The Garvagh Madonna by Raphael

Hello, and welcome to the National Gallery. My name is Matthias Wibbel. I am the curator of 16th-century Italian pictures here at the Gallery. It's a great pleasure for me to be talking about Raphael in this room because this is new. I don't know when Raphael was last in this room, if ever. Usually, the Raphael paintings are hung in the Sainsbury Wing because we have 11 Raphaels in the National Gallery, and most of them are the earlier part of his career and fit better within the context of the paintings that are in the Sainsbury Wing. That does, however, mean that he gets taken out of the context of the beginnings of the 16th century, where he's so important, which is what we usually have in these galleries. So, at the moment, he's in here, along with his older colleagues, Signorelli, and Perugino, and his contemporary, Lo Spagna, over there on the wall, and also Ghirlandaio is over there. So, slightly the older generation that he's in with here. And he just looks, I think, great on these red walls. And it's always instructive to see paintings in a new context, so I'm very happy with that, and I'm happy with our being able to display our great Signorelli Circumcision, which usually we don't have space for on the main floor here on Vista when you come in the door. It's a really fantastic work. If we could have it on the main floor, always we would, but it's these problems of space that we have. Anyway, I'm here to talk about this, the so-called Gawach Madonna, or Aldobrandini Madonna. These are calling names that refer to the collections in which it was. The Aldobrandini Collection was in Rome, and it was recorded there first in the early 17th century, and was sold after Napoleon's invasion of Italy, when a lot of artworks were sold during the unrest in Italy at that time, and made its way to London, where eventually it entered the Garver Collection in Scotland. That's why it has that name. It has nothing to do with Raphael himself or what he thought of it. Actually, we don't know for whom he painted it. It is painted in a very specific and very important time in his career, where he has arrived in Rome. It's like halfway point in his career. He has arrived in Rome and he's working on his greatest, most resonant masterpiece, the Stanza della Segnatura, the decorations of the Papal Library in the Vatican Palace. This is the same time as he is working on those great paintings in that cycle, notably the School of Athens, which is one of the quintessential images of European art. It is in the genre with which he is otherwise most identified, a Madonna with a Child, which is a sub-genre, I would say. It's a small painting meant for private devotion. A private patron would have this in his house and would use it for prayer. And these paintings very often have the two most important figures in the biblical narrative, the Virgin and, of course, the baby Jesus, often seconded by, as we see here, the infant Saint John the Baptist. John the Baptist foretold the coming of Christ and therefore he often appears in these images of Christ as a child. This is, of course, not a narrative. This doesn't happen in the Bible. It is a construction that brings together some of the most important figures to which we pray or to which the owner would pray. This is a genre that Raphael specialised in quite early in his career and that he developed quite rapidly and in very interesting ways. Here you see the Madonna seated centrally with the Child on her lap. He's blonde and Saint John rushes up, clad in what he's usually clad in, in a kind of fur. It's camel skin, as it's described in the Gospels. It looks a lot softer than camel skin here. It looks really soft and cuddly and nice. I'm not sure what it is, but if you take a closer look, the way Raphael can bring out the texture of this wonderfully soft fur is just astonishing. But he rushes up and he hands the child a carnation, which is a flower that symbolises divine love. We also have it here, this Madonna, which is a couple of years earlier. This is from 1557, painted in Florence. I forgot to give you the date of this. It's around 1508, 9, 10, something like that, in Rome. But we also have it here where the child is playing with the carnation that the mother is holding. It's a symbol of the divine love, of the love with which he eventually forgave mankind. So, that's what we have. They are seated in some kind of loggia with two arched openings towards a landscape, which looks like the Roman Campagna, the Roman countryside. There's certainly a river, but there might also be a road winding its way through the landscape. And there's a bridge in the back there and a fortified town. Here is what... There's sort of a rustic farm building here and some larger indeterminate buildings on the right. The landscape is serene, it's beautiful. It's covered in a slight mist. It could be in the morning. Light clouds are passing across the skies. So, it's a very contemplative moment that he's giving us here. And this is a painting meant