DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.53068#0156
RAPHAEL
vision of space and remoteness; such is the poet’s handling of space—as in Dante:
“Dove la legge natural nulla rileva.” And in the human intimacies we note the
lifelike ease of the movements, the foreshortening to the utmost degree of free-
dom in the forward-stretching right hand of the Pope and beneath the hand on
his breast.
The eye is allowed to experience this rich and fascinating upward and
downward movement. Even to-day, in spite of all injuries and worse rumours
concerning the picture, the Sistine Madonna is among the best preserved
examples of Raphael’s painting. The faces of mother and child were slightly
rubbed and touched up in the last restorations, one hundred years ago, the St
Barbara even more so, but her hair retains undisturbed the fine brush-strokes
of the golden high-lights; the putti below, applied on the ground quite lightly
and transparently, make their contribution with the slight rustle of their pinions,
wine-red and green, and the mother-of-pearl shimmer of their eyes, set down
with a freedom equal to that of the most expressive passages of his fresco-painting
of that period; their wings, in colours from another world, are stirred by a
quivering rhythm, immediately above the rigid brown wood that serves as a
welcome support as they keep watch at their ease over the coffin and listen to
the earthly choir singing the Office for the Dead in the earthly sphere of the
church. Above, the other pair of eyes, of the Divine Child, supported on the
hands of his mother; he directs his gaze into the depths in front of him, not in
order to see or to hear—nor does he look into endless space—it is another
kind of immensity this eye embraces, in his future realm, the world of suffering,
for the sake of which he was sent down to earth. Yet all this interplay between
the spheres only makes the more incomprehensible that revelation of eternal
motherhood that Raphael suggests in the consecrated expression of knowledge
through suffering, of goodness and distance, happiness and presentiment, and
that Goethe described in a similar blend of austere exaltation:
“Der Mutter Urbild, Kbnigin der Frauen
Ein Wunderpinsel hat sie ausgedruckt.
Ihr beugt ein Mann mit andachtsvollem Grauen,
Ein Weib das Knie in Demut still entzuckt.”1
Everyone who has retained a sensibility for the poetry of the other world has
always remarked the unusual character of the Sistine Madonna and its unsuit-
ability for an altarpiece; and the canvas-painting style inseparable from its
formal lightness and from the undulation of all the lines, has even occasioned the
surmise that the picture may have been conceived as a processional banner. But
1 “Of mothers primal type, of women Queen,
By magic brush portrayed for eye to see,
A man in holy dread, a woman meek
In quiet transport, to her bows the knee.”
138
vision of space and remoteness; such is the poet’s handling of space—as in Dante:
“Dove la legge natural nulla rileva.” And in the human intimacies we note the
lifelike ease of the movements, the foreshortening to the utmost degree of free-
dom in the forward-stretching right hand of the Pope and beneath the hand on
his breast.
The eye is allowed to experience this rich and fascinating upward and
downward movement. Even to-day, in spite of all injuries and worse rumours
concerning the picture, the Sistine Madonna is among the best preserved
examples of Raphael’s painting. The faces of mother and child were slightly
rubbed and touched up in the last restorations, one hundred years ago, the St
Barbara even more so, but her hair retains undisturbed the fine brush-strokes
of the golden high-lights; the putti below, applied on the ground quite lightly
and transparently, make their contribution with the slight rustle of their pinions,
wine-red and green, and the mother-of-pearl shimmer of their eyes, set down
with a freedom equal to that of the most expressive passages of his fresco-painting
of that period; their wings, in colours from another world, are stirred by a
quivering rhythm, immediately above the rigid brown wood that serves as a
welcome support as they keep watch at their ease over the coffin and listen to
the earthly choir singing the Office for the Dead in the earthly sphere of the
church. Above, the other pair of eyes, of the Divine Child, supported on the
hands of his mother; he directs his gaze into the depths in front of him, not in
order to see or to hear—nor does he look into endless space—it is another
kind of immensity this eye embraces, in his future realm, the world of suffering,
for the sake of which he was sent down to earth. Yet all this interplay between
the spheres only makes the more incomprehensible that revelation of eternal
motherhood that Raphael suggests in the consecrated expression of knowledge
through suffering, of goodness and distance, happiness and presentiment, and
that Goethe described in a similar blend of austere exaltation:
“Der Mutter Urbild, Kbnigin der Frauen
Ein Wunderpinsel hat sie ausgedruckt.
Ihr beugt ein Mann mit andachtsvollem Grauen,
Ein Weib das Knie in Demut still entzuckt.”1
Everyone who has retained a sensibility for the poetry of the other world has
always remarked the unusual character of the Sistine Madonna and its unsuit-
ability for an altarpiece; and the canvas-painting style inseparable from its
formal lightness and from the undulation of all the lines, has even occasioned the
surmise that the picture may have been conceived as a processional banner. But
1 “Of mothers primal type, of women Queen,
By magic brush portrayed for eye to see,
A man in holy dread, a woman meek
In quiet transport, to her bows the knee.”
138