Rosary Madonna (Caravaggio)
|
| The Rosary Madonna |
|---|
| Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio , 1604/1605 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 364.5 x 249.5 cm |
| Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna |
The Rosary Madonna ( Italian : Madonna del Rosario ) is a painting by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio from 1605/06 . The large-format picture (364.5 × 249.5 cm) was painted with oil on canvas and is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna .
Origin and subject
The Rosary Madonna is the only proven votive or donor image from the artist's oeuvre . The founder and commissioner of the painting is shown on the lower left edge of the picture and is still unknown today, as is the Dominican monastery and the Dominican church for which the painting was apparently intended. The fact that no news of this large altarpiece has appeared in the well-searched Roman and Neapolitan archives so far suggests a (then failed) commission for a Dominican church in northern Italy. The cities with which Caravaggio or his Roman patrons had connections, such as Genoa , Siena or Florence, would come into question .
Depicted is the legend spread by Alanus de Rupe around 1468, according to which Saint Dominic , founder of the Dominican order, received the rosary in 1208 at an apparition of Mary and introduced it into his order. The legend tells that Mary gave the rosary to Dominic as a weapon in the fight against the Albigensians .
The subject of the Rosary Madonna is derived from that of the Protective Madonna . It was especially the Dominicans who, through sermons about new protective mantle visions - in which the Divine Mother, seen in the hereafter, takes the deceased members of the respective order under the special protection of her mantle - popularized the pictorial image of Mary as the patroness of the faithful. The representation of the protective coat Madonna in Western art is usually done standing with - provided she is not holding a Jesus child in her arms - arms outstretched over a crowd of small figures, representatives of society and the clergy. In the case of the Rosary Madonna, Caravaggio varies this depiction by letting the Child Jesus stand on the seat between the Madonna's legs, but still holding the child in her arms.
Image description
The fluted column on the left in the picture and the red curtain that stretches across the entire width of the picture give the composition an inner frame. Mary is enthroned elevated above four standing men in the Dominican habit , with the founder of the order, St. Dominic acts. In the foreground, three barefoot men in shawls reminiscent of apostles' clothes push themselves; as well as a woman with a toddler, to them. In between, a distinguished gentleman in a black robe and a white ruff kneels on the left edge of the picture . This figure, in which the founder or client of the picture can be seen, looks over the right shoulder out of the picture and thus ensures the attention of the viewer.
The composition results in a strict hierarchy: mother and child open the picture at the bottom left, whereby the woman is the only one allowed to look up at the Madonna, while her child observes the three men who come from the right in the graduation of the three ages. Fully clothed, the two older men, the young man naked under his shawl, all three stretch out their arms to receive rosaries from the hands of the founder of the order.
The hands of St. Dominic, who hold the rosaries, form an imaginary horizontal boundary between saints and ordinary people, among whom the distinguished founder mingles, who, as it were, opens the protective cloak of the saint for ordinary people and is thus pushed aside by their violent piety.
The Christ child is shown standing in the lap, which is supposed to clarify its origin from the womb of the mother. While Mary is practically pragmatic about telling Dominic to distribute rosaries among the poor, little Jesus clasps her shoulders, grabs her bulging stomach in a childlike gesture and looks playfully at the viewer.
Dating and provenance
The Rosary Madonna is the only altarpiece by Caravaggio whose date of creation has not been documented. The authorship of parts of the composition, such as the curtain, the Madonna itself and the portrait of the founder had even been disputed in the past. The painting was examined at close range using X-ray and infrared reflectography as well as various methods of surface photography , and the structure of the paint layers was also carefully examined. The result was compared with other works from Caravaggio's Roman and Neapolitan times. The research came to the conclusion that everything points to the creation of the picture in Caravaggio's Roman period, i.e. in the first five of the 17th century, between the side pictures of the Cerasi chapel ( Crucifixion of Peter and Conversion of Paul ) in Santa Maria del Popolo from 1601 and the Madonna dei Pellegrini from 1605.
The first written report on the painting was written in Naples . From there, on December 25, 1607, the Bruges painter Franz Pourbus wrote to his master, Vincenzo I. Gonzaga , that a rosary by Caravaggio was available for 400 ducats . Ten years later, in the will of the Antwerp painter Louis Finson, who died in 1617, we can read that he had bought the painting in Naples. The artist community around Peter Paul Rubens , Jan Brueghel and Hendrik van Balen acquired the painting from Finson's estate in order to donate it to the Dominicans for their Church of St. Paul in Antwerp. The painting arrived there in 1619, was seen by Emperor Joseph II in 1782 , acquired and brought to Vienna in 1786.
literature
- Sybille Ebert-Schifferer: Caravaggio. See - be amazed - believe. The painter and his work. CH Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-59140-2
- Eberhard König: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio . Könemann Verlag, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-8290-0685-3
- Gilles Lambert; Gilles Néret (Ed.): Caravaggio (translated by Bettina Blumenberg). Taschen, Cologne / London / Madrid / New York / Paris / Tokyo 2005, ISBN 3-8228-0818-0
- Roberto Longhi : Caravaggio . In: Italian painting (translated from the English translation by BD Phillips and ASG Greenvon by Brigitte Schönert), Verlag der Kunst VEB, Dresden, 1968 (without ISBN ).
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b http://web.fu-berlin.de/giove/restoration/01_schluss.html Project GIOVE on the homepage of the Free University of Berlin
- ↑ a b Eberhard König: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Cologne 1997, p. 120