Raphael: Sublime Poetry (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; 29 March - 28 June 2026)
It took eight long years to put together this extraordinary exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art featuring over 200 works – including paintings, drawings and tapestries – most of them by one of the greatest artists the world has ever seen, Raffaello Santi, more commonly known simply as Raphael.
Born in Urbino on Good Friday 1483, Raphael died in Rome on Good Friday 1520. In his biography Raphael: A Passionate Life (Polity Press, London, 2012), Antonio Forcellino writes that he ‘was more than just the painter, the architect, and the stage designer who had created images of disturbing beauty. He had also acted as the interpreter of a very particular world, the dream of a golden rebirth to be brought about through literary studies and painting, and in this sense he had played an essential part in convincing the intellectuals of his time of the harmony, culture and intellectual and sensual equilibrium that Rome attained during the years in which he had dominated the artistic scene there’.
