The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s huge show Raphael: Sublime Poetry has wrapped as the institution’s most-attended exhibition since 2018. It averaged 6,800 visitors a day and more than 562,000 visitors during its three-month run from late March to late June.
Curated by Carmen Bambach, Marica F. and Jan T. Vilcek Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints, the exhibition provided a look at the work of Raffaello di Giovanni Santi, or Raphael, that had never been seen before. It featured 237 works, more than 170 of them by the artist himself, from collections worldwide. Drawings, paintings, tapestries and decorative arts on display to visitors during the Italian Renaissance reflected the extent of his creative genius.
“This extraordinary, landmark exhibition was an unprecedented look at the brilliance and legacy of Raphael, a true titan of the Italian Renaissance,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “We are thrilled that so many visitors to The Met seized the opportunity to see the remarkable breadth of his creative genius on view in this unprecedented gathering of some of the artist’s most iconic and rarely loaned works from around the world.
The strong turnout makes Raphael: Sublime Poetry one of the Met’s most popular exhibitions of the past decade. It is only bettered by Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer, also curated by Bambach, and the Costume Institute’s Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination. Almost half of all museum visitors during the run of the exhibition came for the Raphael show.
The success signals a wider appetite for scholarly, quality exhibitions that bring masterworks together in meaningful ways. Raphael’s technical skill and emotional depth still resonate with contemporary audiences. The exhibition’s focus on his drawings, along with finished paintings and other media, provided visitors a greater understanding of his working process and artistic evolution.
For the Met, what the numbers mean is more than attendance. Strong exhibitions drive membership, donations and general engagement with the institution’s vast collections. They also place New York as a destination of cultural tourism in the world, especially in the post-pandemic recovery period when museums have been working hard to recover the number of visitors.
Museum officials were pleased with both the critical reception and public response. It just goes to show that even in the digital era and in the midst of contemporary art, classical art still has a strong hold on us. Raphael’s balanced compositions and humanist perspective appear to offer something timeless that audiences desire.
When the exhibition closes, its legacy will likely be enhanced by a heightened awareness of the Met’s Renaissance art collection and new conversations about the need to preserve and present art from earlier periods. It was a rare opportunity for many attendees to see masterpieces rarely lent by their home institutions.
The Metropolitan Museum is not giving up on ambitious programming that appeals both to the scholarly and the general public. The success of Raphael: Sublime Poetry raises the bar for future exhibitions and cements the institution’s status as one of the world’s leading cultural destinations. In a city with a vibrant arts scene, this type of blockbuster show reconfirms why museums matter and why we come back.
