The Conestabile Madonna
Raphael (1483-1520) · about 1504
In a round painting not much wider than your hand, the Virgin in a blue mantle holds a book and looks down at the child, who reaches across to turn its pages. Behind them a wintry landscape opens out, with snow on the far hills and a lake reflecting a pale sky. The picture sits in an elaborate gilded frame carved with grotesques that was probably made at the same time and in the same workshop, so that painting and frame were conceived together as a single precious object.
Raphael was about twenty-one and still working in the manner of his teacher Perugino in Umbria when he painted it. Look at the calm oval of Mary's face and the gentle, downcast eyes, which come straight from Perugino, and then at the way the figures fill the circle so naturally, with the curve of the mantle echoing the curve of the frame. That sense of balance was already his own. The child's foot and Mary's slim hand are drawn with a fineness that rewards a close look. When the painting was moved from its wooden panel to canvas in Saint Petersburg in 1881, the restorers discovered from the drawing beneath that Raphael had originally given Mary a pomegranate, the symbol of the Resurrection, and changed it to a book.
The painting takes its name from the Conestabile della Staffa family of Perugia, who owned it until 1871, when Tsar Alexander the Second bought it as a gift for his wife, the Empress Maria Alexandrovna. After her death in 1880 it entered the Hermitage. The sale caused an outcry in Italy, where the loss of a Raphael was felt as a national wound. Notice the two small trees at the left of the landscape, painted with tiny leaves and no shadows, and the way the whole scene seems lit by cold morning air.
Did You Know? The drawing beneath the paint shows that Raphael first gave the Virgin a pomegranate and changed it to a book.
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