THE ALBA MADONNA
BY RAPHAEL
Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. The three masters of the Renaissance. Of these three great artists, I have met those who are rather dismissive of Raphael, considering him a painter of confectionary, rather uninteresting Madonnas and the baby Jesus. Once again, I urge people to stop and look anew. There are plenty of sound reasons why Raphael is held in the same esteem as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarotti – and the Alba Madonna is absolutely one of them. It is a staggeringly beautiful painting and fully deserves to be this week’s subject.
This relationship of Mary and her son had not really been a subject in art until the Byzantine period when it moved centre stage. To begin with, Mary was most often enthroned and imperial. But by the 14th century the relationship had become much more intimate. In the same way that Leonardo’s portraits of Christ are extraordinarily human, so are Raphael’s of the mother. The portrayal of the Madonna (Italian for ‘my lady’, a sign of respect or rank) increasingly combined the spiritual with the temporal. This devotion to Mary reached a peak by the 16th century and such paintings had a vibrant market – small pieces for private worship and larger pieces for public display. Raphael, like virtually all artists, followed the market and at this time was both working for the Pope and for private patrons. This painting was commissioned by one such patron, Paolo Giovio, Bishop of Nocera (and eventually also the earliest biographer of Raphael).
What we see in the painting is perhaps the greatest Madonna and Child ever painted. A young mother seated casually against a tree stump in a calm landscape. One child (Jesus) on her lap, another (his cousin John the Baptist) nearby. It feels real, it feels familiar. Think how hard it must be to conjure up this scene of such three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional canvas. Note the limbs moving forwards and backwards in space which the author Konrad Oberhauber describes thus: ‘the children are inserted into the Virgin’s lap and gesture as if in a lazy hollow… Everything flows along swinging curves, uniting the group within itself and relative to the round frame’.
The geometry is arresting. Regard the rectangle, then the triangle, the horizon more or less cutting the painting in half, and then all of it in a perfect circle. One more shape within the picture is critical: the cross that John the Baptist is passing to Jesus – foretelling his fate three decades into the future.
The location is important – landscapes were another subject that was attracting additional interest (think again of Leonardo’s works) but also the garden had always occupied a key role – based on the Garden of Eden which was both paradise and the root of mankind’s fall from grace. It was also of course something artists liked to tackle – the detail of plants, flowers and trees were an opportunity to show off. Each may have had symbolic connotation and so on but artists had also to be self-publicists. Here is a wonderful example of how piety and devotion can be approached through beauty but also a wonderful example of a commercial artist demonstrating to both his patron and the outside world that his talents were of the highest quality. The brushwork alone is breath-taking.
This painting is one of the many, many treasures at the glorious National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. It is absolutely worth a visit.
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