Phoenix 24
More than half a million visitors rediscovered a Renaissance master.
NEW YORK, UNITED STATES — July 2026. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s landmark exhibition Raphael: Sublime Poetry closed after attracting more than 562,000 visitors during its three-month run. With an average of 6,800 people entering each day, it became the museum’s most highly attended exhibition since 2018. Nearly half of all visitors to the Met between March 29 and June 28 attended the retrospective.
The exhibition was the first comprehensive international retrospective in the United States devoted to Raffaello di Giovanni Santi, one of the defining artists of the Italian Renaissance. It brought together 237 works, including more than 170 created by Raphael himself. Paintings, drawings, tapestries and decorative objects arrived from 62 public and private collections around the world.
Curated by Carmen Bambach, the exhibition examined Raphael’s technical evolution, creative process and influence on Western art. Preparatory studies were displayed alongside finished paintings, allowing visitors to distinguish the artist’s hand from that of assistants working in his celebrated studio. The arrangement also addressed long-standing debates surrounding the authorship of several works.
Among the most exceptional loans were three monumental tapestries from Spain’s National Heritage collections that had never previously crossed the Atlantic. Their presence reinforced the international scale of an exhibition described by the Met as a once-in-a-lifetime gathering. The museum ranked the retrospective among its three most successful exhibitions of the past decade.
Raphael’s achievement places him alongside the Met’s celebrated Michelangelo retrospective and the Costume Institute’s Heavenly Bodies exhibition. More than five centuries after his death, the artist from Urbino demonstrated that Renaissance art can still attract audiences on a scale usually associated with contemporary cultural phenomena.
Raphael returned to New York—and the public answered in record numbers.