norman lebrecht<\/p>\n
April 25, 2026<\/p>\n
The Met Museum\u2019s big Spring exhibition is\u00a0Raphael: Sublime Poetry.\u00a0In this guided tour, the Exhibition\u2019s curator\u00a0Carmen Bambach,\u00a0Daniel Kershaw,\u00a0Exhibition Design Manager, and\u00a0Caroline Elenowitz-Hess, Research Associate, virtually explore it for our benefit.<\/p>\n
A true titan of the Italian Renaissance,\u00a0Raffaello di Giovanni Santi (1483\u20131520) \u2013 better known as Raphael\u00a0 \u00a0\u2013 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.<\/p>\n
The son of a painter and poet,\u00a0Raphael\u00a0engaged 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.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Raphael: Sublime Poetry is the first comprehensive exhibition on Raphael in the United States, and brings together more than 170 of the artist\u2019s greatest masterpieces and rarely seen treasures to illuminate the brilliance of Raphael\u2019s extraordinary creativity.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n