The detective story is connected with Raphael's The Holy Family. Raphael in the Hermitage History of the painting The Holy Family by Raphael

Raphael's first Florentine period (1504-1508)

Painting by Raphael "The Holy Family, or Madonna with Beardless Joseph"(1506), stored in the Hermitage, dates back to the early, Florentine, period of the artist’s work. Joseph, Mary and the Child form a remarkably simple, natural group.

Religious shade of mood, not yet alien "Madonna Conestabile"(1504), gives way to purely human feeling.

Depicting Mary, the Child Christ and St. Joseph, Raphael cleanses his images of everything everyday, discards random features and everyday details, elevating them to a pedestal of perfection. Fluid and smooth lines of contours, a roll call of color spots, and a thoughtful arrangement of figures give rise to the feeling of harmony, grandeur and simplicity inherent in the works of Raphael in the picture. The artist departs from the traditional iconography of Joseph, depicting him without a beard - hence the second title of the painting.

Before us is an idyllic scene of family life. A minute of quiet silence, inexpressibly poetic inner experiences. These feelings are so ideally pure, so poetically express the holy warmth of motherhood, that if Raphael’s Madonna is now impossible to pray, yet in these bright images you inhale the mood of divine purity and bright peace.

In “Madonna with Beardless Joseph” the figures fill almost the entire surface of the picture and seem to be deployed in the plane of the relief. The baby's head is in the center of the composition. The triangle pattern in the images of the Madonna and Child appears clearly. The plasticity of forms, the contrasts of lines and their inclinations are vividly felt next to the verticals of the pilasters and Joseph’s staff.

His figure perfectly completes the group, bringing it into agreement with the rectangular shape of the picture and highlighting its main images. The rounded lines of heads, shoulders and halos find their final harmonic response in the rhythmic bend of the arch above the light landscape. Thus, the combination of all forms and lines and the light airiness of the landscape respond to the inner expression of peace, clear peace. How subtly thought out and weighed every feature of this enlightened appearance in creative work!

Already in Raphael's earliest works, unique individual features are evident. The young artist strives for concreteness in life. This applies to the greatest extent to the image of old Joseph, who was traditionally depicted with a large beard, emphasizing his age. Raphael depicted the old man as beardless. This detail turned out to be so characteristic that Raphael’s painting was called “Madonna with Beardless Joseph.” Less vividly, but quite definitely, Mary and the Baby Jesus are individualized.

The artist gives the figure of the Child in a complex spread, which undoubtedly shows the influence of Leonardo. But at the same time, Raphael strives for the greatest simplicity and harmony of the image. The artist combines the three figures into a relaxed but inextricably linked group. The composition of the painting is based on repeating and overlapping motifs of a circle and a semicircular arch.

This technique gives the composition amazing musicality, integrity and stability. An undisturbed calm, although shrouded in slight sadness, dominates the picture. A barely perceptible print dissolves in light, delicate color harmonies. Raphael achieves here such coloristic subtlety that he did not always succeed in his later works.

Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin wrote the elegy "Renaissance", inspired by the "Madonna with Beardless Joseph", exhibited in the Hermitage after restoration, which returned the original letter of Raphael.

Renaissance

A.S. Pushkin

Barbarian artist with a sleepy brush
The picture of a genius is blackened
And your drawing is lawless
Draws senselessly over her.

But the colors are alien, with age,
They fall off like old scales;
The creation of a genius is before us
It comes out with the same beauty.

This is how misconceptions disappear
From my tormented soul,
And visions arise in her
Initial, pure days.

The Hermitage has two works Raphael (Raffaello Santi, 1483-1520), one of them - "Madonna Conestabile" - was written, most likely, in 1504, the other - "The Holy Family" - around 1506.

“Madonna Conestabile” (the name is conditional and, just like in the works of Leonardo, comes from the name of the former owner) is a small-format painting (17.5 x 18 cm), slightly smaller than a sheet of a student’s notebook, designed in the form of a tondo. It’s interesting that Raphael starts with such almost miniature things (“Madonna Conestabile” is no exception; “The Knight’s Dream” is close in size - London, National Gallery; “The Three Graces” - Chantilly, Condé Museum, etc.), but It was Raphael who was to become one of the founders of the monumental style of the Roman school of painting.

