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. 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...