(Above) Raphael: The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia. From Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale (at the Exhibition Raphael: Sublime Poetry)
Raphael: Sublime Poetry
Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
March 29–June 28, 2026
The Metropolitan Museum has just opened a new exhibition on Raphael. Now Raphael Sanzio has been, even in his own lifetime and up to the present day, one of the most famous artists who ever lived. This exhibition collects many paintings and drawings of the artist. It’s a unique opportunity to study the artist’s development as well as the development of his individual works of art based on this unique juxtaposition of works from all over the world.
Now Raphael’s time (he died in 1520 at just 37 years of age) was of course a unique culmination of Renaissance and Western art. It was the age of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Giorgione, Bellini, and Titian, among many others. Raphael at an early age showed a complete mastery of the technical handicraft of art. But early on he also showed a unique organizational talent and an ability to receive and understand contributions of others which he incorporated creatively into his style.
Raphael’s career reached its apogee in the Rome of Popes Julius II and Leo X, where he found appropriate challenges for his artistic genius. As time went on the commissions grew ever larger and he was able to meet the situation by assembling and managing a well-trained workshop. A true universal genius of the Renaissance, Raphael later had a role in the planning of the new basilica of Saint Peter. Moreover, he was able to work with artists in other media, creating influential works that for centuries diffused his style all over Europe (the prints of Raimondi; the great tapestries for which Raphael prepared the cartoons). All this can be seen in this exhibition.
But Raphael was not merely an exemplar of a static, “canonized” art. In his interactions with the art of Leonardo or Michelangelo he was already laying the foundations for further developments. Especially his later frescoes introduce movement, drama and conflict. It was these principles that would dominate the next period of art – mannerism – after Raphael’s death.
In this exhibition we see abundant evidence of the various aspects of his genius. Take the many images of the Madonna, each one carefully differentiated from the others. The portraits are of unique quality. Then, there are the great religious paintings. The religious works demonstrate the significance of Raphael’s and Renaissance Italy’s Catholicism for the art of the High Renaissance – this is no “art for art’s sake.” The Madonnas, as the exhibition points out, derive ultimately from a Byzantine icon of the 12th and 13th centuries. It was an image that was particularly relevant when the mortality of both mothers and children in childbirth was exceedingly high. The tapestries, depicting events from the Gospels or the acts of the apostles, are of epic grandeur.
But of particular relevance to the spiritual vision of Raphael is the painting of Saint Cecilia in ecstasy. The saint turns her eyes to heaven, viewing a chorus of angels singing, while she holds, facing downward, a small organ. At her feet, strewn on the ground, are various worldly musical instruments, “broken and unstrung”. She is surrounded by four other saints involved in a mysterious dialogue with each other or with the viewer. The style is not didactic but displays great insight into the personages depicted.
The Metropolitan Museum was able to restrain its woke commentary more than it usually has done recently. Yes, in this exhibition there are passages in the Museum’s texts about the dire position of women in Renaissance – ignoring the role that extremely well-educated women played in the unfolding of the Renaissance as the exhibition itself points out. I also did not appreciate the use of the Alba Madonna as a logo on posters, scarves, refrigerator magnets and mugs.
(Above) The “Alba Madonna.” Currently in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. – previously in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg.(From the exhibition Raphael: Sublime Poetry)
Now such an exhibition, involving consideration and comparison of many drawings and paintings, summons the visitor to contemplation. That is difficult to achieve in the crowded exhibition halls of the Metropolitan Museum. With a few exceptions the crowd was definitely older or to put it more frankly, old. Some visitors were in wheelchairs or using walkers. Is this because the art of Raphael – that once had been almost a cliché – now is known only to those who attended high school or college art courses in the distant past? I don’t know!
And what is a Catholic to think about the light this exhibition may shed upon the current situation in the Catholic Church? Because Raphael, in contrast to the artists of modernity was not an individual creator but was embedded in a society that shared his ideals and offered him the patronage to realize them. These was especially true of Raphael’s two principal patrons, Julius II and Leo X. If we move forward to our own day there’s quite a different situation. Even though it may be an invidious comparison to set the current regime of the Vatican against that which produced perhaps the highest development of Western art, we have to admit that the current artistic patronage of the Roman Catholic Church is a sick joke. We have the cartoon-like images of Marco Rupnik. We have the obsequious courting of contemporary artists by clerics like Cardinal Ravasi and Bishop Fisichella. By introducing the “Luce” mascot of the 2025 jubilee year, the Catholic Church abased itself before what their semi-senile leadership thinks is popular “youth” culture. Then we have, with the direct involvement of the late Pope Francis, agitprop-like art: statues of migrants, art created in women’s prison etc.
Raphael, with his precocious ability, seemingly unlimited facility, organizational skill, authentically classical harmony -as well as his evident religious faith – may seem alien to our day’s notion of the artist. The Metropolitan Museum itself offers a strangely contrasting exhibition, now in its final days, of Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946). We see, in her works, the final stages of the Western figurative tradition: isolated individuals, dreamy symbolist landscapes, self-portraits revealing a person seemingly in dissolution or even on the brink of madness.
We ourselves cannot recreate the art or the specific circumstances of the High Renaissance. Much of 19th century Catholic ecclesiastical art was a commendable but not totally successful attempt to do so (e.g., the “Nazarenes”). But what we can do is study the masterpieces of an artist like Raphael, and attempt to understand the great skill, discipline and intellectual effort that were necessary to create them. And perhaps from this study, God willing, a new Christian art may arise in some way and at some time not yet known to us. For it is by engaging with the masters of the past that a rebirth ( that is, a “renaissance “) of culture will come.
