“Raphael: Sublime Poetry” at the Met Reunites Works with Their Historical Companions

The Colonna Altarpiece is one of four major altarpieces that the artist produced in Perugia between 1504 and 1508, a time when he was working mostly for private patrons in Florence. Together these altarpieces demonstrate how Raphael was developing his ability to compose monumental figural ensembles, master his control of oil paint, and create harmonious color combinations. Commissioned by the cloistered Franciscan tertiary nuns of Sant’Antonio di Padova in Perugia, the altarpiece was intended for their private worship space, the chiesa interna.

The altarpiece originally included multiple parts in addition to the main panel—a predella with several small panels, and a pair of saints on the left and right sides—but was disassembled and dispersed in the 1660s. The main panel and one lunette of the altarpiece have been a treasured highlight of the Met collection since 1916, when they were gifted to the museum by New York banker J. Pierpont Morgan (who acquired them, as the last major Raphael altarpiece still in private hands, in 1901).

The three small panels of the predella show scenes from the life of Christ and will be reunited for the first time in this exhibition (thanks to loans from London’s National Gallery and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, joining the lunette already in the Met collection). The two flanking saints, Anthony of Padua and Francis of Assisi, will also be on loan, from the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Among other connections to be made, seeing the altarpiece as a whole will allow visitors to appreciate how Raphael painted the figures in the panel and the lunette in a unified scale, which hadn’t been the prevailing practice for earlier Umbrian artists.

In the years when Raphael was in Florence, he explored arranging figures in a pyramid shape (maybe inspired by the compositions of Leonardo da Vinci). Madonna of the Meadow was one such experiment, and this exhibition reunites several studies for it illustrating different ideas for poses. A double-sided sheet of sketches from Vienna’s Albertina Museum shows Raphael trying out arrangements of the Virgin Mary with the cherubic Christ and Saint John infants.

For the first time ever, this exhibition will bring together two important preparatory studies that may have been composed on the same sheet of paper. One is held by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and shows Raphael’s rendering of the main design using a sculpted model (likely in clay or wax) to map out the light effects on the figures. The other, owned by the Met, is a red chalk drawing that shows the group of figures mostly as it appears in the final painting.

Raphael painted the circular Alba Madonna when he was living in Rome, sometime between 1509 and 1511, and to this day not much is known about its patronage. It depicts the Virgin Mary along with an infant Jesus, who is trying to grab a reed cross from an infant Saint John the Baptist (likely a symbolic representation of the triumph of resurrection). There’s a sculptural solidity to the figures, and despite being a trio they nestle comfortably in the round tondo format.

The exhibition will bring the painting (held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.) together with a double-sided sheet of studies from the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille. This sheet demonstrates how Raphael used his studio assistant as a stand-in for the Madonna, experimenting with different poses and gradually finding one that worked for the circular frame. On the recto side of the sheet, Saint John appears to be offering the Christ Child a lightly articulated lamb (instead of the reed cross that appears in the final version of the painting).

Raphael’s Virgin and Child with Raphael, Tobias, and Saint Jerome, long nicknamed Madonna del Pesce (Madonna of the Fish) for the fish that a foregrounded Tobias holds in his right hand, is an understudied work that deserves more attention, Bambach believes. The Virgin Mary and infant Christ appear to be interacting with the saints around them, even though their lives were separated by centuries. Produced by the artist with help from the workshop for Del Duce Chapel in the basilica of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples, the painted altarpiece (loaned from Madrid’s Prado Museum) will be reunited with a preliminary study from Florence’s Uffizi Galleries and a modello drawing on loan from the National Galleries of Scotland.

In the Uffizi sketch, we observe how Raphael drew with differing levels of detail and played with a few ideas, using workshop assistants that he posed in the studio. That’s why we see, for instance, a young man wearing a square cap as a stand-in for the Madonna. Instead of holding a Christ Child (apparently there were no available infants in the studio that day), this garzone grasps an amorphous form that would later become the baby Jesus. The Madonna’s throne is shown obliquely and turned to the right, as opposed to the frontal view that Raphael ultimately used in the painting. “The expressive and self-­assured manner of drawing, as well as the many adjustments of the figures and the still undetermined poses of the Virgin and Jerome on the right, indicates a vividly creative work in progress,” Bambach observes in the exhibition catalog.

By the time Raphael made the modello drawing, which is close to the final painted version, he had added the background curtain that cascades in a dramatic diagonal and grants dynamism to the scene.

Not long after Raphael painted this altarpiece for the high altar of a new chapel dedicated to Saint Cecilia in the Bolognese church of San Giovanni in Monte, it became a must-see painting for fellow artists; it is even mentioned in early guidebooks. At the request of one of Raphael’s few known female patrons, Bolognese mystic and religious celebrity Elena Duglioli dall’Olio, the artist painted an ecstatic and emotional Cecilia being raised to heaven.

From a design perspective, Raphael contended with the challenge of infusing drama into a relatively simple composition. His thought process becomes clearer when we view the painting (on loan from the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna) with both known preliminary drawings. The first is a demonstration drawing on loan from the Petit Palais in Paris, which shows the central figures largely disconnected from each other. Raphael ultimately changed this, to add more interplay of gazes. The second drawing, held by the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, Netherlands, is a red chalk study of the Saint Paul figure at the left of the composition, a major departure from the Petit Palais drawing.