Raphael Does New York in a Splendid Met Exhibition

The forever savant, new courtier style, Madonnas, killer portraits, altarpieces, and more.

W hat better way to observe Mother’s Day than with a slice of Raphael’s Madonnas? A baby happy to be with mom, and, yes, the story gets heavy, but what tenderness, love, and beauty in those early days. The Met’s dazzling, breathtaking new exhibition, Raphael: Sublime Poetry, has plenty of Mary-and-Jesus scenes and much, much more. The show’s filled with beauty, but it’s intellectually sharp, too, starting with the first line of the introduction wall text in which the Italian Renaissance artist is described as “one of the great influencers of all time.” I think of influencers as modern media personalities shaping consumer behavior on things like fitness, investing, and looks, people who monetize brand awareness. They’re TikTokish, often young, and prey on those who are uncertain, fearful of putting a foot wrong, and also young.

But Raphael? An influencer? Called Raffaello Sanzio, he lived from 1483 to 1520 in a world where those with consumer firepower were very few — at least in the art world from Milan, Florence, and the rest of Tuscany, into Umbria and Urbino, Raphael’s hometown, to Rome. In that tiny world, though, he was a matchless tastemaker and gold standard-setter not only in his lifetime but, in the art world writ large, for half a millennium after his death. He fashioned the gentle persona of Jesus and of Mary, too, the great intercessor. He also fashioned, as do influencers today, the look of real beauty. His images filtered through class, ethnic, religious, and gender barriers to the point where they’re so ingrained they seem bourgeois.

I’ll do two pieces on Sublime Poetry, focusing first on his early work before he became the Vatican’s superstar artist, around 1508. Sublime Poetry is chronological, starting with Raphael’s early days in Urbino in the Marche in central Italy and ending with his death on Good Friday in 1520 at the top of his game, the mastermind behind The School of Athens, painter to the popes, poised to be Rome’s master architect. I’ll cover his Vatican years next week.

Who and what is Raphael? I’ll start with our National Gallery’s small and large Madonnas, one from around 1505, the other from 1508. The theme of the baby Jesus and his mother made Raphael famous and keeps him so. I’ll toss Christ Blessing, from around 1504, into the mix.

The three are beacon lights of serenity fit for any age where there’s turbulence, which means every age and makes them timeless. A state of serenity, the place we go to meditate, is essential to deep contemplation and devotion. Raphael was by then immersed in all things Leonardo, who taught him when they knew each other in Florence that a good painter ought to capture the likeness of his subject, an easy thing, but also “the intention of his mind,” the hard thing — conveyed through gestures, from the movement of limbs to a hint of a smile or a twitch of an eyebrow. Or, in his two Cowper Madonnas — owned by the Earl of Cowper — the child playfully grasps his mother’s gown, gazes are tender, hers more somber than his since Mary has an inkling of the future. Mary’s one hand supports his bare bottom, a tiny foot, big toe upturned, rests on the other. A blue sky, the stuff of Arcadia, sets them off. The pair is unspoiled, innocent, believable, and among us, sweet but not syrupy. Colors are soft, and folds in drapery and baby fat are subtle.

Ultra-refined, too, is his adult Christ Blessing, tiny at 10 by 12 inches and seductive. It’s not a speaking likeness. He’s blessing us, not hectoring us. Raphael’s subjects aren’t shouters, so much so that I think of silent movies when I look at them. Ideal beauty is for men, too. A perfectly formed, expressive hand presses into flesh, the red slice leading to red drapery folds, and a hand raised in blessing, one of many arcs in equipoise. Everything’s balanced, which is one reason Raphael’s art seems so affable.

The last Raphael blockbuster in America was at our National Gallery in 1983. We need more warm-and-fuzzy and ought to be newly educated on why Raphael was such an art superstar. Only the Met can do it, with its money, scholars, connections, and prestige. So we have Sublime Poetry, an epic show, with more than 200 objects: Thirty-three paintings and 142 drawings by Raphael, tapestries he designed, prints on which he collaborated, manuscripts, and works by his father and Perugino, both mentors.

