Raphael Renaissance: Sistine Madonna

Sistine Madonna

Sistine Madonna, also called The Madonna di San Sisto, is an oil painting by the Italian artist Raphael. Finished shortly before his death, ca. 1513–1514, as a commissioned altarpiece, it was the last of the painter’s Madonna’s and the last painting techniques he completed with his own hands. Relocated to Dresden from 1754, the well-known painting has been particularly influential in Germany. After World War II, it was relocated to Moscow for a decade before it was returned to Germany. There, it resides as one of the central pieces in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister.

Composition

In the painting, the Madonna, holding the Christ Child and flanked by Saint Sixtus and Saint Barbara, stands on clouds before dozens of obscured cherubs, while two distinctive winged cherubs rest on their elbows beneath her.

American travel guide Rick Steves suggests that the expression on Mary’s face stands in marked contrast to the usual in that this Mary is worried, reflecting her original placement besides a painting of the Crucifixion.

History

Commissioned by the Benedictine monks of the Monastery of San Sisto in Piacenza, Raphael painted the piece as their altarpiece. Finished shortly before his death, ca. 1513–1514, it was the last of the painter’s Madonnas and the last painting he completed with his own hands. It was their requirement that the image contain both Saint Sixtus and Saint Barbara. Legend has it that when Antonio da Correggio first laid eyes on the piece, he was inspired to cry, “And I also, I am a painter!”

The painting moves to Germany

In 1754, Augustus III of Poland purchased the painting for 110,000 – 120,000 francs, whereupon it was relocated to Dresden and achieved new prominence. In 2001′s The Invisible Masterpiece, Hans Belting and Helen Atkins describe the influence the painting has had in Germany:

Like no other work of art, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in Dresden has fired the Germans’ imagination, uniting or dividing them in the debate about art and religion…. Over and again, this art painting techniques has been hailed as ‘supreme among the world’s paintings’ and accorded the epithet ‘divine’…

If the stories are correct, the painting achieved its prominence immediately, as it’s said that Augustus moved his throne in order to better display it. The Sistine Madonna was notably celebrated by Johann Joachim Winckelmann in his popular and influential Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), positioning the painting firmly in the public view and in the center of a debate about the relative prominence of its Classical and Christian elements. Alternately portraying Raphael as a “devout Christian” and a “‘divine’ Pagan” (with his distinctly un-Protestant Mary who could have as easily been Juno), the Germans implicitly tied the image into a legend of their own, “Raphael’s Dream.” Arising in the last decades of the 1700s, the legend—which made its way into a number of stories and even a play—presents Raphael as receiving a heavenly vision that enabled him to present his divine Madonna. The legend itself inspired considerable passion in the painting’s audiences, some of whom (including one of Freud’s patients) were transported to a state of religious ecstasy by the sight of it, and created of the painting an unlikely icon of romanticism. The picture influenced Goethe, Wagner and Nietzsche. In 1855, the “Neues Königliches Museum” (New Royal Museum) opened in a building designed by Gottfried Semper, and the Sistine Madonna was given a room of its own.