The Met and Italy Reaffirm Longstanding Partnership Through Major Loans, Scholarly Collaboration and Shared Stewardship of Cultural Heritage

Max Hollein, The Met’s Director and CEO, and Alessandro Giuli, Italy’s Minister of Culture, are meeting in New York to discuss continued collaborations between The Met and Italian institutions.

Italian museums are contributing significant loans to The Met’s upcoming Raphael: Sublime Poetry and to Across Wine-Dark Seas, opening in December.

As part of its ongoing commitment to responsible collections stewardship, The Met is returning a group of works to Italy.

Max Hollein, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Director and Chief Executive Officer, and Alessandro Giuli, Italy’s Minister of Culture, are meeting today in New York, reaffirming the longstanding cultural partnership between The Met and the Italian Ministry of Culture. This meeting takes place in conjunction with the opening of The Met’s forthcoming exhibition Raphael: Sublime Poetry (March 29–June 28, 2026).

The meeting underscores the depth of the Museum’s relationship with Italian cultural institutions, demonstrated by a shared commitment to continued collaboration through exhibitions, scholarly exchange, reciprocal loans, and the responsible stewardship of cultural heritage.

Max Hollein, The Met’s Director and CEO, said, “Italy has long been one of The Met’s most valued partners, and our collaboration with Italian museums and cultural institutions continues to flourish. Partnerships through exhibitions, scholarships and reciprocal loans make it possible to bring extraordinary works into dialogue across collections, deepening our understanding of our world across millennia. Together, we can continue to share the richness of Italy’s artistic heritage with audiences in New York, Italy, and around the globe.”

Alessandro Giuli, Italian Minister of Culture, said, “It is a great honor to inaugurate this exhibition of Raphael at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. We are particularly proud of the exceptional works lent by Italian museums, reflecting our strategic partnership with The Met and the deep commitment to sharing Italy’s cultural heritage with a global audience. This exhibition stands as a testament to the enduring friendship between Italy and the United States, and it holds special significance during the marking of ‘America 250’. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all those who made this exhibition possible—the Director of The Met, the Curator, the Cultural Institutions, and the sponsors, for their invaluable support. Through Raphael’s timeless vision, we celebrate the power of art to connect our Nations and inspire generations to come.”

Italian institutions and scholarship play a central role in the upcoming Raphael: Sublime Poetry, which features significant loans from museums and collections across Italy. A key work in the exhibition, Raphael’s Standard of the Holy Trinity from Città di Castello, was recently conserved through a collaborative project between The Met, the Pinacoteca Comunale in Città di Castello, and the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro in Rome. The exhibition also includes major works from the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini–Palazzo Corsini in Rome, and the Gallerie degli Uffizi’s Gabinetto dei Disegni e delle Stampe in Florence. These works are essential to presenting new scholarship on the Renaissance master and reflect the enduring collaboration between The Met and its international partners.

Loans from Italian institutions will also contribute significantly to Across Wine-Dark Seas, a major exhibition opening at The Met in December exploring artistic exchange across the ancient Mediterranean. The exhibition will include 31 loans from eight museums in Italy, including the Regional Archaeological Antonino Salinas Museum in Palermo, the Capitoline Museums in Rome, and the Mont’e Prama Foundation in Sardinia, as well as four important loans from the Vatican Museums. Sixteen Italian colleagues, all specialists in the field, are contributing to the exhibition catalogue.

The Met recently announced that it will acquire a newly rediscovered painting by Renaissance artist Rosso Fiorentino (1494–1540), one of the most important Italian artists of the 16th century and one of the great masters of the maniera moderna, known today as Mannerism. Madonna and Child with Saint John the Evangelist, thought to be lost for centuries, was newly identified during a recent conservation treatment that removed a layer of overpaint on the canvas, revealing the remarkable figure of Saint John the Evangelist in the foreground of the picture plane. The reemergence of the figure—after perhaps centuries of being overpainted—made clear that this is the seminal painting described in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists as the work that launched the young Florentine artist’s career.

