After visiting Raphael: Sublime Poetry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Caro Fowler emerged with a transformed understanding of Raphael. In this episode, she speaks with curator Carmen Bambach about the exhibition’s moving reframing of Raphael’s Madonna and Child paintings through the lens of maternal and infant mortality in Renaissance Italy. Together they explore the role of biography in art history, Raphael’s extraordinary drawings, and what becomes visible when we take the female body seriously—not as an object of desire, but as a force that makes life, art, and the world itself.
