The beautiful gardener
|
| La belle jardinière |
|---|
| Raphael , ca.1507/08 |
| Oil on poplar wood |
| 122 × 80 cm |
| Louvre |
The beautiful gardener ( La belle jardinière ), also called Madonna and Child with John the Baptist , is one of Raphael's most famous paintings of the Virgin . It was created around 1507/08, shortly before Raphael moved from Florence to Rome. It is the last of a series of similarly conceived pictures of Mary that Raphael painted in Florence between 1504 and 1508.
history
The provenance of the picture is controversial in the specialist literature. Some authors identify with the painting, which - as Giorgio Vasari says - could not be completed by Raphael and was therefore completed by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio . According to Vasari, the commissioner of the picture is said to have been the patrician Fabrizio Segardi from Siena , theses that are not confirmed by the Louvre. X-ray examinations of the picture have since shown that this picture was not supplemented by a second hand.
How it got to France is not known. It appears for the first time in an inventory of the royal collection as La Sainte Vierge en paysanne (= The Blessed Virgin as a peasant woman), in 1720 the French engraver Pierre-Jean Mariette called it La Jardinière (= the gardener) and in letters in his Abecedario La Belle Jardinière . In the Recueil d'estampes (1729) the designation for an engraving by François Chéreau La Belle Jardinière is due to the simple clothes of the Virgin ("à cause de la simplicité avec laquelle la sainte Vierge est habillée") and to this picture from others, Similar pictures of the Virgin Mary, which were also created in Florence around this time - Madonna Esterhazy (Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts), Madonna in the Green (Vienna, Museum of Art History), Madonna with the Goldfinch (Florence, Uffizi).
description
The Virgin Mary and the Baby Jesus are shown in the company of the Johannesknaben . Maria is sitting on a boulder in the middle of a flower meadow. Jesus leans against his mother, who supports his back with her right hand and holds him by the arm with the other hand. Opposite him, Johannes kneels, dressed in the typical fur apron of John the Baptist, with the cross staff in his hand. He looks at Jesus, who is looking at his mother. A low mountain range stretches on the horizon behind a lake, on the banks of which are a medieval castle and a small town with a Gothic church tower. White clouds sail across a pastel blue sky. Maria wears a simple red dress over a light long-sleeved petticoat, the wide neckline is bordered in black, her blue coat flows in abundance from the shoulder to the floor. A delicate veil is woven into the blonde hair. The three figures are embedded in a pyramidal shape and are covered by the arch of the upper edge of the picture. The painting is on the hem of the robe with RAPHAELLO URB. MDVII (I?) Signed.
interpretation
The cross of John the Baptist can be read as an indication of the Passion of Christ , as well as the grip of the boy Jesus for the book that lies in Mary's arm, an indication of his later Passion. The columbine in the meadow also alludes to the suffering and death of Jesus, while the plantain as a symbol of Mary points to the humility of the Virgin Mary.
Replicas
Raphael's Beautiful Gardener was copied again and again soon after it was created; six replicas are documented today .
In art history, the Madonna of Leo X is considered to be one of the early replicas of the “beautiful gardener”, which was probably made in the Raphael workshop. Raphael is said to have given this picture to the Medici Pope Leo X when he took office on March 11, 1513. It is extremely similar to the Louvre picture - apart from various deviations in the landscape representation, but straight at the top and not closed with a round arch. The current owner of the picture, the Winterthur lawyer Hanspeter Sigg, propagates in his book published in 2014 that his picture is the "real" Raphael, while the Louvre in the "Beautiful Gardener" has a replica. Sigg has established a complete provenance in his book about Leo X., whose nephew Innocenzo Cibo , after whose death it remained in the possession of the Cibo-Malacina family in Massa, sold to the Genoese family Cambiaso, who in 1771 sold the doge to Giovanni Battista Cambiaso from Genoa. In 1866 the picture, which Cambiaso had put up for auction, was bought by the Winterthur merchant Jakob Weiss-Sulzer. Since then, the picture has been owned by the Sigg family. This picture has never been publicly exhibited, any existing results from X-ray and infrared reflectography recordings have not yet been published and are also missing in Sigg's book. When the book was presented in May 2014 in a cinema in Winterthur , only a 1: 1 copy of the picture was shown, not the original.
The Walters Museum of Art is showing a replica of the picture, dated towards the mid or late 17th century, when the original was already in France.
reception
The drawing, which is kept in the Harvard museums, was probably made in the Raphael workshop. It is probably a copy of a preliminary study for the picture. The pen drawing, format 27.3 × 19.4 cm, with brown ink and red chalk, shows the Madonna with Child and John in a slightly different composition under a grid.