The traditional theme is treated very simply. A young mother holds a baby in her arms. The gazes of Mary and Christ are focused on the book. The artist brought the group closer to the foreground, and gave the landscape as a wide panorama. The landscape clearly reflects Raphael's impressions of his native places - this is Umbria with a soft line of hills, calm surface of lakes and distant snow-capped peaks. Thin, slender trees stretch upward, their branches not covered with leaves in an intricate pattern stand out against the blue sky. Spring awakening nature is perceived as an accompaniment to the image of the Madonna, young and pure, like the world around her.

In this painting, Raphael still follows the artists of the early Renaissance, painting details - a boat sailing on the lake, people walking along the shore, some buildings in the distance.

The picture is framed by an elegant gilded frame. Its rich grotesque ornamentation perfectly complements the miniature and meticulous painting. Initially, the frame was integral with the wooden board of the picture and, obviously, was made according to the drawing of Raphael himself.

According to legend, the artist painted “Madonna with a Book” in Perugia for Alfaio di Diamante, who bequeathed the work to his heirs. In the 18th century, the Alfano family received the title of Counts della Staffa. In the same century, the Madonna of the Book passed into the hands of the della Staffa relatives, who became known as the Counts Conestabile della Staffa. The Madonna with a Book, purchased from this family in 1871, arrived in St. Petersburg. But during the trip from Italy to Russia, the cracks on the wooden base increased. A special commission was assembled to decide how to preserve the “new” Raphael, and decided to replace the base wood with canvas. For this purpose, the picture was cut out of the frame, and the cracks were glued together so that they became practically invisible. On the front side of the painting, fabric was glued and attached to a marble board. They began to remove the wood from the reverse side, and when it was removed layer by layer, they discovered Raphael's original drawing on the reverse side: a baby holding a pomegranate in his hand. Then the paint layer was strengthened on a new canvas, and the sticker was washed off from the front side. Thus the painting was transferred to canvas.

Why Raphael abandoned the fruit during the work, replacing it with a book, is unknown. But the meaning of the work has not changed. The object plays an even more formal role in Raphael than, for example, in Leonardo da Vinci's Benois Madonna. For all the compositional closeness of the “Madonna Conestabile” to the Umbrian images, Raphael has that brilliant “little bit” that allows him to achieve crystal clarity of the image and composition. In search of a correspondence between the circle and the composition contained in it, he gently repeats the outline of the tondo in the tilt of Mary’s head, in the line of the cloak covering her left shoulder. But, unlike the master’s later works, the foreground plane remains decisive.

In 1504, Raphael moved from his native place to Florence, where he spent four years. This period became very important in his life, since in Florence the young artist became acquainted with the most advanced art of his time and, first of all, with the art of Leonardo, which had a noticeable influence on him.

During his stay on the banks of the Arno, Raphael painted “The Holy Family” or, as this painting is also called, “Madonna with Beardless Joseph”.

The assumption that Raphael completed the painting for Guidobaldo de Montefeltro is based on the words of Giorgio Vasari: “... made for Guidobaldo Montefeltro, then captain of the Florentines, two paintings of the Madonna, small and excellent, in his second manner” (talking about the second manner, Vasari has in mind the Florentine period).

The painting changed many owners in its lifetime until it ended up in the famous Crozat collection. As part of this collection, it was acquired for the Hermitage in 1772. In 1827 she was transferred to canvas.

In the texts to the engravings from the best things in the Crozat collection, the following information was given about the “Holy Family”: “Mr. Barrois bought this painting very cheaply, which belonged to the Angoulême house. It was kept there without much attention. Some inexperienced painter, wanting to renew it, did not knowing how to combine his work with the work of its creator, he rewrote it all again, so that Raphael’s brush was no longer visible in it. But when Monsieur Barrois bought it, Vandin, having cleared it of extraneous work, returned to the world her original letter, which, instead of being damaged it became much fresher; the paints of an inexperienced painter applied to it served as a covering for it and preserved it from the harmful effects of the air.”

