CBS Sunday Morning Covers Raphael, Artemis II, Hacks, and More

Easter Sunday's edition of "CBS Sunday Morning," hosted by Jane Pauley, devoted its 90 minutes to a single quietly insistent theme: who controls the story a culture tells about itself.

The most explicit answer came from inside the Vatican. Correspondent Chris Livesay went deep into the workshops beneath St. Peter's Basilica, where mosaicists have spent centuries sustaining the church's visual identity using millions of tiny colored tiles melted and fashioned with tools and techniques dating back hundreds of years. The segment aired on the church's highest holy day, lending the craft a weight that went well beyond art restoration.

Martha Teichner carried the Renaissance thread outward, visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for "Raphael: Sublime Poetry," the first comprehensive exhibition of Raphael's work ever mounted in the United States. The show, running March 29 through June 28, 2026, examines the life of Raffaello di Giovanni Santi (1483-1520), an artist young enough to absorb influence from Leonardo da Vinci and accomplished enough to be commissioned by the Vatican to produce works designed to rival Michelangelo. Curator Carmen Bambach joined Teichner in the galleries. The historical resonance runs deeper still: Raphael died of a fever in Rome on April 6, 1520, his 37th birthday, making this week an unlikely five-century anniversary.

Across the Mediterranean, the question of cultural memory grew sharper. Seth Doane traveled to Israel and the West Bank, where excavations in the Judean desert have turned openly political, a fight over whose past legitimizes whose present.

Back in the United States, the episode turned to television's role in shaping cultural narrative. Tracy Smith visited the set of HBO's "Hacks," speaking with stars Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder alongside the show's creators. Anthony Mason profiled Dan Levy, whose new Netflix series "Big Mistakes" marks his most prominent work since "Schitt's Creek," where he worked alongside the late Catherine O'Hara.

The episode's most expansive moment arrived through science. Correspondent Mark Strassmann spoke with the Artemis II crew, including commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, when the crew was approximately 180,000 miles from home. On Monday, the Orion spacecraft was set to loop around the Moon's far side, carrying the four astronauts farther from Earth than any human beings have ever traveled. Artemis II launched April 1, 2026, from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Conor Knighton closed the hour with a look at moss, a plant that has quietly colonized much of the Earth while remaining almost entirely beneath notice.