for contemplation. So, that's important. Although it is small and although Raphael was an absolute virtuoso, he still planned this very meticulously and thought about it a lot. What was important to him was, first, as I said, to give a sense of... or to invite contemplation. And secondly, to invite thinking about what it means, what we're seeing, and how that informs our spirituality. And this is subtle, but Raphael is very occupied with psychology. And if you look at the Christ Child here, he's... and also with just the details that give you a sense of who the characters are. So, the Christ Child here is lighter-skinned than the Baptist. The Baptist presumably has been out in the desert, even though it's only later in his life. Actually, it's not as a baby he's out in the desert. But he has certainly been out in the sun. He has tan skin, whereas the Child also is of lighter complexion, but he is much more pale. He reaches out to grab this carnation, and he does it with a cognizant look. A look that makes him appear wise beyond his years. And this is fairly common in the description of the Christ Child, but it's very subtly conveyed here. He is thinking about what he's doing, and he's aware, whereas Saint John is acting in a more childlike manner, with enthusiasm, handing over this carnation. So, the Christ Child already is probably aware of what his further life will bring him. And so is the Virgin, and that is quite normal. The Virgin is usually depicted as also being aware, and has a slight melancholy look on her face. She knows that both of these children are going to die. They're going to die for very important reasons, but it's nevertheless troubling, obviously, to a mother. So, ever so subtly, Raphael inserts this note of melancholy into an otherwise very happy scene. He's not somebody who wants to show us the pain and anguish and conflict in life. That's not really what he's about. He is trying to show us something more that invites our positive thoughts. He gives us an ideal that we can aspire towards. And I think this is very important. I'll be touching upon it a little bit later, how he does this. But this is very important to our understanding of Raphael. And one of the reasons why, in the 20th century, some critics have maybe tended to say that he's less accessible than Michelangelo or Titian, who indeed deal with anguish and pain and ambiguity and the troubling aspects of life. Raphael shows us the angels of our better nature. And that is a message that I think is as important now as it was 500 years ago and as it ever will be. It's always important to know what we can aspire towards and the good things that we can do as human beings working together. And that's what Raphael really is about. So, all this is packed into this small scene. And, as I said, Raphael is a virtuoso. He can draw like nobody's business. And he can... Presumably, he could just sit down and paint this. But he doesn't. He plans it meticulously. So, the infrared examination we've made of this painting show a very meticulous underdrawing done with a metal point on a preparation that registered the line, the metal point made across the preparation. And it's very, very precise. It is not made from so many paintings, like even the little Dream of the Night over there by Raphael, the tiny painting there, is made after a cartoon, which is the normal way of working. First, you prepare sketches and so on and figure out what your composition is going to be. Then you do a drawing in one-to-one scale and you transfer that drawing onto the surface that you paint. And Raphael would do that even with a tiny painting like this. It's not just like... Obviously, it's something that you have to do for a big fresco. But he would do it even with small paintings earlier in his career. At this point, he's moving a little bit away from that. And there is no sign of transfer from a drawing, from a piece of paper. But the line is very precise. So, he presumably had a drawing next to him that he copied freehand with the help of a plumb line down the middle. The centrality here is very important to him. She has to be placed very centrally. And as he was working on the surface before he started to paint, he was also drawing in the landscape behind with all the buildings. And initially, he planned to have an open landscape with buildings coming across all the way. And then he decided not to have that. While he was still drawing, he hadn't started painting yet. But he was doing that on the surface of the panel here, not in drawings on paper. So, he decided to insert this architectural element that frames the Virgin. And that's probably because he wants her head to be clearer to us. If it were set against the blue sky with all this architectural detail in the background, it would recede a bit and not be as graphically effective. Notice also that although he has a very strong command of human anatomy, he is not a stickler for getting everything correct. And he often challenges himself by putting his figures into very difficult