Renaissance perfection: Raphael, The Alba Madonna

[00:00:04][music] >> We're in the monumental Raphael exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see not only some of Raphael's most important paintings, but also drawings that are almost never out.

[00:00:20]Drawings are not like fast. They're very fragile. And so museums like to keep them dark. That is not on public view.

[00:00:28]>> We're actually standing in front of I think probably our favorite painting by Raphael, the Alba Madonna, which is normally in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. So it's lovely to see it here surrounded by Raphael's drawings. The name Alba Madonna comes from the Alba family in Spain who owned the painting for centuries.

[00:00:51]>> The painting is unusual. It's round.

[00:00:53]It's a tondo. This was a format quite popular in 15th and early 16th century Florence.

[00:01:00]>> So we could think for example of Michelangelo's Doni Tondo or the Taddei Tondo or Fra Filippo Lippi's Tondos.

[00:01:08]This is a really popular format.

[00:01:10]>> But it's not just a decorative element here. It goes to the heart of what this painting is about. Going back to the ancient Greeks, the circle was considered the most perfect geometric form.

[00:01:21]>> A circle has no beginning and no end, like God.

[00:01:26]>> The subject couldn't be more familiar.

[00:01:28]The Virgin Mary holding the Christ child, St. John the Baptist, but Raphael has given it a quality of the eternal, of perfection, of the platonic. That is an attempt to reach a kind of almost divine ideal.

[00:01:43]>> Raphael begins his career in Urbino, not too far from Florence and Rome, a city-state ruled by the Duke of Urbino.

[00:01:50]He's got a very refined court. His father was an artist, a poet, and so Raphael's growing up in this sophisticated artistic environment, but where the action is happening is not in Urbino, it's in Florence and Rome. And Raphael goes first to Florence and he sees the work of Leonardo and of Michelangelo. Raphael is interested in Leonardo's emphasis on rounded volumes, on creating this illusion of three-dimensional form.

[00:02:22]>> And at the same time, he's interested in the way that Michelangelo creates these complex interrelated poses where the figures are directly relating to each other.

[00:02:31]>> We could think for example of Michelangelo's Doni Tondo, where the Christ child is moving through space between Joseph and Mary. But that idea of figures that interrelate to one another, definitely Michelangelo, but also the example of Leonardo. Leonardo begins a new kind of composition where the figures look at one another, they reveal their emotions, they gesture to one another, and the separateness of figures that we often see earlier in the Renaissance disappears with this new unified composition.

[00:03:04]>> The Virgin Mary is looking down at St. John. John is returning the gaze, and then Christ looks back to John. This particular type of representation of the Virgin Mary is known as the Madonna of Humility, and that's because she's not represented on a throne as she might have been a century earlier. But here she's represented sitting directly on the ground.

[00:03:24]>> Look at Christ's body. The sophistication of that pose tells us that this is no simple infant, that this is a divine figure. His head turns to our left, his lower body turns to our right. There's this graceful churning of the torso. The figure becomes so much more expressive.

[00:03:45]>> There are two drawings right next to the painting that show us how Raphael got here. He did a studio sketch of one of his assistants, a male, in an even more energetic posture that he refined for the Virgin Mary as he changed the gender to a woman. And yet there is still in the finished painting a sense of her energy, her movement, even as she's also this stable central form.

[00:04:11]>> The figures all move incredibly gracefully, and we refer to Mary as monumental. Part of that to me is that her body encompasses the forms of St. John the Baptist on the left and Christ on the right. In other words, both of those figures are within the frame of her body, and her body becomes like a throne holding Christ child.

[00:04:33]>> There's virtually no brushwork that is visible. Raphael has created a painting that seems magically perfect, not revealing the tremendous effort that went into creating this perfection and this sense of ease. And the term for this was sprezzatura.

[00:04:48]>> We can't pinpoint exactly what the figures are doing with one another. I've read numerous interpretations. Is Christ showing St. John the Baptist the cross to refer to the crucifixion and the resurrection and the redemption of mankind? Is he accepting the cross from St. John the Baptist? Is he moving down from the Virgin's lap? Is he moving up toward the Virgin? It's a lovely ambiguity that helps us engage with each of the figures and their gestures.

[00:05:21]>> But the seriousness of that subject, the foreshadowing of the events at the end of Christ's life, gives the painting, for all of its beauty, a degree of a solemnity, a degree of tragedy. And we can see it even in the beautiful face of the Virgin Mary's.

[00:05:37]>> The modeling of the drapery, too, is so engaging. Our eye goes to that thigh.

[00:05:43]The use of light and dark to create a three-dimensional leg under the satrapy.

[00:05:49]Our eye also goes to Mary's foot.

[00:05:51]>> And apparently, Raphael is referencing ancient Roman footwear in that sandal.

[00:05:57]>> Like Leonardo now, he's expressing the divinity of the figures through the movements of the body, through their ideal beauty, through their perfection.