A Raphael masterpiece is finally back in one piece
Nuns sold off the Colonna Altarpiece bit by bit. Now, the Met has put it back together.
In the early 16th century, the nuns of Sant’Antonio in Perugia, Italy, commissioned a young, largely unknown artist—barely in his twenties—to produce his first altarpiece for their private chapel. The result was a tremendously ambitious work by a painter who would become one of the Renaissance’s most important artists: Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio).
The multipart altarpiece, now called the Colonna Altarpiece after a later owner, features an elegant image of the Virgin Mary with an infant Jesus enthroned on her lap in the main panel. She gazes at a young John the Baptist and is surrounded by four saints in what art historians call a sacra conversazione, or a sacred conversation. At the top of the altarpiece, in the half-oval lunette, God the Father is flanked by angels in richly colored robes. The bottom of the altarpiece, the predella, originally featured five small paintings depicting saints and scenes of the suffering of Christ.
Though the altarpiece was created as an object of sincere religious devotion, the mendicant nuns began selling it off piece by piece to an eager art market in the decades after Raphael’s death. By the 1660s, the altarpiece was completely disassembled. In modern times, the panels have rested in the hands of private collectors across Europe and the United States.
But this spring, for the first time in centuries, the altarpiece will be reconstituted in its entire glory: the Metropolitan Museum of Art is reuniting the Colonna as part of its major exhibition, “Raphael: Sublime Poetry,” which will be the largest exhibition of the artist ever in the United States and runs from March 29-June 28, 2026.
The pieces were scattered across continents: lunette and main panel depicting the sacra conversazione ended up in the collection of American railroad baron J. Pierpont Morgan, whose son gifted them to the Met in the first half of the 20th century. One of the predella panels, depicting Jesus’ agony in the garden, was later sold to the museum. Meanwhile, three panels are making the trip from London (two are held at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, while the largest panel, The Procession of Calvary, is at the National Gallery) and the Lamentation of Christ, is coming from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
Bringing the entire altarpiece together again will allow viewers to experience the masterpiece as Raphael originally intended. The painter was “intent on proving what he could do as an artist,” says Carmen C. Bambach, curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The saturated color and the exchange of tender glances between Virgin, child, and saints in the Colonna are all early signs of Raphael’s signature style as a mature artist, one who, even during his short life of 37 years, unalterably shaped the course of Western art.
Bambach says that the museum’s reconstruction of the predella is particularly significant for viewing the work as Raphael intended. “We are 500 years removed from that experience,” she says. But putting the Colonna back together wasn’t as simple as museums shipping its piece to the Met. The half-century-old panels are fragile; protecting the paintings throughout the exhibition required a mix of creative thinking and technological advancement from the museum’s conservation team. The result is the restoration of what Bambach describes as the “visual impact” of the altarpiece, communicating its “monumentality” and “majesty of the scale of this ensemble.”
The challenge of Raphael’s wood panels
When the Met set about trying to reunite the Colonna and its panels, it faced several unique challenges. Not only did the endeavor involve immense collaboration between the institutions who own the pieces; it also required the Met’s conservators to tap into cutting-edge technological advancements in art conservation. Alan Miller, a conservator at the Met who specializes in panel paintings, says that without recent advances in “microclimate technology,” the panels wouldn’t have been able to travel for the exhibition.
Humidity is a unique challenge for Raphael’s panels since they are oil on wood. Miller explains that “there’s a certain moisture content in wood, and when that changes, the dimension of the wood change.” Moisture content can make the panel warp. If that happens, the oil painting can crack. Raphael’s paintings have, no doubt, changed shape since he completed them over half a millennia ago, but it’s imperative that the panels remain the same shape they are now. Miller notes that each of the panels has “some degree of curvature,” specifically a convex curvature which can complicate the conservation teams’ already difficult work.
Moving wood panels to a new climate can be a tricky choreography. The Met had to work with the lending institutions to figure out an ideal relative humidity point, and then guarantee that the panels would remain in that set point during the entirety of the exhibition. That involved designing a special case wherein the climate could remain sealed and constant. The conservation team also needs to track the temperature and humidity inside the case at all times. To do that, Miller says, they installed a data logger that will “constantly track the temperature and relative humidity.” “We’re able to read that without opening up the case and can tell at any moment what the condition is,” he adds. The humidity is constantly graphed, sending feedback to the team throughout the entirety of the exhibition.
Miller wants to see a “flat line through the whole run of the exhibition” on the data logger, indicating that the case is sealed, and Raphael’s predella remains protected from damaging humidity.
(The Renaissance ‘Prince of Painters’ made a big impact in his short life.)
An unexpected discovery
One of the most exciting discoveries during the run-up to the exhibition is a revelation about young Raphael’s working process. Typically, Renaissance predellas are painted on one continuous horizontal board. While different scenes may be painted, the average Renaissance artist would have used the frame to break them up rather than painting separate panels. As those panels entered the art market, dealers would literally cut the boards and sell them off piece by piece. Miller says he assumed this was the case with Raphael’s panels as well. He thought that when the Met’s conservation team examined the wood, they could “tell by the grain that these were all connected” as one original piece of wood. “That was my assumption going in,” Miller adds.
But technical analysis of the panel at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, an achingly tender representation of the lamentation of Christ, revealed an underdrawing of a single figure. “Maybe it was a first idea,” Miller says. What was telling, however, was the position of the figure: it was sideways on the panel. “That tells conservators and art historians that if you have a long board, you’re not going to stand it upright and do a drawing sideways. It tells us it was always a single panel” on its own and not connected to the other scenes.
That “clue” Miller says, helped the team understand that these panels were intentionally made as separate, independent panels—they belong together, and Raphael put them together in the predella in an exact, specific order. It was a relatively rare decision for the period, and the finding offers insight into how a young Raphael was thinking about constructing the altarpiece.
Restoring the Colonna Altarpiece to its original glory
If new analysis has revealed the secrets of how Raphael made the Colonna, then reuniting the pieces will give viewers a chance to experience the masterpiece as it was intended.
The nuns “prayed privately” and meditated while kneeling in front of the scenes of the predella. Their eyesight, Bambach points out, would have focused on the suffering of Christ depicted in the predella. Putting the predella scenes back in order is a persistent reminder that Raphael wasn’t just making a painting, he was giving his patrons an “object of meditation to engage in the agony of Jesus,” Bambach says.
What emerges isn’t just a work of quiet devotion, but also a revelation about how a young Raphael, producing his first altarpiece and first independent work, was “experimenting with many things,” Bambach says.
“Raphael was always an extraordinary artist of perspective and geometry,” she notes, and he “was very grounded in the culture of mathematics.” She points to the “harmonies of color,” the “three dimensionality,” of the enthroned Virgin, and the landscape in the background as elements that would become part of Raphael’s enduring style. There are also hints of the master who would develop: the rounded cheeks of the Virgin are reflective of the beauty Raphael clearly relished; so, too, the affection and intimacy captured in the glances between Mary, Jesus, and the saints who surround them in a mystical conversation.
The Colonna Altarpiece is a rare glimpse of Raphael at the beginning of his career “Here’s this young, ambitious, prodigious artist,” Bambach says, “trying out new things as he develops his style.” Reunited, its pieces give us a new insight into the artist as he was figuring out how to leave an indelible mark on history.
