Raphael, 'The Madonna of the Pinks ('La Madonna dei Garofani')', about 1506-7

The Madonna of the Pinks ('La Madonna dei Garofani')

Raphael

Not on display

About the work

Overview

In this painting, Raphael transforms the familiar subject of the Virgin and Child into something entirely new. The figures are no longer posed stiffly and formally as in paintings by earlier artists, but display all the tender emotions one might expect between a young mother and her child. The pair are seated in a bedchamber in an Italian Renaissance palace, and exchange carnations, which are symbolic of divine love and of Christ’s Passion (his torture and crucifixion).

This small picture may have been intended to be held in the hand for prayer and contemplation. A manuscript inventory dating to the early 1520s states that it was made for ‘Maddalena degli Oddi, a nun in Perugia'.

It is freely based on Leonardo da Vinci’s Benois Madonna (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg). For more than a century it was believed to be a copy, but it was rediscovered in 1991 as an original painting by Raphael.

In-depth

The scene takes places in the young Virgin Mary’s bedchamber in an Italian Renaissance palace. She sits on a bench or box at the end of her bed (the green bed curtain is knotted up behind her) and is shown delighting in her infant son, who sits on a soft white pillow on her lap. The brightly lit pale complexions of the Virgin and Christ Child stand out against the cool dark interior wall. Through the arched window is a sunny view with fortified ruins clinging to a rocky hill. There is a tiny chip in the grey stone window ledge.

Christ gazes at the delicate flowers offered by his mother – the pinks or carnations after which the painting is named. Known in Greek as dianthus, the flower was a traditional symbol of divine love and was reputed to have sprung from the earth where the Virgin’s tears fell during Christ’s Passion. In secular portraits the dianthus symbolised friendship and often betrothal, which would also be appropriate here, as the Virgin was venerated as both the mother and bride of Christ. This idea derived from the Old Testament Song of Solomon, in which the divine bridegroom is united with his heavenly bride – the green bed here recalls the green wedding bed of the biblical text.

The figures are not lit with light from the window but from an artificial light source at the upper left. The subtle description of light and shadow on the flesh and draperies reveals Raphael’s familiarity with Netherlandish painting. The knotted bed curtain, the view through the window with the illusionistic chip in the sill and the Virgin’s downcast, crescent-shaped eyes also reflect Northern European examples. However, the chief influence here is Leonardo da Vinci’s Benois Madonna (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg), on which Raphael’s composition is closely based. The correspondence is so close as to suggest that Raphael was able to study Leonardo’s picture at first hand, though it was painted some 30 years earlier. The cool colours, artful lighting, lively interaction of the figures and arrangement of the draperies all reflect Leonardo’s work. Raphael has linked the heavenly and earthly worlds of the interior and exterior through his harmonious use of colour. His choice of blue-grey and yellow for the Virgin’s clothes (rather than the traditional red and blue) may also relate to Leonardo’s similarly unorthodox choice of colours in the Benois Madonna.

The painting, which is in excellent condition, is not much bigger than a Book of Hours (a personal prayer book), with the refinement of a manuscript illumination, and may have been intended to be held in the hand for prayer and contemplation. A manuscript inventory dating to the early 1520s states that it was made for ‘Maddalena degli Oddi, a nun in Perugia’. Maddalena was named by the sixteenth-century art biographer Vasari as the patron of Raphael’s Coronation of the Virgin, painted for the Oddi Chapel in S. Francesco al Prato, Perugia, in about 1503–4, and now in the Vatican Pinacoteca. The National Gallery’s tender painting, with its imagery of the chaste Virgin, betrothed by the exchange of divine flowers with divine love in the form of her baby son, would be an appropriate prompt to prayer for a virtuous widow who had herself espoused Christ by taking religious vows.

The painting can be dated on stylistic grounds to around 1506–7 and could very well have been produced at the same time that Raphael was designing and delivering the Entombment altarpiece for the Baglioni family, whose chapel in S. Francesco al Prato is opposite that of the Oddi family which housed Raphael’s Coronation.

The painting was well known and celebrated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and many early copies and prints were made after it. Although believed by its previous owners at Alnwick Castle to be by Raphael, its reputation was eroded by the doubts of scholars until it was considered to be only a copy of a lost work by the artist. However, Dr Nicholas Penny, Director of the National Gallery from 2008 to 2015, rediscovered The Madonna of the Pinks in 1991 and his attribution to Raphael was verified by scientific investigation of the underdrawing and the pigments, which are both typical of Raphael’s work before he went to Rome.

