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Angels bend to you in solemn ceremony and Saints pray where your foot
steps: glorious Queen of Heaven! To you the lyre of the spheres resounds,
which God has strung. Your spirit gazes, divine to see, through the veil
of your unfading, blooming figure; you bear a child of sublime
omnipotence, victor over death and liberator of the world.
August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Sonnet to the Sistine Madonna, с
1840
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Visiting Dresden, the Russian
novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821—1881) could hardly tear himself away
from The Sistine Madonna. He kept returning to the
Gemaldegalerie where it hung to spend hours in front of it. Vasari, the
Founding Father of art history, said of the artist: "How generous and
benevolent Heaven may on occasion show itself to be by showering one man
with the infinite riches of its treasures, all the grace and rare gifts
otherwise distributed over a long period of time among many individuals,
can be clearly seen in the beauty and grace of
Raphael."
Dostoyevsky may have had similar feelings about the painting and the
artist. On his last day in Dresden, he pulled up a chair in front of the
painting so that he might be closer to the Madonna's face: "What beauty,
innocence and sadness in that heavenly countenance, what humility and
suffering in those eyes. Among the ancient Greeks the powers of the divine
were expressed in the marvellous Venus de Milo; the Italians,
however, brought forth the true Mother of God — the Sistine Madonna." The
author of Crime and Punishment (1866) went so far as to claim that,
compared to this masterpiece, other representations of the Virgin resemble
bakers' wives or other pedestrian, petty-bourgeois women.
A major Italian artist by 1500,
Raphael
was commissioned at the age of thirty-nine to work on the design of the
new St Peter's in Rome. The young architect had already painted The
Sistine Madonna for the high altar of San Sisto in Piacenza, where
the relics of Pope Sixtus 11 (martyred in 258) had been kept since the
ninth century. The Sistine Madonna hung in the church until 1755,
when it came into the possession of the Prince Elector, Frederick Augustus
II of Saxony. Before Dostoyevsky, German writers, such as August Wilhelm
von Schlegel, Heinrich von Kleist and Franz Grillparzer, had been
enthralled by the painting. The Sistine Madonna continues to
enjoy wide acclaim to this day. In recent times, advertising and commerce
have discovered the irresistible appeal of the two bored, mischievous
angels on the lower edge of the picture plane. They appear on cups and
napkins, letter paper and lampshades. Putti like these are a
type of angel, which
made their first appearance during the Renaissance. Deriving from the
Italian word for "child" or "infant boy", the putto, with his chubby,
sensual cheerfulness, is in the tradition of Eros or Cupid, the god of
love. In ancient writings and representations, Eros was portrayed as a
half-naked boy with wings, while his figure ranged from slim to plump. The
child-like appearance of Italian putti is an expression of their
innocence. In connection with the Virgin, they represent the immaculate
purity of the Queen of angels and men.
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