The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Raphael · the one canvas, scored as it now stands in Dresden · oil on canvas, an altarpiece · the Virgin and Child on cloud between Saint Sixtus and Saint Barbara, two putti at the foot · about 1512 to 1513, for the high altar of the Benedictine church of San Sisto in Piacenza · bought for Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, in the early 1750s · Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
Mode
Altarpiece as a vision disclosed: the Virgin and Child with saints, the throne and the architecture removed, the picture framed by curtains and stopped at a painted ledge
Mythos
The mother who carries her child out to his fate; the veil drawn back on the god; the god brought to the altar
Phase
One instant of approach: the step forward on cloud, held at the threshold; painted about 1512 to 1513
Presentation
Oil on canvas, a tall field over an altar, the figures at about life size; curtains on a rod above, a ledge below
Register
Grave wonder, one sustained note; transport in the centre, idleness at the foot
Scale
Six figures on one axis of approach: a mother and her child, a pope and a martyr, two putti, and the congregation drawn in by a pointing hand
Governing Proposition
A curtain is drawn back on a field of light, and out of it a young woman walks toward us on cloud, carrying her child forward. Neither face is innocent of what the coming will cost. The canvas does not show a heaven one enters; it shows an appearance that comes forward to a threshold and stops there, at a painted ledge that belongs to the space of the people before the altar, where an old pope has set down his tiara and points across to them.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The canvas was painted about 1512 to 1513 for the high altar of San Sisto, the church of the Benedictines in Piacenza, on a commission associated with Pope Julius II. Its two saints belong to the place. Sixtus, Pope Sixtus II, is the saint whose name the church bears; Barbara, a martyr, kneels opposite him with the tower of her imprisonment drawn small behind her shoulder.
It is an altarpiece on canvas, which is unusual among Raphael’s altarpieces, most of them on panel. It was made for a monastic church far from Rome, by a painter then at the height of papal favour, and it stayed there for about two centuries. In the early 1750s it was bought for Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, and it has been in Dresden since, in what is now the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. A copy stands in Piacenza.
What is scored here is the one canvas as it now stands in Dresden. Its first setting, above the altar of San Sisto, is not the work; it is weighed where it bears on what the form knew and on what survives. That setting is lost, and some of what the picture does was made for it.
Movement II
The picture opens on its own frame. Across the top runs a rod, and from it hang green curtains drawn back to either side. Across the bottom runs a painted ledge, a parapet that belongs less to the vision than to the room in front of it. Between the two, where an altarpiece of the inherited kind would have set a throne in an architecture continuous with the church, there is no building at all: only a field of light.
The light is full of faces. The background is made of the heads of cherubs, painted so thinly that they dissolve into cloud and emerge only as one looks, a crowd made of light. The curtains frame that light, and the saints and the Virgin are lit from it. The device of the parted curtain is old in devotional painting; here it is the act of the whole picture. The picture plane is a veil drawn back, and the picture is the showing.
The Virgin in glory on cloud, above saints who kneel, was already in the painter’s Madonna of Foligno of a year or two before. What is new is not the cloud but the threshold: the vision stopped at a ledge that is ours, and a figure within it who does not wait to be approached.
Movement III
The Virgin stands at the centre on cloud, and she is walking. The mantle swings out in one arc against the pale ground, and the step forward is given by the drapery over the leading leg. She is barefoot, young, not crowned and not enthroned. The swing of the cloth makes walking on cloud seem a natural act.
She carries the child high in her arms, and his body has a real weight there. He is a boy with tousled hair, and his look is grave and direct, unchildlike. Her look is wide and steady, with something like fear held under composure. Both faces look out at us, and both know what the coming forward will cost: she is bringing her child into a world that will kill him, and she does it with open eyes.
That is the doctrine of the Incarnation and its sacrifice, and the picture does not pretend otherwise. But the faces are things seen, not stated: a mother advancing with fear under composure, a child who looks like a judge. They hold outside belief. The picture’s faces are modelled without line, and the gravity is in the modelling.
Movement IV
At the left Sixtus kneels on cloud, an old pope with his head bare. His tiara is set on the ledge below him, the earthly office put down at the threshold. One hand is at his breast and the other points out of the picture, across the ledge, toward the place where the people stood before the altar. His cope and its embroidery, the tiara and the hand are given with an exactness that grounds the cloud.
At the right Barbara kneels with her gaze turned down, toward the same place. Her look balances his upward one, and the three heads, his, hers and the Virgin’s, make a triangle that holds the whole canvas still, so that the motion within it reads as calm. Her face and turn are sweeter than the centre’s gravity, and the cloud beneath the two saints is summary. They kneel with no ground under them, at the sides of the way the Virgin walks.
The ledge is the line where the vision meets the room. Sixtus points across it, Barbara looks down across it, and the tiara rests on it. Whom Sixtus points to, and what stood opposite the picture in San Sisto (by one reading, a crucifix), are open questions, and they turn on a setting the gallery wall cannot supply. What the form shows without that setting is still a god brought to an altar.
