Today
I took a break from writing a chapter about Raphael’s masterpiece Madonna del
Cardellino (Madonna of the Goldfinch) and spent a day in London.
There
I visited the Royal Academy which is proud to own the only Michelangelo
sculpture in the UK. Called the Taddei
Tondo it is an image of Mary, Jesus, John the Baptist and … yes a goldfinch!
You
might not notice the goldfinch at first because Michelangelo never actually
finished the work and it’s a bit vague:
The
remarkable thing about the image is that it’s the only known image of John,
Jesus and the goldfinch where John seems to be scaring Jesus with it:
Mary
doesn’t look too impressed:
And
while it’s hard to pick out in the unfinished carving, she actually seems to be
pushing John away with her hand
While
Jesus (far more finished) retreats into his mother’s lap:
The
sculpture itself is fascinating – but what really interests me is its role in
the composition of Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch. The work I’ve been doing on that has included
Raphael’s process of composition. Here
in Oxford the Ashmolian Museum owns a preparatory sketch he made for the
painting (I hope to see it on Monday – this is from the internet):
At
this stage Raphael was working on a triangular composition (following the
example of Leonardo do Vinci) with Mary sharing a book with Jesus while John,
standing very statically, looks on. But
part of Raphael’s genius was the way all the figures in his paintings interact with one
another. Clearly he was dissatisfied with
the composition. His eventual solution
was the inclusion of the goldfinch.
He
had used the device once before in the Solly Madonna of 1502:
This
painting was effectively a combination of his tutor Perugino’s own painting of
the scene:
And
da Vinci’s one and only goldfinch painting, the Madonna Litta (in the
Hermitage):
The
idea of using the goldfinch to resolve his compositional issues in 1505, I
believe, probably came to him when he saw Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo. In 1505 Michelangelo left Florence for Rome
and he left the unfinished tondo behind him.
While they were rivals with little love between them, Raphael is known
to have studied Michelangelo’s work and learnt from it. Later in Rome the Pope would secretly let
Raphael in to the Sistine Chapel to see the ceiling in progress – something Michelangelo
had insisted no-one should do. After his
death Michelangelo wrote of Raphael "everything he knew about art he got from me”.
When
Raphael saw the marble he probably recognised the possibility for his own
painting. The idea of John teasing Jesus
with the goldfinch, and Jesus recoiling, was not Raphael’s style. The painting was after all a wedding present
for a close friend – intended to be an image of love and harmony.
But
the use of the goldfinch as a focal point, engaging all three figures, hinting
at their shared premonition of things to come made for a perfect picture. A masterpiece was born:
Footnote:
This blog is a short summary of part of a much longer piece I am writing on
Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch.