Carmen Bambach, the curator of Italian and Spanish drawings at the Met, curated Sublime Poetry. She believes, as I do and more so than most Raphael scholars, that Urbino is not only the place to start but a place Raphael aesthetically and philosophically never really left. Her reasons are better than mine. I’m a chauvinist. Urbino is about 20 miles from the Marche coast where my family, via my Italian mother, lives. Raphael is a paisano. He signed his work “Raphael Urbinis” all his life. In Bambach’s book, she calls him the Urbinate, the man from Urbino. My heart swells with pride.

Today, Urbino is a pretty hill town, but in Raphael’s time it was a powerhouse, owing mostly to its ruling duke, Federico da Montefeltro, a scholar, potentate, general, and arts patron. His harmoniously arcaded palazzo, sublime, marquetry-rich studiolo, and bridgeless nose in Piero della Francesca’s portrait are still to be seen. He was the ideal Renaissance ruler, cunning and quick but refined, humane, informed by ancient literature, and ultimately a man of peace, learning, and harmony. Raphael’s father, Giovanni, was a Montefeltro court painter. He’s a decent painter, but the zeitgeist that Raphael absorbed as a child is best seen in The Ideal City, from sometime between 1475 and 1490, probably by Fra Carnevale. The picture’s worth a thousand words about the new, rationalized conception of vast space ordered by geometry and perspective, quoting Greek and Roman models, and making room for color and light. It’s the architecture of civic virtue.

When Raphael, a budding artist, had exhausted whatever training his father could give, he went to Umbria and to Perugino, then Italy’s most renowned painter. Sublime Poetry takes a deep dive into Perugino’s impact on the young Raphael, who studied with him as a teen and learned fast about Perugino’s style and technique but also about networking in the big, wide world outside of Urbino. The Ideal City is very much about balance, perspective, clarity, and reason, but paintings such as Perugino’s Sepulcrum Christi and The Virgin and Child with Saint John, both from the late 1490s, are about refinement and quietude as well. Perugino’s figures can be just on the edge of dainty, though, a defect Raphael soon overcomes. His technique is exacting, so the result can be minute and dry. Raphael’s Banner of the Holy Trinity, from between 1497 and 1500, is on view. This front-and-back painting was meant to be carried in a parade of thanks for dodging a plague in Città di Castello in the Marche. It won the artist, still a teen, his certification as a master painter. He’s still Perugino’s prodigy, but what an accomplishment.

Here we see for the first time in Sublime Poetry a group of high-end master drawings. It’s both a paintings show and a drawings show, but the two are intertwined, for Italians at least, with heavy-duty immersion in drawing, teaching Raphael about monumentality, anatomical control, and facility. He could experiment with form, gesture, and atmosphere and chase the truth using live models. Raphael perfected a new and likely radical approach to figures in space pioneered by, among others, Perugino. Rather than using the size of figures to emphasize their importance, artists in the 1490s began to use a uniform scale. Whether it’s contrapposto, foreshortening, details of faces, or placing multiple figures in space, Raphael started with drawings. It’s easy to dive into technical details and get stuck in quicksand. The exhibition allows us to see the drawings as freestanding vignettes, spooky moments when we see just a head in isolation. Enjoy their beauty and energy.

The Met owns the main panel of Raphael’s Colonna Altarpiece, from between 1504 and 1505, a gift from J. P. Morgan, and, to its great credit, reunites the little panels that went with it as supporting images for the first time since 1663, when it was dismembered. That’s a big deal. The main panel is a triumph in multilayered perspective, given that the two foreground saints, then Baby Jesus, Mary, and the baby Saint John the Baptist, then the two background saints, and finally the canopy are all in different planes. There are dainty features à la Perugino, especially in the busy-bee predellas, but the two men have a new weight and volume made from tone and shadows. That’s new and Florentine.  Though Raphael supplied the altarpiece for a convent in Perugia, he’d moved to Florence, the Renaissance mecca and to the sphere especially of Leonardo. I’m surprised the show didn’t do more with it, but there’s a lot happening in this section.