Movement V
On the ledge itself lean two winged putti, chins on their arms, looking up idly, in boredom or in reverie. They are on our side of the vision, at its very edge, and they lower the temperature of the picture by design. Of every element in the canvas they are the one it could lose: the picture would stand without them.
The world took them anyway. From the canvas’s arrival in Dresden it became the central object of German devotion to art. Winckelmann wrote on it; the Romantics made it the type of the inspired picture; the Nazarenes took from it their idea of Raphael; the Russian nineteenth century took it up; and for German and Russian taste it became the measure of the Madonna. In popular imagery the two putti were lifted out and reproduced without end, an image of their own. Much of that is fame, and fame is presence, not depth.
The canvas is whole. No figure that carries its meaning is lost, and it has been in Dresden, at the centre of its gallery, since the 1750s. What it has lost is the altar it was made to stand above. The curtains are still drawn back on the light made of faces, the Virgin still walks forward with the child held high, and the old pope’s hand still points across the ledge to people who are no longer there.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged figure by figure, the canvas resists subtraction. The Virgin is the event, a woman walking forward on cloud with the child held high. The child’s grave, direct look is the second face of the argument. Sixtus’s pointing hand is the hinge between the vision and the people before the altar, and his tiara on the ledge is the earthly office set down. Barbara looks down toward the place of the congregation and balances his upward look, so that the triangle of the three heads holds the whole. The curtains are the act of revelation; the ledge is the threshold. What yields is the pair of putti: the picture would stand without them, and the long history of their detachment as an image of their own proves it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
What is disclosed can be stated. The Virgin is not enthroned and receiving honour: she is coming toward us, bringing her child to the world, and both faces know what that coming will cost. The mother’s look is wide and steady, with something like fear held under composure; the child’s is unchildlike in its gravity. What comes into the open is the offering of a child into a world that will kill him, borne with open eyes by a young woman and not a queen. A second proposition holds with it: the sacred is not a place one enters but an appearance that comes forward and stops at a threshold. Held below the top because the first is the doctrine of the Incarnation and its sacrifice made visible more than a condition discovered, and much of what viewers report before it is rapture, a state, which ranks below a meaning.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Elevation is real and high, and of one kind: the apparition. The curtains part on light, the light is full of faces, and out of it a figure steps toward us with a swing of the mantle that makes walking on cloud seem a natural act. The height recurs within the field: in the Virgin’s face, in the child’s look, in the mantle’s arc against the pale ground, in the cherubs dissolving into light. Against it: one sustained note on one canvas, one register of grave wonder, no terror, no grandeur of scale beyond the life size of the figures, and the two putti at the foot lower the temperature by design. Level on this axis with Las Meninas at 8.7, a step above the Mona Lisa at 8.5, whose note is quieter: this one is transport.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing. The archetype is the mother who carries her child out to his fate, and the composition is that act: the figure advancing, the child held forward, the saints flanking as witnesses. It is also the oldest structure of revelation, the veil drawn back on the god, built literally into the canvas with the curtains and their rod. The particulars stay particular: a young woman barefoot on cloud, a boy with tousled hair, an old pope with his hat off, a tower drawn small behind a girl’s shoulder. Sixtus’s hand ties the myth to a place, so that the picture enacts what it represents: the god brought to the altar. Held below the top because the myth is the Church’s own, carried at full strength rather than rebuilt, and the putti have become a lighter myth the canvas does not govern.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the Italian altarpiece of the Virgin and Child with saints, the sacra conversazione of Bellini and Perugino, the Virgin enthroned in an architecture continuous with the church, and the painter’s own Florentine altarpieces. The departure: throne and architecture removed, the Virgin walking on cloud, the saints kneeling with no ground under them, the whole framed as a vision disclosed by curtains and stopped at a ledge that belongs to our space. A devotional image turned into an event happening now. Against it: the Madonna in glory on cloud above kneeling saints was already in his Madonna of Foligno of a year or two before, the parted curtain had a long life in devotional painting, and the stake was low, a commission for a monastic church far from Rome by a painter at the height of papal favour. The turn is real and sharp; the wager was not. This is the lowest of the five gated axes.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Substitute a different form and much goes. The painting knows what it knows as a tall field over an altar, its figures at about life size, with the ledge at the bottom as the line where the vision meets the space of the people before it: Sixtus points across that line, Barbara looks down across it, the putti lean on it. The curtains make the picture plane a veil drawn back, so that the picture is the act of showing. It is a single frontal apparition, not a narrative; a print would lose the life size that places the viewer at the threshold. Held below the top because part of what the form knew depended on its first setting, the altar and whatever faced it, which the gallery wall does not supply, and because the image has proved that much of it survives reduction to postcard size.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over promise: five centuries, and about two and a half of intense return. From its arrival in Dresden it became the central object of German devotion to art. Winckelmann wrote on it; the Romantics made it the type of the inspired picture; the Russian nineteenth century took it up, and it became the measure of the Madonna for German and Russian taste. The questions it leaves open are real: what the Virgin and the child see, what stood opposite the picture in San Sisto, whom Sixtus points to. Held below the top because much of the return has been veneration rather than inquiry, and the open questions turn on the lost setting more than on depths in the image itself.