In 2026, museums from New York to Stockholm are doubling down on single-artist presentations with a centuries-old focus. The results turn a spotlight on household names like Raphael and introduce figures still unfamiliar to many U.S. audiences, such as the Swedish sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel.

At the same time, a parallel slate of exhibitions aims to connect classical and contemporary appeal. These shows span touchstones from Ovid’s Metamorphoses—whose shape-shifting myths have seeped into the creative imagination for two millennia—to the long, strange afterlife of tarot imagery.

Taken together, these five exhibitions demonstrate that “Old Masters” has become less a sealed-off category than an ever-evolving framework for attracting new audiences, at least when it’s channeled thoughtfully and creatively.

Caravaggio, Narcissus, ca. 1597–1598, Palazzo Barberini, Rome. Courtesy of Rijksmuseum.

“Metamorphoses”

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Feb 6 – May 25, 2026

Galleria Borghese, Rome

June 22 – September 20, 2026

The Roman poet Ovid’s magnum opus, Metamorphoses, is receiving the blockbuster treatment this February at the Rijksmuseum. The Latin epic, completed around 8 CE, braids history, folklore, and Greco-Roman myth. The famous tales of Narcissus and his reflection, Icarus’s ill-fated flight, and King Midas’s golden touch number among some 250 narratives indexed in the text. Over the 20 centuries since, Ovid’s poem has served as a fertile sourcebook for artists and writers, from Rembrandt to Shakespeare.

“Ovid’s Metamorphoses has… touched people for centuries because of the deeply human themes it addresses: love, lust, hate and passion, desire, revenge, fear, awe and heroism,” said Frits Scholten, the Rijksmuseum’s senior curator of sculpture and one of the exhibition’s organizers.

Louis Finson, The Four Elements (1611). Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

The show will go beyond examining how the poem’s main theme of transformation appealed to Renaissance and Baroque artists, coinciding with their interest in new materials and techniques. It will also illustrate how this very theme underpinned the work’s centuries of longevity, all the way to the present day.

“Many 20th-century and contemporary artists, composers, filmmakers and writers have been deeply influenced by Ovid’s tales of transformation, from Picasso’s work to the movie Being John Malkovich,” explained Scholten.

The checklist extends well into the modern age, including works by Auguste Rodin, Louise Bourgeoise, and Ulay. A version of the show will travel in June to Galleria Borghese, the home to many Ovid-inspired masterpieces, including Bernini’s dynamic sculpture of “Apollo and Daphne,” an evergreen marker of the transformative qualities of art.

Johan Tobias Sergel, The Faun (1774). Marble. Nationalmuseum.

“Sergel – Fantasy and Reality”

Nationalmusuem, Stockholm

Feb 19 – Aug 9, 2026

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York

October 30, 2026 – January 31, 2027

The sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel (1740–1814) is finally getting his due with a major monographic exhibition at Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum. An artist of contradictions, the 18th-century Swede is as known for his neoclassical sculptures—svelte marble figures that reframe antiquity with a new sensuality—as he is for portraits of his artist circle and erotic drawings that challenge our understanding of his era’s proprieties.

Johan Tobias Sergel, Passionate lovers. Pen and brown ink, brown wash on paper. Nationalmuseum. Cecilia Heisser/ Nationalmuseum

“Sergel was of an exuberant disposition, but also prone to bouts of depression,” said Daniel Prytz, the exhibition’s curator, noting that the title Fantasy and Reality reflects these warring tendencies. The show will offer new research into Sergel’s expansive artistic network and how it sharpened his distinctive style. Beyond his close friend, the Danish painter Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard, his circle included well-known artists from the British Isles, such as Henry Fuseli, Thomas Banks, Alexander Runciman, and James Barry.

“A strong sense of the sublime runs through Sergel’s major works,” Prytz added, comparing their phantasmagorical charge to contemporaneous works by Goya and Fuseli. In October, a reduced version of the exhibition will travel to the Morgan Library & Museum, marking the Swede’s first major US presentation.

Raphael (Raffaello di Giovanni Santi) (Italian, 1483–1520) The Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia with Saints Paul, John the Evangelist, Augustine, and Mary Magdalene, ca. 1515-16, Polo Museale dell’Emilia Romagna, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna (577) Image: Scala / Art Resource, NY

“Raphael: Sublime Poetry”

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

March 29 – June 28, 2026

The Italian Renaissance artist Raphael is so synonymous with artistic excellence that subsequent generations have been vying for the descriptor “the Raphael of…” ever since. This spring, the Met will present an in-depth look at the artist, tracing the breadth of his career through paintings, drawings, and tapestries—and bringing together works rarely, if ever, seen side by side.

