NEW YORK CITY—The three titans of the Italian Renaissance—Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael—have been ranked in varying orders since the 1500s. For more than three centuries, Raphael (1483–1520), painter, draftsman, and architect, was at the top, venerated as the incarnate of artistic perfection. Aspiring artists throughout Europe were taught to emulate his style. In the modern era, the critical consensus had reassigned Raphael to the rear, categorizing his art as saccharine, formulaic, emotionally sterile, and too idealized.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new blockbuster exhibition “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” challenges this assessment by assembling an astonishing grouping of his drawings, paintings, and tapestries that attest to the artist’s mastery of the interplay of vibrant color, light, space, and geometry.
