The current show at America\u2019s greatest museum, Raphael: Sublime Poetry, will run through June 28th of this year. As with most major exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, curators have gathered works by the artist from museums around the world \u2013 and in this case, not just by Raphael. There are 237 works in total, including 33 paintings, 142 drawings, some monumental tapestries, and some sculptural work, too.<\/p>\n
In remarks before the show\u2019s opening, principal curator Carmen Bambach said that, whereas many consider him third on the list of Renaissance masters, she \u201ccould make the argument that Raphael is every bit the equal of Leonardo and Michelangelo.\u201d After spending eight years pulling together the exhibit, I doubt she could say anything else. In any case, Raphael was a superb artist, and the show is stunning.<\/p>\n
I wonder, though, if most people could name a Raphael painting. Asked about da Vinci, many could name \u201cThe Last Supper\u201d and certainly the \u201cMona Lisa.\u201d And about Michelangelo, the Sistine Chapel ceiling or one of his sculptures, the \u201cDavid\u201d or \u201cPiet\u00e0\u201d perhaps. Of course, visitors who\u2019ve toured the Vatican Museum and seen the Raphael Rooms would certainly remember those extraordinary frescoes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But Ms. Bambach is among the best in the business when it comes to Renaissance art. When Robert and Veronica Royal were in Manhattan in 2017, my wife, Sydny, and I joined them at another of Bambach\u2019s MET curations, Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer. And even if I\u2019d visited the Raphael show not knowing Bambach is its curator, I would likely have assumed it must be her handiwork.<\/p>\n
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Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (1483-1520) was a kind of shooting star: He came to Rome from Umbria in northeast-central Italy at the age of 23 and died there at 37. In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, the first true art historian, Giorgio Vasari (who was born in 1511, so did not know Raphael personally) wrote of him:<\/p>\n
How generous and kind Heaven sometimes proves to be when it brings together in a single person the boundless riches of its treasures and all those graces and rare gifts that over a period of time are usually divided among many individuals can clearly be seen in the no less excellent than gracious Raphael.<\/p>\n
Vasari did know the great Michelangelo, and it\u2019s probably not an exaggeration to say he idolized him. And he definitely knew that the older man (Michelangelo was eight years Raphael\u2019s senior) frankly detested the upstart from the east, which enmity may have begun when Michelangelo saw himself portrayed in Raphael\u2019s Vatican fresco, The School of Athens, as an isolated, brooding, tormented Heraclitus.<\/p>\n
Michelangelo was neither a schemer nor a debaucher, and Raphael had a reputation for being both. Maybe yes, maybe no \u2013 it doesn\u2019t matter, because it\u2019s clearly what Michelangelo believed.<\/p>\n
But Vasari does write that when the sculptor Donato Bramante, keeper of the keys, let Raphael into the Sistine Chapel for the first time (Michelangelo was away in Florence), the young man was so stunned by the majesty and muscularity of Michelangelo\u2019s prophets and patriarchs, that \u201cafter he had already finished it, Raphael immediately repainted the figure of. . .Isaiah in Rome\u2019s Sant\u2019Agostino.\u201d<\/p>\n
This may have been why Michelangelo said, \u201cEverything he knew about art he got from me.\u201d\u00a0In some versions of the quote, \u201cgot\u201d is \u201cstole.\u201d Whether or not Raphael was a plagiarist is debatable. After all, everybody who has mastered anything has had teachers along the way.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Heads and Hands of Two Apostles\u00a0 c. 1519-20.\u00a0 [Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England]<\/p>\n
The MET\u2019s show is comprehensive. It even includes a room in which all the frescoes from the aforementioned Vatican Raphael Rooms are projected by video onto the walls in rotation. (The same was true at that Michelangelo show, with the Sistine Chapel illuminated overhead in the gallery.)<\/p>\n
It is fine and fitting to see featured in the exhibit paintings by Pietro Perugino, a superb painter and one of Raphael\u2019s teachers, as well as bas-relief sculptures by Raphael.<\/p>\n
For me, though, there were three highlights. First (and this comes more from Sydny), is the remarkable number of drawings by Raphael (as above). There may be no better way to gauge the pure technique of an artist than such sketches, and it\u2019s rare to see them because of their fragility.<\/p>\n
Portrait of Baldassarre Castiglione,\u00a01514-1516\u00a0 [Louvre, Paris]<\/p>\n