As part of its ongoing commitment to responsible collections stewardship, The Met is also returning a group of objects from its Greek and Roman collection to Italy. This follows new information that emerged through the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office’s ongoing investigations into antiquities trafficking networks.

The objects include two Archaic Greek drinking cups attributed to artists near Psiax and Epiktetos (ca. 520–510 BCE), a terracotta fragment of a votive relief depicting Hades abducting Persephone (ca. 470–460 BCE), a bronze situla handle attachment in the form of a mask and a pair of Roman silver drinking cups (1st century BCE–1st century CE), a pair of earrings (6th–5th century BCE), a marble lid of a Roman funerary urn (late 1st century CE), and a marble plaque with a Roman funerary inscription made in the 20th century.

Reciprocal Loans and Exchanges
Italian institutions continue to contribute significantly to the presentation of antiquities at The Met through a number of collaborative loan agreements. A Greek red-figure krater from the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Ferrara is currently on view as part of the Euphronios exchange agreement, an ongoing program of rotating four-year loans between The Met and Italian institutions established following the 2008 agreement between the Museum and the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Also on view are several archaeological works from the ancient city of Selinunte, on loan from the Regional Archaeological Antonino Salinas Museum in Palermo, which contribute to the presentation of the ancient Greek world in The Met’s galleries. A Roman mosaic from the House of the Citharist at Pompeii, on loan from the Naples Archaeological Museum, is currently displayed at the Museum. The mosaic is notable as the inspiration for the “Imagine” mosaic in Central Park, created in memory of John Lennon.

Italian institutions have also partnered with The Met on past exhibitions. Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350 exhibition (2024–25), which brought together works from Santa Maria della Pieve in Arezzo, the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena, as well as two works from the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Siena, which reunited panels from Duccio’s Maestà predella for the first time in centuries.

The Met has recently lent four Cypriot vases to the Salinas Museum in Palermo and a Greek marble relief to the Capitoline Museums in Rome for a special exhibition exploring the presence of Greek art in ancient Rome. Later this year, the Museum will lend additional works to the Naples Archaeological Museum for an exhibition on the ancient city of Parthenope, as well as to the Fondazione Prada in Milan for a forthcoming exhibition.

Provenance Research at The Met
Every one of the more than 1.5 million objects in The Met collection has a unique history, purpose, and context. Part of the Museum’s mission is to research and present the provenance of every object, enabling The Met to continuously expand and diversify the narratives presented in the galleries and on the website.

The Met’s provenance team—the largest dedicated team of provenance researchers of any museum in the world—works with The Met’s curators, conservators, and scientists, as well as internal and external partners, in conducting a systematic review of the provenance of the Museum’s holdings and ensuring that all objects entering the collection meet The Met’s strict collecting policies. The Met has long been a leader in the field, providing provenance information on most of our collection, with hundreds of thousands of objects available online. In recent years, these efforts have expanded the provenance of nearly 1,000 objects.

In cases where The Met learns—through our own research or from external sources—that a work should be returned to its country of origin, the Museum has a long and well-documented history of transferring works to their rightful owners. Further information on The Met’s collecting practices and activities is available online.

Cultural Heritage at The Met
One of the most critical areas of focus for The Met’s provenance research efforts is ancient art, archaeological materials, and other cultural property, including works of art from once-colonized areas. As part of our commitment to the shared stewardship of cultural heritage, we collaborate with countries around the world to exchange information, museological resources, collection care, object loans, and more. This collective understanding is deepened further through convenings with international experts, interpretive framing within gallery displays, and the global accessibility of research and object histories via our website.

About The Met
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded in 1870 by a group of American citizens—businessmen and financiers as well as leading artists and thinkers of the day—who wanted to create a museum to bring art and art education to the American people. Today, The Met displays tens of thousands of objects covering 5,000 years of art from around the world for everyone to experience and enjoy. The Museum lives in two iconic sites in New York City—The Met Fifth Avenue and The Met Cloisters. Millions of people also take part in The Met experience online. Since its founding, The Met has always aspired to be more than a treasury of rare and beautiful objects. Every day, art comes alive in the Museum’s galleries and through its exhibitions and events, revealing both new ideas and unexpected connections across time and across cultures.

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