Biography

Carmen C. Bambach is Curator of Drawings and Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received the Inaugural Vilcek Foundation Prize for Excellence for her contribution to U. S. society and culture as an immigrant, April 4, 2019. Her Michelangelo Divine Draftsman and Designer accompanying her exhibition at The Met, won the Phyllis Goodhart Book Prize of the Renaissance Society of America in 2019, and also from the Association of American Museum Curators in 2018. She was Andrew W. Mellon Professor in 2010-12 at CASVA (Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts), National Gallery of Art. Her books include Drawing and Painting in the Italian Renaissance Workshop: Theory and Practice, 1300-1600 ("Premio Salimbeni 2000”). Her Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, 4 vols. (Yale University Press), will be out in June 2019. She has organized several exhibitions at The Met.

Project Summary

Though departing from my earlier work on Renaissance full-scale drawings and painting practices, this research project on Raphael and his workshop is at its very beginnings and will likely lead to an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum in a few years. My objective will be to present an integrated portrait of Raphael as a draftsman of both the figure and architecture. I shall highlight his figural drawings which he produced in the final scale of paintings and prints. These types of full-scale drawings by Raphael are exceptional in being numerous for an artist of his time.