Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino died at thirty-seven, on Good Friday, in 1520. He had, by that point, painted the Stanze in the Vatican, designed St. Peter's Basilica, directed archaeological excavations of ancient Rome, produced portraits that redefined the genre, and created at least two works — the Sistine Madonna and The School of Athens — that became so familiar they ceased to be seen. Five hundred and six years later, his work is arriving at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in what the museum is calling, with justifiable immodesty, "a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition." [1]

"Raphael: Sublime Poetry" opens March 29 and runs through June 28. It is the first comprehensive Raphael retrospective ever staged in the United States, a fact that requires a moment of consideration. America has hosted major exhibitions of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Vermeer, and Rembrandt. It has never given Raphael the full treatment. The third member of the Renaissance trinity, the artist Vasari crowned as the supreme painter, has been waiting in the queue since the museum system was invented. [2]

The scale is formidable. More than 170 works — paintings, drawings, tapestries, and decorative arts — assembled from the Louvre, the Vatican Museums, the Uffizi, the National Gallery in London, the Prado, and private collections that do not ordinarily lend. The Met's own holdings serve as the core, but the loans represent the kind of diplomatic and curatorial negotiation that takes years to execute. Several of the works have never left their home institutions before. Some will not leave them again. [1][3]

The New York Times published a major interactive feature on March 21 that attempted to answer a question the exhibition itself poses: why does Raphael matter as much as Leonardo and Michelangelo but occupy less space in the popular imagination? The answer the Times offered, through the lens of three works, is that Raphael's genius was so fluent it looked effortless, and effortlessness is harder to mythologize than torment. Leonardo was the enigmatic polymath. Michelangelo was the agonized sculptor on the ceiling. Raphael was the one who made perfection look easy, and we have never quite forgiven him for it. [4]

This is, in fact, the argument the exhibition intends to dismantle. "Sublime Poetry" is organised not as a greatest-hits procession but as a reconstruction of Raphael's entire thirty-seven-year life, from his training in Urbino under his father Giovanni Santi, through his years in Florence absorbing and surpassing Leonardo and Michelangelo, to his final decade in Rome where he functioned as something closer to a one-man creative agency than a solitary painter. He ran a workshop of fifty. He designed buildings, stage sets, and tapestries. He oversaw the preservation of Roman antiquities with a scholarly rigour that anticipated modern archaeology by three centuries. [1][3]

The press preview, held this week, drew a response that critics are describing in terms usually reserved for concerts or sporting events. Artforum's preview noted the exhibition "reconstructs Raphael's entire thirty-seven-year journey from Urbino to the Vatican." The press was not muted in its admiration. Art history exhibitions rarely generate this kind of anticipation. This one has. [5]

The exhibition will not travel internationally, but a second presentation will open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in October, extending access beyond Manhattan. The catalogue, published by Yale University Press, has already been flagged by Publishers Weekly as one of the top art books of the spring. The institutional apparatus around the show — the publications, the educational programming, the membership drives — suggests the Met is treating this as the centrepiece of its 2026 calendar and possibly its decade. [2][3]

There is a risk, always, in calling something once-in-a-lifetime. The phrase has been devalued by marketing departments that apply it to everything from wine sales to furniture clearances. In this case, the description is arithmetically defensible. The loans involved required negotiations with sovereign states. The insurance valuations are in the billions. Several of the works are too fragile to travel again. If you want to see Raphael in this depth, in this country, this is the moment. There will not be another.

Urbino's most prodigious son arrives at Fifth Avenue on Saturday. He has been dead for half a millennium, but the work, as it always does, got here on time.

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London