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The work is public, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of Italian painting of the second decade of the sixteenth century and the altarpiece after it. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of the altarpiece, from a sacred interior to a vision coming toward the worshipper, achieved with the fewest means. The discount: for about two centuries it hung in a provincial monastic church and reached painting chiefly through copies and prints, and the visionary altarpiece of the Baroque had other sources too. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: once in Dresden it became the measure of the Madonna for German and Russian taste through the nineteenth century, shaped the Nazarenes’ idea of Raphael and the Romantic doctrine of the inspired painter, and gave popular imagery its two putti, reproduced without end. Much of that last is fame, which is presence. Wide reach in taste and thought; narrower redirection of the art.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about five centuries. Form: whole. Every figure and every element of the composition stands; nothing that carried the meaning is lost or replaced. Presence: in a monastic church for about two centuries, then in Dresden since the 1750s and at the centre of its gallery. Fame is presence and lifts the figure by at most a tenth. Fabric: a canvas of its age, with the ordinary history of lining, varnish and cleaning, and no known loss that takes from the image; the state of the paint layer is known thinly. The charge is for the loss of the first setting, the altar the picture was made to stand above, which takes something from what the ledge and the pointing hand do.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Judged as command of oil on canvas at altar scale, to the anchors of every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the vision convinces because it is painted with weight. The Virgin’s mantle swings out in one arc, her step forward given by the drapery over the leading leg; the child’s body has a real heaviness in her arms; the faces are modelled without line; the cherubs in the light are painted so thinly that they emerge only as one looks. The tiara, the embroidered cope and Sixtus’s hand are given with an exactness that grounds the cloud. Charged: Barbara’s face and turn are sweetness where the Virgin’s are gravity, the cloud under the saints is summary, and the putti are drawn with ease rather than with the authority of the centre. Below Las Meninas at 9.8 and the Mona Lisa at 9.6, the peaks of their kinds.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Virgin’s face at the top centre, looking out with foreknowledge, and the putti at the foot, chins on their arms, looking up idly. Do they obey one law? They do: every figure is ranked by its nearness to the threshold and turned in relation to the coming forward, the Virgin advancing, the saints kneeling at the sides of the way, the putti at the very ledge, on our side of the vision. Light governs the whole: the curtains frame it, the cherubs are made of it, the saints are lit from it. The range runs from the divine to the playful, from heaven to the ledge, and holds. Held at the gate of the top because the putti’s register is a real strain, a lightness the rest of the picture does not share, even where the law places them.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The orders held: the sacred, as the centre; the family, a mother and her child, and the child’s fate; the Church, in a pope and a martyr, the tiara set down and the tower of Barbara’s imprisonment; death and sacrifice, in what the two faces know; and the congregation, the human order before the altar, drawn in by the pointing hand. The structure integrates them by placement on one axis of approach. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, no state except the papacy, no history beyond the saints’ legends, no natural order but cloud, and no ordinary world. It is a single devotional image of six figures, and the figure describes the form. Below The Transfiguration at 8.4 and level with Primavera at 7.4.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.3 and The Made at 9.3, then The Inner Law at 9.0, with The Inevitable and The Archetypal Deep at 8.8. A canvas whole after five centuries; a making in which the vision convinces because it is painted with weight; one law of nearness to the threshold that places the Virgin and the putti alike; six figures no one of which can go but the two at the foot; and the mother carrying her child to his fate built as the composition itself.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.4: the sacred, a mother and child, the Church, sacrifice and the congregation held on one axis of approach, with no labour, no state but the papacy, no history beyond the saints’ legends and no ordinary world; a single devotional image of six figures. Next, The Swerve at 8.3: a sharp turn on the altarpiece, half anticipated in the painter’s own work, made at little stake. Then The Unconcealment, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.3 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear it by a tenth, but The Swerve at 8.3 falls short. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is The Swerve at 8.3, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. The twelve sum to 104.1, an average of 8.68 that displays 8.7; the work stands below the summit on its aggregate and on the Epochal Gate.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas as an image and as a reception history (its composition, figures, gestures and light, its commission and its life in Dresden), scored as the one canvas as it now stands: The Sistine Madonna (Madonna di San Sisto), by Raphael, oil on canvas, about 1512 to 1513, painted for the high altar of the Benedictine church of San Sisto in Piacenza on a commission associated with Pope Julius II; bought for Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, in the early 1750s, and in Dresden since, now in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. A copy stands in Piacenza. The first setting over the altar is context, weighed on The Living Form and The Imperishable; what faced the picture in San Sisto is an open question, and the crucifix is one reading of it, not a fact. The canvas as a technical object, the state of its paint layer and the history of its restorations, is known thinly, and The Imperishable is weighed with that limit. The Madonna of Foligno, the altarpieces of Bellini and Perugino and the later reception, Winckelmann, the Romantics, the Nazarenes and the Russian nineteenth century, enter as the inheritance and the reach, and are not scored. Nothing on this page is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the canvas’s exact dimensions, the number of the cherubs’ heads, its wartime movements and the years of its removal from Dresden and return, the date and extent of any recent restoration, why canvas was chosen, and the particular writers of the Romantic and Russian reception and their texts.