Two Leonardo drawings on view, having what the curator calls “feral energy,” and drawings by Raphael show the younger artist’s move from Perugino’s painstaking, methodical drawing regimen, bound to produce placidity, to Leonardo’s quick style, which keeps him from overthinking or losing an idea’s momentum. Raphael’s Florence drawings have a new and electric spark, and his paintings have more movement and animation. Michelangelo? More on him next week. He was among the very few people Raphael despised.

I’ll finish for now with Raphael’s portraits. The portrait section comes after Raphael’s Virgin and Child paintings and drawings and before mother-lode galleries on his drawings for his Vatican projects. No divinities, no ancient philosophers, and a palette cleanser. Constantly looking and learning, Raphael couldn’t help but know Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, painted while the two were in Florence. The portrait, we learn, came from a new Leonardo recipe, the subject luxuriously but not ostentatiously dressed and a three-quarter view as opposed to a bust — too minimal — or a full-length portrait — too maximal and given to grand gestures and clutter. Her head is turned to the left, her torso is a balance between casual and stiff, hands are meticulously painted and part of the story, and she has a look of engagement but also comportment.

Raphael’s Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, from around 1515, is a Roman picture, but Raphael probably met him around 1504 when Castiglione, the courtier, diplomat, and writer, had a long stay in Urbino at the Montefeltro ducal palace. His The Book of the Courtier — the model how-to book on ideal comportment — draws from his time there. In his book, he advised on dance, athletics, dress, hierarchies, dignity, grace, and what he called “an airy sweetness” in all things. Castiglione wasn’t rearing a race of flatterers and connivers. A courtier was a man of substance and principle who nevertheless possessed what he called sprezzatura, an insouciance in which navigating complexity seemed to come as if by instinct.

Raphael had sprezzatura, dabbled in poetry, wasn’t a scholar by any means but strove for beauty, virtue, and perfection in himself, his friends, and his subjects. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were his yardsticks as much as Perugino, Leonardo, and Michelangelo. Given the show’s subtitle, by the by, I’m surprised more isn’t made of these poets aside from a reference here and there. La Muta from the early 1500s is most indebted to Mona Lisa. Comparing it with, say, Young Woman with Unicorn from a couple of years later or his Portrait of Bindo Altoviti from around 1515 shows how fast he progressed. La Muta, and she wasn’t really mute, is stiff while Young Woman is more graceful, with fancier dress and a more elegant background, and then there’s that cute, wriggling little unicorn. Her thumb and finger caress the animal’s paws. The unicorn is a symbol of love and chastity, so it’s likely a wedding portrait.

The Altoviti portrait belongs to our National Gallery, and I’ve seen it a lot. He rose to become one of Florence’s leading bankers but, in his twenties, was among Raphael’s high-society buddies. Leonardo had pioneered the pose — a view from the shoulder of a turned head, hand on his chest — in the 1490s, but Altoviti made it famous. How could it not? That baby face and those rosy cheeks, vermillion lips, blue eyes, blond 1960s hippie hair, and jaunty cap make what the show calls “an ideal of radiant masculinity.”

That it is, though it’s easy to go wobbly over it and forget that missing from the show are Raphael’s iconic portraits of Pope Julius II and his successor Leo X and any of his self-portraits, except for a drawing that might be one Raphael did of himself when he was 13. The Met got tons of “no way” responses to its initial loan requests. “No was the first step to yes,” Bambach said, and her optimism and doggedness got her nearly 200 Raphaels, a huge success. An extra treat is Isabella Rossellini’s narration of the audio tour. Next week, to Rome, the Vatican, and Raphael at his zenith.