After Raphael, The Madonna and Child

This is a copy of Raphael’s Virgin and Child known as ‘The Bridgewater Madonna’. The original is on loan to the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh from the Duke of Sutherland’s collection. Raphael continued to be hugely influential long after his death aged 37 in 1520. Copies and prints of his works helped to spread his fame before the advent of photography.

The copy is similar in size and in most colours – it also follows Raphael’s style closely, which makes it difficult to attribute to a known artist. Its origin is uncertain but it possibly dates from the late sixteenth century. Although much importance was given to the creative process of artistic invention, copying other works and reusing successful models was common practice in the Renaissance workshop. The copy is very precise, except for the gauzy drapery which covers Christ’s nudity. This is clearly a later addition, probably dating from the nineteenth century.

The Bridgewater Madonna represents Raphael’s most complex approach to the subject of the Virgin and Child before his move to Rome in 1508. Although he had previously depicted Christ lying across his mother’s lap, he had never before given the pose so much movement nor invested the scene with so much drama. Raphael adapted Christ’s pose in reverse from Michelangelo’s relief sculpture, the Taddei Tondo (Royal Academy of Arts, London). The dynamic spiralling composition echoes, also in reverse, Leonardo’s Madonna of the Yardwinder (one of two versions is on loan to the Scottish National Galleries). Raphael adopted a twisting pose and poignant gaze characteristic of Leonardo in his Saint Catherine of Alexandria, which also dates from about 1507.

Preparatory drawings in London and Vienna show the complex process by which Raphael combined and transformed these two influences from Leonardo and Michelangelo. Technical examination of The Bridgewater Madonna shows that he continued to revise his ideas during painting. X-ray images reveal that the Virgin and Child were originally shown in a landscape setting, as in Leonardo’s Yardwinder Madonna. Raphael then painted this out but retained a window with a landscape view in the right background. Only later was this opening transformed into the empty niche of the finished picture. There is still a window seat remaining beneath the niche. The light brown shape to the right of the niche was probably an internal shutter for this window, and has been retained as a door to cover the niche. Its colour serves to balance the wooden bench on which the Virgin is sitting, in the diagonally opposite corner of the composition.

Raphael’s decision to paint out the landscape may have been to focus our attention more closely on the interaction of the Virgin and Child. He also changed his mind about the Virgin’s costume. He first painted her with a blue cloak wrapping around her right breast and behind the child’s body. When he decided to remove this piece of drapery, he repainted the whole of the Virgin’s dress, which was originally red not pink – however, he forgot to paint over her left cuff.