THE PAINTINGS FLEW BUSINESS. THE COURIERS FLEW HOME IN ECONOMY.
Before the public was let in, a curator walked the empty galleries one more time, checking the sightlines between paintings worth, by one dealer's rough guess, somewhere under ten billion dollars combined. Getting them all into one room had taken Carmen Bambach seven years and a wish list sixty-eight pages long, single-spaced.
"Raphael: Sublime Poetry," which just closed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after a three-month run, was the first exhibition of its kind ever mounted in the United States: more than two hundred works by the Renaissance master, on loan from seventeen Italian institutions and museums across Europe, assembled for a single engagement that will not travel anywhere else afterward.
Raphael himself would have found the scale of the operation almost as strange as the show's opening wall text, which introduces him, in its first line, as "one of the greatest influencers of all time." He was born in Urbino, son of a minor painter-poet, and dead by thirty-seven — probably of a lung illness, though rumor has always preferred a more romantic explanation. In between, he outmaneuvered Michelangelo and Leonardo for Florence's biggest commissions before landing, in his final decade, at the center of the papal court in Rome.
Getting his work into one room meant asking institutions to lend something close to a treasured firstborn, in one Old Master dealer's phrase. Seventeen Italian lenders eventually agreed, alongside the Louvre, the British Museum, the Prado, and the National Gallery in Washington. Moving that much irreplaceable art meant an unusually large number of couriers — one shipping executive estimated the expense at well over two million dollars — because paintings this valuable travel with a human escort seated beside them. On the way there, the art flies business class. The humans who fly with it go home in economy.
The exhibition's most quietly unsettling loan may be a small "betrothal portrait" of a young woman cradling a pet unicorn, painted to advertise her as a desirable match. If the Met's own identification of the sitter as Laura Orsini is correct, she was thirteen. Nearby hangs Raphael's portrait of his friend Baldassarre Castiglione, the diplomat who would go on to write the era's guide to appearing effortlessly graceful — a philosophy Raphael paints directly onto the sitter's dark velvet sleeve.