“The most exciting and surprising element of the exhibition has been the process of creating a visual narrative of Raphael’s creative mind through a selection of his works as if we were glimpsing over his shoulder and bringing that story to a contemporary public,” said Carmen Bambach, the exhibition’s curator.

In addition to new scientific and technical discoveries, the show will focus on Raphael’s use of nude female models—an under-explored area of research—and how those studies informed everything from his Madonna and Child compositions to portraits of women. Bambach points in particular to La Fornarina (c. 1520), a mysterious nude portrait at the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica at Palazzo Barberini in Rome, as a work that received extensive attention in the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue. Overall, the show promises to be a rare presentation that not only cements Raphael’s stature but augments our understanding of how it was built.

Francisco de Zurbarán, Agnus Dei, 1635 – 1640
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid ©Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado

“Zurbarán”

National Gallery, London

May 2 – Aug 23, 2026

Musée du Louvre, Paris

October 7, 2026 – January 25, 2027

Art Institute of Chicago, IL

February 28 – June 20, 2027

This May, London’s National Gallery kicks off a touring exhibition of the Spanish Baroque painter Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664). Sometimes dubbed the “Spanish Caravaggio,” Zurbarán is renowned for solemn devotional paintings of saints and martyrs that channel Counter-Reformation ideals of austere piety.

“Zurbarán is a consummate storyteller,” said Daniel Ralston, the associate curator of Spanish Paintings at the National Gallery and one of the exhibition’s organizers. “He draws viewers in with striking and sculptural figures, faces that seem immediately real and familiar, and stark, dramatic light effects.”

Francisco de Zurbarán, The Immaculate Conception with Saint Joachim and Saint Anne, (circa 1638-39) Scottish National Gallery © National Galleries of Scotland

The show also examines Zurbarán’s still-life practice, celebrated for both his technique and for the way it slips into the register of devotional image-making. One of the touchstones of this genre is Agnus Dei (1640), a bound lamb set on a bare ledge. “The goals of Counter-Reformation artists, broadly speaking, were to inspire devotion and incite emotion, and Zurbarán’s exceptional paintings do both,” Ralston added. “Those qualities are what make his paintings still feel so original, so vibrant, and so modern.”

The exhibition will shift slightly as it travels to the Louvre in October 2026 and the Art Institute of Chicago in February 2027, enabling a wider audience the chance to appreciate Zurbarán’s innovations during a time of restraint.

Francisco de Zurbarán, The Venerable Miguel Gerónimo Carmelo (1628–30). The Minneapolis Institute of Art © The Minneapolis Institute of Art

“Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions”

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York

June 26 – October 4, 2026

Originally the basis for a card game played among courtiers in Renaissance Italy, the tarot deck quickly became a mainstay of divination used by specialized fortune tellers and the general public alike. This summer, the Morgan Library & Museum digs into the history and enduring appeal of the major and minor arcana in a two-part exhibition. The first section, “Renaissance Symbols,” centers on three 15th-century tarot decks made for the Duke of Milan. The second, “Modern Visions,” examines tarot’s visual evolution and its pull on modern and contemporary artists, from Leonora Carrington to Betye Saar.

“What is perhaps most surprising about tarot in the Renaissance is how much of a fad it was,” wrote the curator Joshua O’Driscoll and the conservator Frank Trujillo in an email to Artnet News. “Whether playing the game or not, tarot was very much on the minds of artists and patrons in this period.”

Bonifacio Bembo, Death from the Visconti Sforza Tarot Cards. Italy, Milan or Cremona, ca. 1456-58. The Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.630.12. Photography by Graham S. Haber.

The second gallery turns to tarot’s modern longevity, beginning with the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, which inspires many of today’s designs. “I think what resonates most for audiences today is that tarot is both instantly familiar and endlessly open,” said Claire Gilman, curator of “Modern Visions.”

In total, this two-part show joins a growing wave of exhibitions that move fluidly between Old Masters and contemporary practice—proof that images and the ideas behind them can echo across more than half a millennium.