positions. And the way that she's sitting here, for a painter at this time, this is a very complex posture to put a figure in. He has a sense, of course, of how her body sits under the drapery here. But still, he's adjusted it ever so slightly. And especially the head. If you look at this for a bit longer, you see the head is bigger. It's out of proportion. It's bigger than it should be on that body. And again, I think that's for visual emphasis. It might be unintentional, but it's certainly not something he had a problem with, because it worked for him. So, he starts painting. He's decided to set off the Virgin. Another thing that... He has these arched sides here. And another thing he didn't draw are the little pieces of wall on either side of the window here. And the reason he didn't... I mean, those are slightly unmotivated architectural elements. And as you can see, if he were to... He has these arches and he can't paint the edge of the window. He can't paint the whole window, because obviously the painting is too small. And I think he was uneasy about having the landscape just pass into the... To crop the landscape just with the painting. So, he inserted these architectural elements that really make no architectural sense to frame the landscape architecturally. So, this is pictorial thinking rather than trying to make something that is sort of accurate in terms of the real world. This is an ideal world, after all. They're seated on this box. Unfortunately, the painting is not in perfect condition. It's not like this, which is immaculate, which is absolutely remarkable. But this is a slightly raw painting. And I think this box, which he also adjusted slightly when he started painting, would have been more like... You see those glowing steps on the altar there, or on the throne, going up to the throne where the Virgin and Child sit in this painting, which was painted in Florence some years earlier, about six, seven years earlier. At this point in Raphael's career, he had really developed a three-dimensional conception of the figure and a great understanding of the interaction of his figures, in part from looking at Leonardo da Vinci, his much older contemporary who was in Florence when Raphael spent his crucial years there between 1504 and 1508. And because he was so charming and wonderful and everybody loved him, he quickly got access to Leonardo's studio and copied things in Leonardo's studio. He looked very closely at what Leonardo was doing. Also what Michelangelo was doing, but that's not as important here. So, Michelangelo... He realised very quickly that Leonardo and Michelangelo were the two greatest artists of the time. This is who I measure myself in relation to. And he was a great magpie in art. He stole wherever he could from fellow artists and transformed his inventions into things that looked entirely like Raphael. Except for the people who knew he'd stolen from them. Michelangelo was fuming about this even 30 years later. But he was an expert at this. And coming up with inventions that the originator could never have thought of. One of his talents, one of his great talents. Taking the best of what he saw around him. So, here he is thinking about Leonardo. And Leonardo was a pioneer in placing figures in relation to each other and suggesting an emotional life underneath their outer appearance. He was not so interested in emotional investment from the viewer because he was a scientist and he just wanted to acknowledge the fact that humans also have emotions and that's part of their scientific makeup. That's how we're made and that's what he's trying to illustrate in his art. Raphael was very interested in emotional engagement. He took that from Leonardo, that idea of having the figures interact and having an inner life. And brought it to a new height of perfection. In Raphael's, in this period, when he's painting the School of Athens, if you can bring that picture to mind, his large compositions. It's almost as if there are maybe 30 or 40 figures in that painting and you can't remove any of them without it falling apart. Everything is perfectly placed and everybody interacts with each other and is placed in relation to each other. This is something that Raphael is better at than anybody. And here what he does is, he has the central placement of the Virgin, but in order to not make it too boring, he's not sitting frontally as he does here. Here he's still learning this kind of animated three-dimensional movement. He's getting there, but here he's arrived. And in order not to have it be too boring and central, her body is torqued. So she sits with her legs out here, with one leg folded up in front of her. And so her body describes a curve, but feels very centralised at the same time. And, of course, there's the exchange of gazes. She looks at Saint John, who looks up at Christ, who looks back. And that suggests the thoughts that pass between them. He also needs to balance out the composition in other ways. So, because the Baptist is a quite large presence down