DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.53068#0144
IX
ROMAN MADONNAS
Mp'HE Blessed Virgin appeared to the boyish painter as a nun, to the
roaming youth as a beautiful soul; to Raphael the man she became
JL woman in her perfection as mother.
At the outset he may have been prevented, to begin with, by the great new
Vatican commissions from going further in his confession of this mystery, a
mystery which he had so young become a master in proclaiming; indeed, it
seems as if he never carried through to completion any paintings of the Virgin
he may perhaps have taken with him from Florence, with the intention of
finishing them in Rome; yet they included some that were very near to his heart.
Such was the Esterhazy Madonna at Budapest, of which only the underpainting
is finished. He had done the preliminaries for it in one of his freest Florentine
pen-drawings, in the Uffizi, which at the same time served as cartoon for the
little picture a few inches in dimensions (20 x 25). In a motive taken from
Leonardo, the Virgin turns on one knee and, with a charming gesture, holds
the Child as he reaches from a mound of earth towards the little John the
Baptist; the saint crouches on the ground with his inscribed scroll, like a Cupid
drawing his bow. This elastic kneeling pose was transferred to the Albertina
drawing of children playing and the little torch-bearer who, five years later,
crowned the central niche in the fresco of the Sibyls in Santa Maria della Pace
(Plate 195). The delightfully conceived landscape in the drawing, with a little
chapel on a height approached by a row of cypresses, gives way in the painting to
a view of the Tiber with the ruins of the Forum of Nerva—the only part of the little
picture that appears to be entirely carried out; there is a truly Roman atmo-
sphere in the soft terracotta tones which Poelenborch might have envied the
master. Everything else retains the unfinished charm of the rough sketch and
of the visible underpainting.
The Madonna di Casa Colonna of the Berlin gallery, still in many places
unfinished, also certainly belongs to this transitional period. Full sunlight is
provided as a harmonious accompaniment to the inward bliss of mother and child;
here Raphael succeeded in painting in colours what he had in view in the pen-
sketches with contours broken by excess of light—the profusion of light of
Perugino in his early days, with sunny half-darkness in the shadows and in
the brocaded breviary in the Virgin’s hand. But the very forms and attitude
126
ROMAN MADONNAS
Mp'HE Blessed Virgin appeared to the boyish painter as a nun, to the
roaming youth as a beautiful soul; to Raphael the man she became
JL woman in her perfection as mother.
At the outset he may have been prevented, to begin with, by the great new
Vatican commissions from going further in his confession of this mystery, a
mystery which he had so young become a master in proclaiming; indeed, it
seems as if he never carried through to completion any paintings of the Virgin
he may perhaps have taken with him from Florence, with the intention of
finishing them in Rome; yet they included some that were very near to his heart.
Such was the Esterhazy Madonna at Budapest, of which only the underpainting
is finished. He had done the preliminaries for it in one of his freest Florentine
pen-drawings, in the Uffizi, which at the same time served as cartoon for the
little picture a few inches in dimensions (20 x 25). In a motive taken from
Leonardo, the Virgin turns on one knee and, with a charming gesture, holds
the Child as he reaches from a mound of earth towards the little John the
Baptist; the saint crouches on the ground with his inscribed scroll, like a Cupid
drawing his bow. This elastic kneeling pose was transferred to the Albertina
drawing of children playing and the little torch-bearer who, five years later,
crowned the central niche in the fresco of the Sibyls in Santa Maria della Pace
(Plate 195). The delightfully conceived landscape in the drawing, with a little
chapel on a height approached by a row of cypresses, gives way in the painting to
a view of the Tiber with the ruins of the Forum of Nerva—the only part of the little
picture that appears to be entirely carried out; there is a truly Roman atmo-
sphere in the soft terracotta tones which Poelenborch might have envied the
master. Everything else retains the unfinished charm of the rough sketch and
of the visible underpainting.
The Madonna di Casa Colonna of the Berlin gallery, still in many places
unfinished, also certainly belongs to this transitional period. Full sunlight is
provided as a harmonious accompaniment to the inward bliss of mother and child;
here Raphael succeeded in painting in colours what he had in view in the pen-
sketches with contours broken by excess of light—the profusion of light of
Perugino in his early days, with sunny half-darkness in the shadows and in
the brocaded breviary in the Virgin’s hand. But the very forms and attitude
126