This story served as the reason for A. S. Pushkin to create the poem “Renaissance”:

The barbarian artist, with a sleepy brush, blackens the picture of a genius And the lawless one draws his drawing senselessly over it. But alien colors fade with age into shabby scales; The creation of a genius before us comes out with the same beauty.

The most interesting results were obtained during the study of the “Holy Family” in the Hermitage Physics and X-ray Laboratory. The photograph, taken in infrared rays, made it possible to see the original drawing made using the method that in Russia was called gunpowder. The artist used a needle to pierce the contours of the preparatory drawing on the sheet, then it was placed on the primed base of the future work - canvas or wood - and rubbed in with charcoal or paint. The substance, getting into the holes, left the contours of the pattern on the ground.

Invisible to the naked eye, the drawing of the “Holy Family” is subtle and expressive. In addition, the author's corrections are clearly visible - for example, the outlines of St.'s fingers have been changed. Joseph, at first more elongated, his face is more individualized, he is almost bald, the shape of his ear is changed, etc.

The excellent drawing discovered in infrared rays serves as indisputable proof that the “Holy Family” was painted by Raphael, which was sometimes doubted due to the not very successful old restorations.

Compared to the "Madonna Conestabile", "Madonna with Beardless Joseph" is solved monumentally. The composition looks down to elementary simplicity, but the simplicity is deceptive; behind it lies strict thoughtfulness and precision in each part of the work.

The Madonna's hairstyle - her hair is braided - a greenish scarf and other everyday details do not reduce the impression of the majesty and solemnity of the scene.

Madonna is a typically Raphaelian image. Subsequently, the artist would write in a letter to the famous humanist Count Castiglione: “... in order for me to paint a beauty, I need to see many beauties... But due to the lack of beautiful women, I use a certain idea.” These words quite clearly define one of the characteristic features of the art of the masters of the High Renaissance - not just blind copying of nature, but generalization and typification of what was seen.

“The Holy Family” is a heartfelt and sublimely sad picture. The figures are depicted against the backdrop of the steppe, but on the right, in the opening of the semicircular arch, a calm landscape is visible, creating an amazing impression of the depth of space. If in other paintings by Raphael, similar in style and time of creation, the baby is shown in lively and frisky movement ("Madonna of Orleans" - Chantilly, Condé Museum; "Madonna Bridgewater" and "Madonna with a Palm", both - Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland ), then in the Hermitage work he gently clung to his mother’s chest, who thoughtfully pressed him to her, raising him up to his eyes to St. Joseph, who answers him with a calm, kind look. Mary's hand was either about to touch the child, or just touching him. However, it is unlikely that the artist thought about the great emotional expressiveness of the gesture. The soft outline of the hand is continued in the rounded lines of the baby’s body, in Joseph’s crossed hands. Raphael avoids sharp corners, sharp intersections of lines: “as a result of smooth contours, the echo of color spots, the arrangement of figures against the background of the steppe, slightly enlivened by pilasters, and the impression of harmony, grandeur, simplicity inherent in Raphael’s works is born. In them, he seems to concentrate the best human quality, creates a new concept of beauty, a typical ideal of the Renaissance, the master cleanses his images of everything everyday, prosaic, raising them to the pedestal of perfection.

Raphael is a complex artist. For many centuries, his authority was unquestioned; his painting was considered perhaps the highest achievement of European art. In the 20th century, which survived two world wars, Raphael seems to many to be too cold and calm. But the desire for harmony, which no one expressed with such skill as Raphael, for humanity and perfection, awakens unflagging interest in the artist’s work even today.

In the Hermitage there are no originals from the Roman period of Raphael's work - the highest stage of the master's activity, which began in 1508, when he moved from Florence to Rome, and continued until his death.

In Rome, the master created such programmatic works as paintings in the state rooms of the Vatican Palace, the Sistine Madonna and others.

Part of the idea of ​​Raphael’s activities in the Eternal City can be given by a copy from the Vatican gallery, the so-called Loggias of Raphael *, painted according to the plans of the great Urbino by his students in 1518-1519.