here, he can afford to leave this window fairly open without any of the figures interrupting our view through it. Whereas here, he has Christ's head with the halo and the Virgin holding a bit of her mantle, which is sort of unmotivated. Maybe it's because she has just enveloped Christ with it and is opening it. It's hard to say, but it certainly works pictorially, that there's a little bit of interruption of our view there, balancing that. And we have the halos as well. The halo here, balanced by that, going up to the central one there. So there's a sort of a step-by-step progression there. And he thinks a lot about composition. And this is why he has to plan very meticulously. Even he, who is such a virtuoso, can't just do that completely extemporally. In terms of colour, this is a very special time in Raphael's career too. There's these pastel, these very soft colours that are pastel-like. And they differ from his Florentine work, which is more saturated, as you can see. Very bright, saturated colouring. And it differs from his later paintings, just a couple of years later, where he becomes much more interested in strong contrasts. And still a very saturated colour, a very strong shadow and light, and so on. At this point, he has this soft focus, beautifully muted colour range. And again, you probably can't see that here, but if you go up close, you will be able to see how her blue dress is a slightly different hue to her mantle. And those two blues match the blue of the sky and the blueness of the mist in the landscape behind her. And just to add an accent to that, there's turban-like garment she has on her head. It interacts with blue and then green, which is again matched in the landscape, the greenish blue. They're separated out, they're combined in the landscape and they're separated out in her turban. The gilding, the halos and the red of her dress is lined with actual leaf gold. And this is something which is a very... It's an old technique that you see in older paintings and that progressively at this time becomes less and less used. And this is maybe Raphael's last use of it. He made use of it in his Danza della Segnatura and is using it here. But after this, he drops it from his painting because it is an alienating element. It's pure flat gold in a painting otherwise meant to suggest verisimilitude, the real world. And there's a slightly alienating conflict between that flatness and the... So, going forward, he will paint gold using pigments rather than using actual gold. So, this is the last time he does that, probably. It's around this time, anyway. But, again, it's elegantly integrated and gives a sense of otherworldliness to it. So, that is some of what's going on. And, of course, this is something that satisfies him as an artist to be able to so beautifully integrate his figures into an environment and to have them interact and to give us a sense of harmony. And give himself a sense of harmony, I'm sure. However, this carries a more... This is not just done for its own sake. This is key to understanding why Raphael is so important and why his art continues to speak to us, I think. I said before that what he's interested in is showing the better angels of our nature. And as he's composing his pictures, he's thinking about this. He shows the interaction of his figures and the psychological interaction, as I talked about. And he tries to give an emotional charge so we can invest our emotions in it and feel empathy with his characters. But he doesn't want violent emotion. As I said, he doesn't want violent emotion. He wants something that makes us feel at ease and aspire towards greater things. But down to the very forms, this is important. His idea, I think, is by looking at a harmonious picture, harmoniously composed, we are encouraged to internalize that harmony in ourselves. So, in praying to this Madonna, he is attuning us to the harmony that courses through us as human beings, that courses through nature and the cosmos. And you can put it even in musical terms. The harmony of the spheres, described by various classical writers and theoreticians. This idea that the universe is ordered by a divine harmony that is sort of musical in character. Raphael is a very musical painter in this sense. And he makes it explicit in the School of Athens, where he actually has a diagram of the harmony of the spheres. So, he is trying to show us that. And that harmony that courses through the universe, also, if we are attuned to it, appears in our art. And it appears in Raphael more than probably any other European artist. And this is why Raphael is one of the quintessential artists of the European tradition, I think. He shows us what we can aspire towards, how civilization should work. He shows us how we can obtain not just peace, but knowledge and enlightenment and spiritual harmony. If we think about each other as fellow human beings, living in harmony together in a community. He is a painter of community. I think I'll leave you with that. And say thank you for your attention.