IN THE ROOM with RAPHAEL

A one-time-only exhibit on the Renaissance master traces his rise from tiny Urbino to the Vatican—opening a door on his personal world and showing why it still resonates with designers and collectors today.

- By JULIE BRENER DAVICH

When Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Carmen Bambach decided she absolutely needed to have a painting for her sweeping Raphael retrospective, opening this month, she wouldn't take no for an answer. It took five visits to the Louvre to finally persuade the world's largest museum to lend the Met its portrait by the artist. An in-person visit by the Met's director and CEO, Max Hollein, finally sealed the deal.

Over the course of eight years, Bambach's research for the show took her to Europe more than a dozen times, including trips to London, Vienna and Madrid. The show comprises 237 paintings, drawings, tapestries, historical objects, and even a fresco fragment, from 60 public and private collections around the globe. Many of the items rarely, if ever, travel. They come from some of the greatest institutions in the world, including the Prado, the Uffizi, the British Museum, London's National Gallery, and the royal collection of King Charles III, as well as from lesser-known museums like the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, France. “It's a once-in-a-lifetime event,” Hollein says of this exhibition, the first major show devoted to Raphael in the United States.

To help illuminate Raphael's process, curator Carmen Bambach assembled sketches for some of his masterpieces, including this study, loaned by Frankfurt's Städel Museum, for the central figure of Diogenes in The School of Athens (circa 1509-11), the iconic fresco in the Vatican's Raphael Rooms.