Natalie Haddad at Hyperallergic:
“Nature created him as a gift to the world,” wrote Giorgio Vasari of Raphael in the 16th-century compendium The Lives of the Artists. Roughly 500 years later, the sentiment still holds true. Born in 1483 in Urbino, Italy, a small center of 15th and 16th-century art and culture, Raphael embodies the ideal of the Renaissance man: In his 37 years, he established himself as a painter rivaling Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, ran a thriving studio, and expanded into architecture and design. Yet it’s the humanism of his art, reflecting his own empathic personality, that continues to resonate across time and space.
Sublime Poetry, opening this weekend at the Metropolitan Museum, is the first comprehensive Raphael survey in the United States, encompassing his childhood apprenticeships through his late-life fame and accomplishments. If that seems surprising, consider the logistics involved in securing more than 170 works by the Renaissance master from over 60 global collections, ranging from celebrated masterpieces such as “The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist in a Landscape (The Alba Madonna)” (1509–11) to the fragile drawings that were the cornerstone of his practice, like the Ashmolean Museum’s beguiling “Portrait of a Young Boy (Presumed to be a Self-Portrait)” (c. 1500) and the Louvre’s breathtaking “Saint Catherine of Alexandria in Three-Quarter Length” (c. 1507).
more here.
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