Raphael’s Madonna della melagrana, in line

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Auction · Background

This is a Raphael Madonna drawing associated with the Madonna Conestabile.

Raphael, Madonna Conestabile, c. 1502-1504, the Hermitage
Raphael, Madonna Conestabile, c. 1502–1504. The Hermitage, Sankt-Peterburg.

The hatchings aren’t contour-following. I would expect them to be, but then these ones are clearly at a different angle, which helps us see the difference in these two surfaces. I didn’t focus on it. It’s a fairly natural idea if one isn’t going to hatch with contours, but I use brush anyway, and am looking for the form in more direct ways. I don’t have an idea how to convey that geometric information based on the hatchings he drew, especially since their start points were regular, whereas I rely on a more jagged curve to indicate a level of complexity.

He did work up to these summary silhouette lines, I think. Once you’ve found the line that you really want, then you just kind of go with a little more pressure. I am tracing, so it’s much simpler for me. He had to gently build up to that silhouette.

I’m thinking I will brush. Maybe I’ll start with a black brush, and a little bold this time. That’s not bad. So, now the silhouette. I’m trying to replicate these values with my line variation.

He seems to be very consciously into this headdress. Maybe it has a biblical sort of origin or something.

I think it said that Ingres and some others, of course, were studying this. Maybe not this one, but studied Raphael’s drawings. Yesterday I traced Ingres’s study for the comtesse d’Haussonville. In these two in particular I think there is some similarity, but I think Ingres did do something perhaps more direct, and perhaps less classical, less formal, which was beautiful and different.

So, I think if we wanted to just go for minimalism, we could be done at an earlier point. Just a little bit of the lower eyelid, because he’s drawing the pupils, I think. And a little more on the upper lip. I think we don’t need much to understand the emotion, but as Ingres said yesterday, there may be much more grace that one loses by choosing minimalism.

Auction

This sheet has never been to a saleroom that we could find. It is one of the highlights of the Albertina in Wien (Vienna).

For scale, a Raphael chalk drawing of a head did come up once. His Head of a Young Apostle, a black chalk study for the Transfiguration, left the Devonshire collection at Chatsworth through Sotheby’s London on 4 December 2012. The estimate was £10–15 million. It sold for £29,721,250, the figure the UK government then needed to match to keep it in the country.

Background

Raphael drew this sheet around 1504, in black chalk. It is in the Albertina, Wien, inventory 4879. The Virgin is half-length behind a ledge, the Child on her lap holding a pomegranate, her right hand on a closed book.

About 1504 is when Raphael began spending time in Firenze (Florence), where Leonardo had returned in 1500.

The sheet is tied to a small painting, the Madonna Conestabile in the Hermitage in Sankt-Peterburg (Saint Petersburg). Underdrawing found there shows the Virgin first held an apple or pomegranate, not the book she holds now. Raphael went back to that first arrangement in this Vienna drawing, and kept both the pomegranate and the book.

He was one of the great draughtsmen, and planned his compositions through drawing. More than four hundred of his sheets survive. Three centuries later he was Ingres’s favourite painter. Ingres’s Grande Baigneuse of 1808 wears a turban borrowed from Raphael’s Fornarina.

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