* (The loggias - a gallery open on one side with arched openings - were reproduced in the 80s of the 18th century by the architect Quarenghi, who built the Hermitage Theater. A group of artists under the leadership of H. Unterberger copied frescoes on canvas in Rome in the gallery of the Vatican Palace, then in St. Petersburg they were mounted on the walls. The reliefs available in the Vatican are conveyed through painting.)

The copy in no way replaces the original, and yet it is of great importance as the only reproduction of the Renaissance interior within the walls of the Hermitage.

The solution of the gallery, built by the architect Bramante in Rome, determines the rhythmic alternation of arches dividing the gallery into thirteen parts; each of them ends with a cross-domed vault, which, in turn, houses four plot compositions. They are included in the ornamental frame. The paintings on the ceiling were called "Raphael's Bible". The artist focused on fifty-two of the most important biblical scenes, starting from the moment God separated light from darkness, ending with the Last Supper.

The main impression the viewer receives from the loggias is the harmonious clarity of the entire structure; The design of the gallery can be traced in the ratio of load-bearing and supported parts. The painting is strictly consistent with the architectural design.

In decoration, Raphael created a free variation on the theme of ancient paintings, the so-called grotesques. A similar ornament became widespread after the ruins of the “Golden House”, a building from the time of Emperor Nero, which burned down in 64, were found in Rome at the end of the 15th century. The discovered ruins of the “Golden House” began to be called grottoes because of their resemblance to caves and, accordingly, the ornaments that decorated them were called grotesques.

Vasari gave the following definition of grotesques: “Grotesques are a type of painting, free and amusing, with which the ancients decorated walls, where in some places nothing else was suitable except objects floating in the air, and therefore they depicted all sorts of absurd monsters generated by the whims of nature and imagination and by the whims of artists who did not observe any rules in these things: they hung a load on the thinnest thread that it could not withstand, attached legs to a horse in the form of leaves, and to a man crane legs, and endlessly all sorts of other funny ideas, and the one who came up with "something more wonderful, he was considered the most worthy. Later there was order in them, and they began to be very beautifully displayed on friezes and panels, and stucco alternated with painted ones."

Grotesque ornament became very widespread in Italy, especially after Raphael's work in the Vatican.

With extraordinary grace, with truly Renaissance freedom, with the richest imagination, Raphael combines ancient gods, satyrs, nymphs with motifs taken from living nature, introduces entire landscapes, creates garlands of vegetables, fruits, flowers, and musical instruments. The paintings stretch along the plane of the pilasters, obediently echoing the lightly rounded ceiling, now opening with a balustrade into the blue (picturesque) sky, now resembling an elegant mosaic.

Here, among the leaves - fantastic and real - squirrels jump, lizards glide, mice sneak through, beetles crawl, and each time the artist avoids symmetry, giving the animals different movements, placing different numbers of leaves on the branches, replacing one form with another. None of the motifs is repeated exactly; you can tirelessly examine one detail after another, all the time discovering something new.

The Loggia paintings interpret the world in their own philosophical way, conveying its beauty and diversity in a laconic and concentrated form. The dimensions of the gallery are perfectly correlated with the human figure. Elegant, spacious, filled with air and light, the gallery is a true brainchild of Renaissance architecture and painting. A person, according to the artist, should recognize himself as the center of the world, bright and clear, and his mind should easily comprehend the laws of the universe.

The activities of Raphael and his students in Rome can also be judged by nine frescoes located in the Hermitage.

Most of them come from the Villa Palatina, which according to legend belonged to Raphael himself. Then the villa passed through the hands of different owners until it became the property of the Salesian sisters, who converted it into a monastery. However, the secular nature of the paintings - they are dedicated to the history of the goddess of Love, Venus - was completely unsuitable for the new purpose of the building, and the nuns, according to the then director of the Hermitage Gedeonov, “outraged by the freedom of the plots, in 1856 they gave rather than sold the frescoes to the Marquis of Campana, who hastened to transfer the painting to canvas."

The transfer to canvas and subsequent not very successful restorations led to the fact that even when they arrived at the Hermitage in 1861, the frescoes were in very poor condition.

As a result of the restoration carried out in the museum in recent years, the painting has been strengthened, but it is no longer possible to return it to its original freshness.

