Raphael: Sublime Poetry

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” examines how Raphael’s paintings, drawings, and designs shaped a visual language of lyricism in the Italian Renaissance. The exhibition traces his dialogue with classical literature and contemporary poets, and the workshop practices that helped spread his ideas across Europe. For New York, it places a canonical artist in the city’s ongoing debate about authorship, collaboration, and cultural memory. One quiet takeaway is how much of Raphael’s “poetry” is built from structure rather than sentiment.