Raphael at the Metropolitan
Subtitle: the Colonna altarpiece
By: Linda Wolk-Simon
Contributors: De Montebello, Philippe; Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.)
Publisher: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Published: 2006
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 75
Subjects: Exhibitions; Art collections; Renaissance Altarpieces; Italian Art
Other titles: Colonna altarpiece
Description: Raphael has been the indispensable reference point for countless artists, great and small, Italian and non-Italian. His frescoes in the Vatican quickly asserted themselves as paradigms of the Grand Manner, while his serenely beautiful Madonnas and calmly dignified portraits redefined their respective genres. The combination of clarity and complexity in his compositions results in an ineffable quality of innate grace that many artists have since tried to emulate. Not only Parmigianino, Carracci, Poussin, Ingres, and Degas but Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Manet, and Picasso also mined Raphael's works for inspiration. The Colonna Altarpiece is the only altarpiece by Raphael in an American collection. Raphael painted this work in his early twenties for a convent of nuns in Perugia on the eve of his move to Florence. The two main panels of the altarpiece were bought by former Museum president J. Pierpont Morgan, and later given as a gift to the Museum's Collection in 1916. This volume accompanies an exhibition that reunites all seven parts of the altarpiece for the first time since the seventeenth century: the two main panels in the Metropolitan together with the five components of its predella, divided among the Metropolitan, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and the National Gallery and the Dulwich Picture Gallery, both in London. Also included is a fine selection of paintings and drawings by Raphael executed during the same period, 1502{u2013}5 A.D. Additionally, this exhibition showcases a preliminary study, now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, for the landscape in the Metropolitan's altarpiece, as well as the beautiful painting Madonna and Child with a Book from the Norton Simon Art Foundation in Pasadena. These works document one of the pivotal moments in Raphael's career, when the young artist abandoned Perugia, in Umbria, and set his sights on Florence, where he encountered the work of Fra Bartolommeo and Leonardo da Vinci. To contextualize the transformative effect of this move, paintings by his master, Perugino, as well as by Pinturicchio and Fra Bartolommeo are also exhibited. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.
Notes: Catalogue of an exhibition held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, June 20-September 3, 2006.

"Metropolitan Museum of Art bulletin, spring 2006, volume LXIII, number 4"

Exhibition title: Raphael at the Metropolitan : The Colonna Altarpiece.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 59-62)

Association of Art Museum Curators, 2006.
Table of contents: title: Director's note / Phillippe de Montebello; title: Raphael at the Metropolitan : The Colonna Altarpiece; title: The Painter : Raphael; title: The Sant'Antonio di Padova Altarpiece : The Madonna and Child and Saint John the Baptist enthroned with Saints Peter, Paul, Catherine of Alexandria, and Cecilia (or Margaret, or Dorothy, or Barbara?); title: The patron and the commission : the Nuns of Sant'Antonio di Padova; title: The pastoral visit of the Bishop of Perugia to Sant'Antonio di Padova in 1661 and the last eyewitness account of Raphael's altarpiece in the "chiesa interna"; title: The first sale : the Nuns of Sant'Antonio di Padova sell the Predella to Queen Christina of Sweden in 1663; title: The wandering Predella : the Agony in the Garden from Raphael's Sant'Antonio di Padova altarpiece leaves Rome, eventually reaches Roslyn, New York, by way of Paris and London, and enters the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; title: The second buyer : Raphael's Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints is sold by the Nuns of Sant'Antonio di Padova and enters the collection of the Colonna family in Rome, becoming known as the Colonna Altarpiece; title: From Madrid to Paris to London : further travels of the Colonna Altarpiece, also known as the "Madonna Borbonico" or the "Madonna di Napoli"; title: "The Raphael of a million"; title: "Mr. Morgan buys a Raphael"; title: Appendix 1 : transcription and translation of a passage from the account of the pastoral visit of Bishop Marcantonio Oddi to Sant'Antonio di Padova in Perugia, 1660 (1661 n.s.), describing Raphael's altarpiece in the chiesa interna; title: Exhibition checklist.