The copy of the Belle jardinière , which the young Eugène Delacroix made as a preliminary exercise for an altarpiece for a small church near Paris, has not survived.
Two modern painters take over the beautiful gardener as the title of their pictures. The title of Max Ernst's painting La belle jardinière from 1929 refers to both Raffael and the Paris department store of the same name. Raffael was the only historical person whom Max Ernst included in the circle of his Parisian painting colleagues in the painting Au rendez-vous des amis . The picture was confiscated by the Nazis in 1937, shown at the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich and has been missing ever since. In 1967, Ernst's return of the beautiful gardener was created (Retour de la Belle Jardinière) , it belongs to the collection of the Menil Collection , Houston.
Paul Klee adorns his picture La belle jardinière from 1939, which has no content or formal references to Raphael's picture, with the playful and ironic subtitle “A Biedermeier Ghost”.
On the occasion of Raphael's 500th birthday in 1983, the Republic of the Congo , Nicaragua and the Cook Islands issued postage stamps with the theme of the beautiful gardener.
Reproductions
Raphael's extraordinary popularity was largely due to his marketing through copperplate engravings and etchings, which Raphael himself encouraged to the best of his ability at an early age. Until the late 19th century he was one of the most reproduced artists of all. The first reproductions of the Belle jardinière include Pierre Andouin's (1768–1822) copperplate engraving from 1803 and Auguste Gaspar Louis Boucher-Desnoyer's La belle jardinière de Florence , engraved in 1804. Desnoyer almost exclusively reproduced Raphael in copperplate engravings, which in turn were distributed in photogravures . This is followed by Ernst Ludwig Riepenhausen's dot-style engraving from around 1820, which shows a reversed portrait of the Madonna, and Johann Adolph Roßmaessler's (1775–1858) variant from 1821. In 1876, Gustave Levy's (1819–1894) engraved La Belle Jardinière .
The beautiful gardener was also marketed in Meißen - copied on a porcelain board and lavishly framed (1815/1860).
literature
- Jürg Meyer zur Capellen : Raphael. A Critical Catalog of His Paintings . Vol. 1. Arcos-Verlag. 2001. pp. 257-263
- Pierluigi De Vecchi: Raphael . Munich: Hirmer Verlag 2002. ISBN 3-7774-9500-X , 383 pp
- Luitpold Dussler : Raffael. Critical directory of paintings, murals and tapestries . Munich 1966.
- Raffael and the consequences. The work of art in times of its graphic reproducibility . Ed. Corinna Höper. Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz 2001. ISBN 978-3-7757-1035-0
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Claudio Strinati: Raphael. English edition. Florence, Milan: Giunti 1998 p. 22nd
- ↑ La Vierge à l'Enfant avec le petit saint Jean-Baptiste, Louvre, Toutes les oeuvres .
- ↑ Esther Gallwitz: A wonderful garden: The plants of the Ghent Altarpiece. Frankfurt: Insel-Verl. 1996.
- ↑ Dussler, 1966. p. 55, no. 96; Exhib. Cat. Paris 1983/84 No. 6; raffael-projekt.de
- ↑ data
- ^ Hanspeter M. Sigg: Raffael, Madonna Leo X., La Belle Jardinière and their replicas. Abstract. 2014. [1]
- ↑ Christine Buscher: The painting is safe in the safe. In: Winterthurer Stadtanzeiger. Stadi-online. May 20, 2014 [2] accessed on August 10, 2014.
- ↑ La Belle Jardière
- ↑ Figure
- ^ Marielle O'Neill-Karch: Jean Alexis Rouchon (1794-1878) et la (Re) naissance de l'affiche publicitaire. In: The Renaissance in the Nineteenth Century. Ed. By Yannick Portebois and Nicolas Terpstra. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto 2003. p. 173.
- ↑ The pious shouted three times ugh SPIEGEL conversation with the painter Max Ernst. February 23, 1970.
- ↑ You are there and I am here. La Belle Jardinière ( Memento of the original of August 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Fig.
- ^ [3] Klee: La Belle Jardiniere, 1939. Tempera and oil on jute 1939, Kunstmuseum Bern ; Illustration
- ↑ Figure
- ↑ Allgemeine Anzeiger und Nationalzeitung der Deutschen, Gotha 1822
- ↑ Description
- ↑ Description and illustration ( Memento of the original from March 7, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
