This picture, remarkable for the effective simplicity of its design and for the purity of the Virgin's face, derives the name by which it is commonly known from the fact that it was bought in 1799 by the Grand Duke Ferdinand III. from a poor widow, and held by him in such esteem that he would never part from it and always took it with him on his travels. At one time it was actually credited with the power of working miracles. It is one of the first works of Raphael's Florentine period, and now hangs in the Pitti Palace, Florence.
What are the qualities of Raphael's art that have carried his fame unsullied through the ages and made him the most popular, the most admired, of all painters? The greatest of the primitives, and of the later masters Velazquez, Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Watteau, to mention only a few of the brightest beacons in the realm of art, have at some time or other been eclipsed and held in slight esteem. Raphael alone escaped the inconstancy of popular favour; he was set up as an idol before he left the world to mourn his untimely death, and in the course of the years the world's idolatrous worship was extended even to the feeble handiwork of his assistants, which often passed under his name. Only within the memory of living men did this blind and indiscriminating worship lead to a reaction as indiscriminating. But this reaction was confined to a comparatively small circle of æsthetically inclined art enthusiasts; and to-day, when the more scientific methods of criticism have succeeded in sifting the wheat from the chaff—the master's own work from the factory-like production of his bottega—he has been reinstated in all his former glory. Contemptuous hostility to Raphael's art has ceased to be a fashionable pose. The frank acknowledgment of the perfection of this art is no longer stayed by the consciousness of the harm done by that imperfect imitation of the Raphaelic code of beauty, which has been the result of all academic teaching in Europe since the founding of the Prix de Rome.
Beauty, formal beauty, pure and faultless, must appeal to everybody; and Raphael means to us the perfection of beauty—such beauty as lies in rhythm, balance, colour, form, and execution. It is a calculated beauty, the lucid, unambiguous expression of an absolutely normal, well-balanced mind assisted by an unerring hand; hence it is intelligible to everybody without that unconscious mental effort which is needed for the understanding of an art of greater emotional intensity. It is of the very essence of art that it should express an emotion; a picture which is merely imitative without holding a hint of what the artist felt at the time of creating it, ceases to be a work of art, even if it represents a subject beautiful in itself. On the other hand, an ugly subject may be raised to sublime art by emotional statement; but this emotion is of necessity more complex and more difficult to understand than that simplest of all emotions, the pleasure caused by the contemplation of beauty. This accounts for the common fallacy that art and beauty are indissolubly connected, and for the favouritism shown by all the successive generations to Raphael whose brush was wedded to beauty in the classic sense, and whose art knew nothing of the beauty of character.
But beauty alone does not constitute Raphael's greatness, or Bouguereau and many other modern academic painters would have to be accounted great instead of being merely dull and insipid. Raphael developed to its utmost power of expressiveness the art of space-composition, the secret of which was the heritage of the Umbrian painters. What space-composition means cannot be better defined than it has been by Mr. Berenson: "Space-composition differs from ordinary composition in the first place most obviously in that it is not an arrangement to be judged as extending only laterally, or up and down on a flat surface, but as extending inwards in depth as well. It is composition in three dimensions, and not in two, in the cube, not merely on the surface…. Painted space-composition opens out the space it frames in, puts boundaries only ideal to the roof of heaven. All that it uses, whether the forms of the natural landscape, or of grand architecture, or even of the human figure, it reduces to be its ministrants in conveying a sense of untrammelled, but not chaotic spaciousness. In such pictures, how freely one breathes—as if a load had just been lifted from one's breast; how refreshed, how noble, how potent one feels; again, how soothed; and still again, how wafted forth to abodes of far-away bliss!"
This sense of space and depth is achieved by methods which have nothing in common with our modern art of creating the illusion of what is called "atmosphere"—not by the "losing and finding" of contours, not by the application of optical theories, such as the zone of interchanging rays which dissolves all hard outlines, nor by the blurring and fogging of the distance. Space-composition in the sense in which it was practised by Raphael is closely akin to the art of architecture in its appeal to our emotions.
As an illustrator, again, Raphael was unequalled as regards clear, direct, measured statement of all that is essential to the immediate grasping of the idea or incident depicted. The first glance at one of Raphael's works, whether it be a small panel picture or a monumental fresco, reveals its whole purport, and that in a manner so complete and lucid and convincing as could not be achieved by any other method of expression. With infallible sureness he invariably found the shortest way for the harmonious statement of idea, form, and emotion, which in his work are always found in perfect balance and so completely permeated by each other as to constitute an indissoluble trinity.
Another reason for Raphael's powerful appeal—and in this he is perhaps the most typical child of his period—is that his art unites in one majestic current the two greatest movements of thought which have ever fired the imagination of civilised Europe; classic antiquity and Christian faith, when treated by Raphael's brush, cease to be incompatible and live side by side in that measured harmony which is the hall-mark of his art. Christianity is presented to us in the glorious classic garb of the old world, and the myth and philosophy of the ancients are brought into intimate relationship with Christian teaching. He infuses new blood and life into the stones of ancient Greece and Rome—unlike Mantegna who had remained cold and classic in his relief-like reconstructions of antiquity; just as he accentuates the human emotional side of the Madonna and Child motif by discarding all hieroglyphic symbolism and setting before our eyes the intimate link of love that connects mother and babe. Almost imperceptibly his cupids are transformed into child angels, and the Jehovah of his "Vision of Ezekiel" has more in common with Olympian Jove than with the mediæval conception of the Lord of Heaven.
PLATE III.—THE MADONNA DELLA SEDIA
(In the Pitti Palace, Florence)