B-SIDE-ART

  For most of the twentieth century, a Jesuit residence in Dublin had a dark, dramatic painting of a betrayal hanging quietly in its dining hall. The priests who ate beneath it believed it was the work of a minor Dutch follower of a more famous Italian master. It hung there through decades of dinners, unremarkable, misattributed, until a restorer finally looked closely enough in 1990 to recognize what it actually was: a lost original by Caravaggio himself, "The Taking of Christ," painted around 1602 and missing from the historical record for nearly two hundred years. That kind of disappearance was not unusual for him. Caravaggio was, by multiple accounts, the most electrifying Italian painter to work since Michelangelo — whom he was not related to, though he shared the name — and he was almost completely forgotten within years of his own death. Paintings were quietly reassigned to other artists' catalogues. His name barely survived the century he died in, and it would tak...

  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. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain — Raphael, Self-Portrait (ca. 1504–06), Uffizi Gallery, Florence. 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 th...