Madonna of the Meadow
Raphael (1483 to 1520) · 1505 or 1506
The Virgin Mary sits on the grass in a wide green meadow with a lake and blue hills behind her, in a red dress and a blue cloak, steadying the naked infant Jesus as he reaches for a slender cross held by the small John the Baptist kneeling at her feet. Her face is turned down toward the children with an expression of complete calm. Flowers grow in the grass, poppies and strawberries among them, and the light is that of a clear spring morning. Nothing in the picture is dramatic, and that is why people stand in front of it for so long.
Raphael painted it in Florence when he was about twenty two, for his friend Taddeo Taddei, and the date is written in tiny gold letters on the hem of the Virgin's neckline. The three figures form a pyramid, a device he took from Leonardo, whose drawings for the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne he had just seen. But where Leonardo's figures are shadowy, Raphael's are clear and evenly lit. Look at the gentle spiral of the Virgin's pose, the way her hands hold the child without gripping, and the landscape, which dissolves into blue at the horizon in the manner of Perugino, his teacher. The cross that the children play with is the only hint of what is to come.
The painting was bought for Archduke Ferdinand Karl of Tyrol in 1662 and came from Ambras Castle to Vienna. It belongs to a group of three Florentine Madonnas in landscapes that Raphael painted within about a year; the others are in Florence and Paris. This one is the most serene, and it hangs in the first room of the Italian galleries, the natural beginning of a visit. Compare it with the Titians a room away, and you see the whole of the sixteenth century open up between them.
Did You Know? Raphael wrote the date in gold on the edge of Mary's neckline, and the last digit is so faint that scholars still argue over whether it reads 1505 or 1506.
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