The five frescoes reproduce, on an enlarged scale, the beautiful paintings created by Raphael and his students in 1516 in the stuffet (bathroom) of Cardinal Bibiena in the Vatican.

For an era that sought to reconcile paganism with Christianity, it is significant that a clergyman commissions an artist to paint murals depicting the gods of Olympus.

In the Villa Palatina, the repetition of compositions of the stuffets acquired a new meaning, and not only because of their large size, but also because in the villa they decorated the portico, and not an enclosed room, and were thus connected with the open surrounding space.

Antiquity is perceived by the artist as the golden age of humanity. The world that appears in the paintings is majestically beautiful and harmonious, and its inhabitants, while loving and suffering, do not lose their physical and spiritual perfection.

The plots of a number of scenes are inspired by the then very famous “Metamorphoses” of the 1st century Roman poet Ovid. One of the episodes reproduces the moment when Cupid, kissing his mother Venus, accidentally wounded her in the chest with the tip of an arrow, which aroused her love for Adonis.

Once a boy, girded with a crown, kissed his mother, and accidentally scratched her chest with a protruding arrow. She was wounded, the goddess pushed her son away with her hand...

The naked goddess sits under a tree, touching her wounded chest, Cupid stands next to her. The beauty of the human body for Raphael, as for the ancients, is in full accordance with inner beauty. Every time has its own ideal. If in this regard we compare the ideas of Quattrocento and Cinquecento, then we can use the comparison of a bud with a blossoming flower. Raphael, who fully expressed the aesthetic norms of the era in art, preferred body forms that had reached full bloom and had nothing in common with the angular, sometimes fragile nudity of figures in 15th-century painting.

In “Venus Putting on a Sandal,” the main theme of the fresco is the smooth gesture of the goddess, graceful and strong at the same time. The movement does not lose its softness even when it is intended to be swift, for example, in the scene “Venus with Cupid on Dolphins,” where the goddess and her son rush across the sea on dolphins. Then calm comes again: in another fresco, “Venus and Adonis,” the goddess, tired of the hunt, rests with her lover, “leaning against him, resting her head on her chest.”

It is no coincidence that one of the works of the 19th century said about the Palatine frescoes: “Beautiful, like Pompeian painting.”

Indeed, in the paintings conceived by Raphael and carried out by his students, the rapture of life and admiration for the beauty of man, so characteristic of antiquity, are captured.

Despite poor preservation, the frescoes expand our understanding of the monumental and decorative art of the High Renaissance.

Wood, oil. 131 x 107 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich

“The Holy Family of Canigiani” belongs to the same period of Raphael’s work as “ Entombment" The title of the painting comes from the Florentine Canigiani family, which owned this work by Raphael before it passed into the Medici collection and then to Germany after the marriage of Anna Maria Lodovica de' Medici to the Elector of the Palatinate.

Raphael. Madonna of Canigiani (Holy Family of Canigiani). Old, distorted version before von Sonnenburg's restoration

Madonna and Righteous Elizabeth (mother of John the Baptist) are sitting on the grass with their children. Joseph the Betrothed stands above them - this shows the importance of Jesus' adoptive father and reflects the growth of veneration of Joseph after 1500.

Raphael. Madonna Canigiani. Detail. 1507

In The Canigiani Madonna, Raphael synthesizes elements that he adopted from Leonardo da Vinci And Michelangelo, and connects them with a distinctly northern landscape and delicate color passages where rainbow tones dominate.

Raphael. Madonna Canigiani. Scenery

The pyramid into which the figures fit perfectly is borrowed from Leonardo, but the mutual feelings between the participants in the scene, expressed by the glances they exchange and their general serene mood, give the composition a calm descriptive character. The overall tone of the Canigiani Madonna is thus quite different from the intense and agitated art of Leonardo. Raphael creates here a plot full of human participation and transparent calm.

Raphael. Madonna Canigiani. Version after restoration by Hubert von Sonnenburg

In 1982, the German restorer Hubert von Sonnenburg undertook a careful restoration of the Canigiani Madonna and removed the distorting blue layer of paint applied in the 18th century in the sky area. Raphael's original concept can now be seen again, with putti (angels) on the left and right at the top.