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| Raphael Madonna della Sedia ca. 1516 oil on panel Palazzo Pitti, Florence |
"A lecture which is to centre on one particular work of art demands a self-sufficient masterpiece. I hope and think that Raphael's Madonna della Sedia, now in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence, fulfils this condition. It is so self-explanatory that it has proved its appeal to many who have never heard the name of Raphael, let alone of the Italian Renaissance. Generations of art lovers have seen in it the embodiment of artistic perfection. Even a critic brought up in a different intellectual climate, such as André Malraux, who says that Raphael does not move him, quotes it as an instance of a masterpiece we would recognize as such if it were found in an attic without any labels attached to it. I think I should warn you from the outset that I have no fresh labels to stick on the frame. I have searched for no new link between the painting and the literature or thought of the Renaissance. My theme is precisely that most elusive of problems – the self-contained classic masterpiece.
But can we still see it in isolation? Is not the popularity it once enjoyed, and our own reaction against it, a disturbing element? I may as well confess to you that, when I approached the Palazzo Pitti this autumn to study the picture in preparation for this lecture, my heart sank as I saw the coloured postcards, box lids, and souvenirs displayed on the stalls in front of the Gallery. Should I really inflict this on you? A fresh encounter with the original removed my doubts. My doubts but not my difficulties. For, after all, you have only my word for it that the painting looks different from those baneful reproductions, that the very brushwork shows a freshness and boldness which banishes all thought of the sugar-box, and that the colours, under the old varnish, have a mellowness and richness which no print and no copy can bring out. I remember in particular the warm golden-brown of the Christ-child's garment, as it stands out against the deep blue of the Virgin's skirt, the dark red of her sleeve and the gold-embroidered back of the chair, and, most of all, the blending into the harmony of that daring green scarf which so easily brings a cheap and discordant note into prints. . . . It is true that even in the Pitti Gallery it is not easy to come to terms with the picture. The vast golden eighteenth-century frame produces a dazzle that all but kills the subtle gradations of tone on which Raphael relied. As soon as you screen it off with your hands the picture comes to life."
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| Johan Zoffany Tribuna of the Uffizi (Raphael'a Madonna della Sedia on the wall at far left) 1772-77 oil on canvas Royal Collection, Great Britain |
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| Johan Zoffany Tribuna of the Uffizi (detail) 1772-77 oil on canvas Royal Collection, Great Britain |
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| John Jackson after Raphael Madonna della Sedia 1833 wood-engraving (proof-print, inscribed in 1834) British Museum |
"At the same time the self-sufficient isolation of the picture began to present a problem to the admirers who made their pilgrimage to Italy. Travellers then, as now, found mere looking strenuous and somewhat disconcerting. The mind soon threatens to become a blank unless it is given something to play with – a story, an anecdote, a bit of gossip or background information. Guides and ciceroni then, as now, knew of this human frailty to which we art historians owe so much. I suppose the stories which began to be told about the Madonna della Sedia to create a link with the familiar world of man must be their collective work, though we find their first reflection in a German book for children. This book by one Ernst von Houwald, published in 1820, at the height of the Romantic era, contains the first version of a legend with which the guides of Florence still regale the visitors. As I heard it in Florence, it tells of a hermit who fled from a pack of wolves into the branches of an oak tree and was saved by the plucky daughter of a vintner. The hermit prophesied that both the girl and the oak tree would be immortalized for this deed. Many years later the oak tree was felled and its timber turned into wine barrels for the vintner. The daughter married and had two children, when, lo and behold, Raphael came along and saw the beautiful girl with her angelic babies. He reached for his sketching material but found he had left it at home. So, quickly, he took a piece of clay and immortalized the group on the bottom of one of the barrels which stood around."
"The explanation of the tondo-form as the bottom of a wine barrel admirably filled the void which Vasari had left when he failed to relate some anecdote about the picture. It quickly gained currency and was even illustrated by a German painter in Italy, August Hopfgarten. His re-creation of the episode is now forgotten, but you need only visit the Pitti to hear a good many variations on the motif told in any number of languages to forlorn and tired crocodiles of bewildered tourists. One guide I heard tried to revive the flagging interest of his charge by the never-failing device of asserting that the Madonna was really the portrait of Raphael's mistress, the notorious baker's daughter. Another, perhaps more prudish and less concerned with historical possibilities, made her into a portrait of Raphael's wife – though there was no such person. But I liked best the English-speaking guide who said in my presence: 'Raphael had no money to buy anything, so they gave him a barrel to paint on' – I may have looked up at that moment and my expression may not have been sufficiently credulous, for the guide continued, 'we have the document here in Florence'. I am afraid I lacked the courage to inquire further. It would have been unkind. The starving genius who has no money for canvas and begs for old barrels which posterity frames in gold is an image to be hugged and taken home like some story from the films, and it may have served to keep alive a faint memory of the picture, which would otherwise have joined the others in limbo."
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| Johann Michael Wittmer Raphael's first sketch for the Madonna della Sedia 1853 oil on canvas Royal Collection, Great Britain (purchased by Prince Albert as a gift for Queen Victoria) |
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| Johann Michael Wittmer Raphael's first sketch for the Madonna della Sedia (detail) 1853 oil on canvas Royal Collection, Great Britain |
"But whatever the value or otherwise of all the anecdotes and associations which have come to cluster round the Madonna della Sedia, a work of art carries with it the barnacles of its voyage through the centuries. It is a frightening thought, and yet, I believe, true, that anything we say or write about a painting may change it in some subtle way. It reorganizes our perceptions, and no one can unscramble them or wipe away the accents which description and interpretation superimpose upon the picture. The anecdote represented in Hopfargten's picture turns the devotional image into a genre piece, the mature composition of a great master into a snapshot-like improvisation. It is this way of looking at it which endears the picture to the many who are fond of snapshots, but it has also served to alienate those others who have learned to look askance at all anecdotal elements in art. Nor is the critic and historian quite immune to the suggestive power of past interpretations. Even as sensitive and independent a writer as Mr. Paul Oppé must have succumbed to its spell when, in his beautiful book on Raphael, he described our painting as 'a swift and frankly realistic portrait of a mother with her child, palpitating and breathing with the hot life of the Roman sun'. For is this painting realistic? I think it is mainly one element which has led to the feeling that Raphael has here portrayed a woman of the people rather than the Queen of Heaven: the green patterned scarf round her shoulders is indeed unlike the hieratic blue cloak of the Virgin. Whether it is really a peasant scarf, as is often asserted, seems to me a different matter. The chair, at any rate, the sedia from which the picture takes its present name, with its elaborate turnery and its backrest of embroidered velvet and golden fringes, would hardly have conveyed the atmosphere of a humble dwelling to Raphael's contemporaries; nor would the serene face of the Virgin have looked to them like that of a working woman with two children on her hands. Raphael was no Caravaggio and the Roman model which inspired his Madonnas is a figment of the Romantic imagination.
There may be some need to remove that misunderstanding, for it threatens the integrity of the work in more than one sense of the term. If we were really meant to relate it to an image of everyday life, we might feel that this relationship is false and prettified. It is this feeling which presents the greatest obstacle in our day to the understanding of Raphael's achievement."
– E.H. Gombrich, from Raphael's Madonna della Sedia, the Charlton Lecture delivered at King's College in the University of Durham in 1955, reprinted in the author's essay collection Norm and Form (London: Phaidon Press, 1966)