The closing image of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Raphael blockbuster, opening to the public on Sunday, is of a muscular man bursting out of a craggy hillside. As he does so, one jacked forearm blows right through the frame that surrounds him. Part of a monumentally scaled tapestry called Saint Paul in Prison (ca. 1517–21), it’s a ferocious picture of unbridled masculinity, bulging pecs and all. It might be read as the logical parting shot for a retrospective about a man whose paintings changed art history forever.But there is a wrinkle in that reading: the textile is not attributed to the Renaissance painter himself but to the workshop of Flemish artist Pieter van Aelst, since Raphael’s sole contribution was only its cartoon, which isn’t at the Met. Raphael died the year before the tapestry was completed, but the fact that van Aelst continued on without him suggests this Italian painter wasn’t necessary to finish the job. Tough going for an artist who was named a “master” by one of his patrons when he was just 17 years old.Few would argue with that designation, both then and now. Raphael’s paintings helped establish rules of perspective and composition that remain in use today; his portraits vested his subjects with an earthbound humanity that was largely missing from the genre prior to him. He worked on commission for powerful individuals, including Pope Leo X and the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi, whose namesake Roman basilica Raphael both designed and bedecked with his own paintings, and he laid the groundwork for future movements such as Mannerism and Neoclassicism.Fast forward five centuries to the days of modernism, and you can still find Raphael admirers. “Leonardo da Vinci promises us heaven,” Pablo Picasso is reported to have said. “Raphael gives it to us.”A gallery of the Met’s Raphael retrospective is devoted to his portraits, which humanized his sitters in a way that was rare for his time.Photo Eileen Travell/Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of ArtBut Raphael did not arrive at this version of heaven by himself. There were artistic forebears along for the journey, most notably the painters Giovanni Santi and Perugino, respectively the wunderkind’s father and mentor. And there were also all the people Raphael employed in a sizable workshop, at the time an unusual means of production—and one that rankled his enemy Michelangelo, who saw Raphael’s method as a lowly one. There is a reason why, in his famed Lives of Artists, Renaissance-era art historian Giorgio Vasari used the same word to describe both Raphael and all the people on his team: “blessed.”How blessed are we, then, to have this Met show, whose 237-work checklist includes quite a few works that are not by Raphael, imploding the notion that his short career was less a thunderclap of self-made brilliance than one big group project. His true mastery lay in his ability to synthesize the innovations of others and make them his own.Curator Carmen C. Bambach spent eight years organizing this astonishing survey, titled “Raphael: Sublime Poetry.” It’s the first show of its kind ever staged in the US, likely because of all that traveling Raphael’s finest works entails. (This may explain why some of his greatest paintings are not in New York, most notably his famed Sistine Madonna, which remains in Dresden, where it has lived ever since 1794, with just one decade-long exception.) Equally impressive is the fact that it’s about the same size as another Raphael mega-show staged in Rome in 2020, on the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death, and about two times as large as another held at London’s National Gallery two years later.Among the rare loans in the Met’s Raphael show are three textiles that haven’t left Madrid since the 16th century.Photo Eileen Travell/Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of ArtMuch of the Met show is drawings, which is sure to disappoint some who want to see his paintings. Still, no expense has been spared in bringing a select few world-famous Raphaels to the Met. The show’s centerpiece is a gallery devoted to Raphael’s painted portraits. Here, the star is Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (ca. 1514–15), featuring a diplomat whose baggy eyelids communicate long nights of devotion to his work. The painting is typically held by the Louvre, which hasn’t loaned the painting to the US in two decades. There’s also Portrait of a Young Woman (ca. 1507–08), which features a model set against a field of thick blackness. You can make out her a few wisps of brown hair that have fallen askew, and that makes her just like the rest of us: imperfect, and therefore perfectly human.Raphael, Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, 1514–16.©RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York/Musée du LouvreHead down a darkened hallway, and you arrive in front of three large tapestries that rise more than 15 feet in the air. Woven by a Brussels workshop two decades after his death using the artist’s cartoons, these tapestries depict narratives from Acts of the Apostles that Raphael rendered as sprawling crowd scenes. The textiles haven’t left Madrid since they were acquired in the mid-16th century by Philip II of Spain.Raphael, Drapery Study of a Standing Figure for the Disputa, Stanza della Segnatura (recto); Figure Studies and a Draft of a Petrarchan Sonnet (verso), ca. 1509–11.Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, OxfordIn between are a vast array of drawings by Raphael: carefully rendered faces turned up toward the heavens; scrawled studies for arms, some made in preparation for larger works; a delicate depiction of Madonna and child, both having fallen asleep against each other in postpartum exhaustion. These drawings are classic Raphael: a sketch featuring several images of the Christ Child’s fat foot, one rendered right above the other, portrays this sanctified infant in a way that feels unusually human. It’s worth remembering, as Bambach points out, that Raphael didn’t come up with that technique for drawing. His rival, Leonardo da Vinci, some 30 years his senior, did. Raphael, however, would improve on his forebear’s technique by sketching even more furiously, causing his drawings to occasionally devolve into scribbles.Bambach’s show moves cleanly and chronologically, starting off before Raphael even came into his own as an artist. Much of the first two galleries are devoted to his dad, Giovanni Santi, who spent nearly half a century writing an epic poem about the mercenary Federico de Montefeltro. (The illuminated manuscript produced for it, thick enough to do serious damage if dropped on one’s foot, has made it to the Met—it’s a beauty.) Santi was also a painter of handsome, if somewhat straitlaced, religious scenes; one in the Met show features a gargantuan female saint standing atop a landscape filled with recognizably Italian pine trees. He was among the many artists of his day to render Biblical figures larger than life, in an effort to raise them to higher importance than the humans who worshipped them.Some of the true stars of the Met’s Raphael retrospective are drawings.Photo Eileen Travell/Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of ArtRaphael was born in 1483, about 44 years into Santi’s manuscript project, and he picked up his father’s mantle early on. Working under the tutelage of Perugino, who imparted rarified knowledge about perspective, Raphael started out painting Christian scenes that enlist his mentor’s triangular compositions with one tweak: Raphael’s figures are all the same size. In a processional banner produced while Raphael was still a teenager, you get the sense that if the penitent Saints Sebastian and Roch rose up, they’d stand about as tall as the crucified Jesus Christ they pray before. Works like that one demonstrate that Raphael was a responsive viewer, working both with and against the conventions of his peers to engineer his own voice, as most of the best artists so often do.In 1504, Raphael relocated to Florence, where he began working under the sign of Leonardo, by then an established Renaissance master. Before its section on the Florentine stretch of his career, the Met show is dominated primarily by Raphael’s drawings done in pen, a tool that allows for the sharp, precise linework. In Florence, however, he started utilizing charcoal and chalk, allowing him to translate Leonardo’s signature sfumato haziness to paper. In one unforgettable drawing dated to ca. 1507, Raphael uses both mediums to mark out Saint Catherine of Alexandria’s flowy drapery, which looks as soft to the touch as it might feel to wear it.Raphael, The Annunciation, ca. 1503–4.©RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York/Photo Michael Urtado/Musée du LouvreAt 24, Raphael was already established by the time he made that drawing, but he only got more famous once he moved in 1508 to Rome, where he spent the rest of his short life. The big commissions for Popes Julius II and Leo X—most notably The School of Athens, produced for the former—are not here, since they are site-specific frescoes. But even without them, you get a sense of his artistry through works such as The Madonna of Divine Love (ca. 1516–18), in which an infantile Saint John kneels before his cousin, the Baby Christ. Wits its harmonious triangular composition and furtive gazes, the painting seems like pure Raphael, but it is in fact the work of many artisans. Raphael only applied the final layer of paint; he’s forced to share the credit at the Met with Giulio Romano, his assistant. The Met’s Raphael retrospective reunites the Colonna Altarpiece for the first time since it was broken up centuries ago.Photo Eileen Travell/Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of ArtAnother artist who worked closely with Raphael was Marco Raimondi, a close friend whose intricate engravings brought Raphael’s compositions to the masses. Look at Raphael’s 1508–10 drawing of Lucretia, a Roman noblewoman whose rape triggered the destruction of an entire monarchy, and then admire Raimondi’s engraving based on it. Working with that sketch in mind, Raimondi adds more folds to her sheer dress and an entire landscape around it. Well after Raphael’s death in 1520 at the age of 37, the Lucretia works kept coming: the exhibition’s final galleries include two majolica plates based on the same composition. The Raimondi drawing and the painted plates show that others picked up where Raphael left off. Affirming his rightful place in the canon, the master would continue to teach aspiring artists for centuries.In her introductory wall text, Bambach terms Raphael “one of the greatest influencers of all time.” That feels like a calculated bit of pandering, but it’s also close to the truth, as those last galleries reveal. For example, there’s The Vision of Ezekiel (ca. 1515–16), in which God floats through the clouds alongside a winged horse. For years, the painting was attributed to Romano. According to Bambach (and the painting’s owner, the Uffizi Galleries in Florence), the painting is by none other than Raphael, whose ability to impact others around him is still coming into focus.