieces and rarely seen treasures to illuminate the brilliance of Raphael’s extraordinary creativity.
It follows the full breadth of his life and career, from his origins in Urbino to his rise in Florence, where he began to emerge as a peer of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, to his final, prolific decade at the papal court in Rome.