Raphael At The Met, Review: A Must-See Show The 'Greatest Influencer'

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Raphael's Met Blockbuster Ends With a Tapestry He Didn't Finish - and That's the Point

A hulking figure strains out of a rocky hillside, his forearm thrusting so forcefully it seems to break the boundary of its own frame. That image - from the monumental tapestry“Saint Paul in Prison” (ca. 1517–21) - is the final note of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's new Raphael exhibition, opening to the public Sunday. It reads like a curtain call for Renaissance virtuosity: muscle, drama, and a sense of pictorial force that still feels modern.

Yet the work's attribution complicates the tidy myth of solitary genius. The tapestry is credited not to Italian painter Raphael (1483–1520) but to the workshop of Flemish artist Pieter van Aelst, with Raphael's role limited to the preparatory cartoon, which is not on view at the Met. Raphael died the year before the textile was completed. Van Aelst's workshop carried on, a reminder that even the most celebrated names of the Renaissance often depended on systems of production that could outlast them.

That tension - between Raphael as singular master and Raphael as orchestrator - runs through“Raphael: Sublime Poetry,” a sweeping survey organized by curator Carmen C. Bambach after eight years of research and negotiation. With 237 works, the exhibition is billed as the first retrospective of its kind ever staged in the United States, a logistical feat in a field where the most prized paintings rarely travel. The show's scale also places it in conversation with recent European blockbusters: a major Raphael exhibition mounted in Rome in 2020 for the 500th anniversary of the artist's death, and another at London's National Gallery two years later.

Raphael's reputation hardly needs burnishing. His paintings helped codify principles of perspective and composition that became foundational to Western art. His portraits, in particular, brought a grounded psychological presence to sitters at a moment when the genre could still tilt toward idealization. He worked for the era's most powerful patrons, including Pope Leo X and the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi, and his influence radiated outward, shaping later developments from Mannerism to Neoclassicism.

Even modern artists found themselves in his orbit. Pablo Picasso is reported to have drawn a sharp distinction between Renaissance titans:“Leonardo da Vinci promises us heaven,” he said.“Raphael gives it to us.”

But the Met's exhibition also insists on the scaffolding behind that“heaven.” Raphael's formation was shaped by earlier painters - notably Giovanni Santi, his father, and Perugino, his mentor - and by the labor of a sizable workshop that was unusual for its time. That collaborative model famously irritated Michelangelo, who viewed Raphael's method as a lesser kind of making. Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari, however, used the same word for Raphael and the people around him:“blessed.”

“Raphael: Sublime Poetry” leans into that collective reality. Its checklist includes numerous works not executed by Raphael's hand, a curatorial choice that reframes his short, incandescent career as something closer to a coordinated enterprise than a lone thunderclap. The argument is not that Raphael mattered less, but that his mastery often lay in synthesis: absorbing the innovations of others, refining them, and making them feel inevitable.

Visitors expecting a parade of paintings may be surprised by the show's emphasis on drawings. The Met's selection underscores how central draftsmanship was to Raphael's practice - a place where ideas were tested, compositions tightened, and figures given their unmistakable poise. Still, the museum has secured a small number of marquee works, including a gallery devoted to painted portraits. Among the standouts is“Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione” (ca. 1514–15), a touchstone of Renaissance portraiture whose quiet authority has long served as a benchmark for the genre.

In that context, the closing tapestry lands less as a footnote than as a final provocation. The figure's arm breaking through the frame becomes a metaphor for the exhibition's larger premise: Raphael's art expanded what painting could do, but it also emerged from a network of teachers, assistants, and specialized workshops. The Met's retrospective invites viewers to hold both truths at once - the brilliance of an individual and the machinery that helped make that brilliance visible.

“Raphael: Sublime Poetry” opens to the public Sunday at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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