The first major exhibition on Raphael in the United States: the Metropolitan Museum in New York announced it yesterday. It will run from March 29 to June 28, 2026 and will be titled Raphael: Sublime Poetry. This exhibition, curated by Carmen C. Bambach (an expert on Renaissance drawings and curator of the Met’s Department of Drawings and Prints) will explore the entire career of Raphael Sanzio (Urbino, 1483 - Rome, 1520), from his origins in Urbino to his prolific years in Florence, where he began to establish himself as a peer of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, to his final decade at the papal court in Rome. The exhibition will bring together more than 200 works including drawings, paintings, tapestries and works of decorative art from public and private collections around the world, and aims to offer a new perspective on this key figure of the Italian Renaissance, presenting his celebrated masterpieces alongside rarely exhibited treasures to reveal an extraordinarily creative mind.
“This unprecedented exhibition will offer an innovative look at the genius and legacy of Raphael, a true titan of the Italian Renaissance,” said Max Hollein, Director and CEO of the Met. “Visitors will have an exceptionally rare opportunity to view the extraordinary range of his creative genius through some of the artist’s most iconic and rarely lent works from around the world, many of which have never before been exhibited together.”
Among the highlights will be the Madonna of Alba from the National Gallery of Art, one of the most emblematic examples of Raphael’s mastery of the mature Renaissance ideals of harmony and classical beauty, which will be flanked by his preparatory drawings from the Museum of Fine Arts in Lille, and then again the Portrait of Baldassarre Castiglione, now in the Louvre, widely considered one of the greatest portraits of the mature Renaissance.
Lenders include important museums: Accademia Carrara (Bergamo), Albertina (Vienna), Ashmolean Museum (Oxford), British Museum (London), Galleria Borghese (Rome), Gallerie Nazionali Barberini Corsini (Rome), The Duke of Devonshire and Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement (Chatsworth), Galleria Nazionale delle Marche (Urbino), Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria (Perugia), Kupferstichkabinett (Berlin), Louvre (Paris), Fondazione Brescia Musei (Brescia), National Gallery (London), National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Palais des Beaux-Arts (Lille), Patrimonio Nacional de España (Madrid), Pinacoteca Comunale di Città di Castello, Pinacoteca Nazionale (Bologna), Prado (Madrid), Städel Museum (Frankfurt), Szépmüvészeti Múzeum (Budapest), Gallerie degli Uffizi (Florence), and among others, the Vatican Museums. In short, virtually all, or almost all, of Raphael’s great masterpieces will be there.
“The seven-year journey to create this exhibition has been an extraordinary opportunity to reformulate my understanding of this monumental artist,” said Carmen Bambach. “It is an exciting opportunity to connect with his unique artistic personality through the visual power, intellectual depth and tenderness of his images.”
Although he lived only 37 years, Raphael achieved such success as a painter, scenographer and architect that he was considered the pinnacle of artistic perfection for centuries after his death. The son of Giovanni Santi, a painter and poet active at the court of Urbino, Raphael came into contact with the most important writers and thinkers of his time in Rome, demonstrating a poetic sensibility that fascinated his contemporaries and later generations. Raphael knew how to create works with both intellectual depth and emotional depth, a necessary endowment in the complex political landscape of Renaissance courts.
The exhibition will unfold in chronological order, and will trace Raphael’s life and career, with thematic sections focusing on the development of his ideas and images. Recent scientific discoveries will also be included. There will also be drawings, presented together with the paintings to which they refer, and works made in other media to demonstrate the prodigious versatility and give an account of Raphael’s creative process. The appointment, then, is for the spring of next year.
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| Biggest exhibition on Raphael in the U.S.: will be in 2026 at the Metropolitan in New York |
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