Dresden
This exhibition may well be unique in that the initiative for it has come directly from the Pope himself. The occasion of the show is the pastoral visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Germany and it was apparently at his insistence that the Vatican Museums loaned Raphael’s Madonna di Foligno, 1512, to be displayed alongside the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden’s own Raphael altarpiece, the Sistine Madonna, painted in the same year. Both of these works were famous in Raphael’s lifetime and have remained so since. That such a large-scale work as the Madonna di Foligno (over three metres tall) has been loaned despite the potential hazards involved in moving it underlines the importance the Pope attaches to his visit. While the two Raphael altarpieces are the stars of the show, the supporting cast includes other works featuring the Mother of God by transalpine artists such as Cranach the Elder, Matthias Grünewald and Dürer, as well as other Italians such as Correggio and Garofalo, in addition to drawings, engravings, books and other documents.
It seems likely that the two Raphaels stood together at one time in the artist’s studio. The Sistine Madonna takes its name from the Monastery of St Sixtus in Piacenza, the monks of which had commissioned Raphael to paint the altarpiece. They stipulated that he include figures of their patrons, Sts Sixtus and Barbara, but it has been the detail of the two cherubim underneath the Virgin (included, according to Heinrich Wölfflin as long ago as 1888, merely to provide a motif to close the bottom of the painting, the wing of the cherub on the left having been omitted for considerations of visual balance) that has lately been massively reproduced in every conceivable medium, without reference to the rest of the work. The Sistine Madonna was bought by Augustus II/III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, in 1745 and has remained in the city (apart from a sojourn in the USSR, 1945-55) ever since. It was an object of grand-tour veneration. Among others, Goethe, Winckelmann, Wagner and Nietzsche all commented on the painting.
The Madonna di Foligno was commissioned by Sigismondo de’ Conti, the chamberlain to Pope Julius II, in 1511. It was placed on the high altar of the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome where Sigismondo was buried in 1512. It was moved in 1565 by a descendant to a monastery in Foligno, from which its title is taken. Looted by Napoleon, it was returned to Rome in 1815 and placed alongside Raphael’s Transfiguration, 1516, in the Pinacoteca, where it, too, has remained ever since. The cherub bearing the superscription at the bottom of the altarpiece has never achieved anything like the recognition enjoyed by his relations in the Dresden picture.
Heavenly Splendour: Raphael, Dürer and Grünewald Paint the Madonna, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden. September-8 January 2012
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'Papalmadonnamania'