The presence of exceptionally free and creative underdrawing – the drawing made by the artist before they began to paint – was revealed by infrared reflectography, a late twentieth-century scientific technique that no earlier copyist could anticipate. Much of the underdrawing in The Madonna of the Pinks is typical of Raphael’s style. It includes features familiar from many drawings, cartoons and other underdrawings by him: for example, broad arcs to lay in the principal forms, smaller arcs indicating the knuckles of the hands, hatching to denote areas of shadow and hook-ended marks to indicate drapery folds. Microscopic investigation shows that the underdrawing was carried out in metalpoint, a medium Raphael frequently used.

The underdrawing shows that Raphael changed his mind about the composition several times. In particular, he radically rethought the costume. He then followed the principal outlines of the underdrawing but made several changes and revisions during the course of painting. A major change was the bed curtain, which was originally coloured purple. These types of changes – a well-recognised part of the creative process – would not be present in a copy because a copyist would be working from the final version.

The pigments in the paints have also been identified using microscopic investigation. They are all characteristic of paintings made in Florence and Umbria in the first years of the sixteenth century, when Raphael was working there. Later copyists would not have been able to obtain many of the pigments he used, and would have had to employ later pigments, unknown in Renaissance Italy. Most importantly, the picture contains a highly unusual dark grey pigment with a shiny, sparkling appearance, identified recently as powdered metallic bismuth, which is present in other works by Raphael. The use of bismuth as a pigment is confined, so far as is known, to early sixteenth-century central Italian painting.

All these features and evidence mean that The Madonna of the Pinks cannot be attributed to another artist of Raphael’s time, or one at a later date.

Want to find out more?

Delve deeper and explore the catalogue entry for this painting.

Key facts

Details

Full title: The Madonna of the Pinks ('La Madonna dei Garofani')
Artist: Raphael
Artist dates: 1483 - 1520
Date made: about 1506-7
Medium and support: oil on wood
Dimensions: 27.9 × 22.4 cm
Acquisition credit: Bought with the assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund (with a contribution from the Wolfson Foundation), the American Friends of the National Gallery, London, the George Beaumont Group, Sir Christopher Ondaatje and through public appeal, 2004
Inventory number: NG6596
Location: Not on display
Collection: Main Collection
Frame: 16th-century Venetian Frame

Provenance

Following Penny’s visit to Alnwick the painting was sent to the National Gallery for examination. It was subsequently offered and accepted on loan as L582, initially until March 1993. In September 2002, Ralph George Algernon Percy, 12th Duke of Northumberland (born 1956), whose older brother had loaned the picture to the National Gallery in London after its rediscovery a decade earlier, agreed to sell the painting to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for £35,000,000. The sale, made through the agency of Sotheby’s, was blocked by the UK Government’s Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, and the National Gallery undertook a campaign to acquire the painting for the national collection. This was achieved in March 2004 when it was purchased (from the 10th Duke of Northumberland’s Wills Trust) for £22,000,000, which included a ‘douceur’ from the government that had been introduced by HM Treasury to encourage owners to sell pre‐eminent works of art by private treaty to national collections. The purchase was achieved with the assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund (£11,500,000), National Art Collections Fund (£400,000 with a contribution from the Wolfson Foundation), the American Friends of the National Gallery (of which £10,500,000 came from the endowment given by John Paul Getty Junior), the George Beaumont Group, Sir Christopher Ondaatje (£1,000,000) and through public appeal (£70,000). The circumstances of its acquisition are described in an article by Ashok Roy, which goes on to counter specific doubts raised about the picture before and after its acquisition.

Additional information

Text extracted from the ‘Provenance’ section of the catalogue entry in Carol Plazzotta and Tom Henry, ‘National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings’, vol. 4, ‘Raphael’, London 2022; for further information, see the full catalogue entry.

Exhibition history

2010

Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries

The National Gallery (London)

30 June 2010 - 12 September 2010
2014

Raphael, Prince of Painters

Timken Museum of Art

19 December 2014 - 26 April 2015
2015

Masterpiece in Focus: Raphael, The Madonna of the Pinks

Minneapolis Institute of Art

9 May 2015 - 16 August 2015
2020

Raphael in Berlin: The Madonnas of the Gemäldegalerie

Gemäldegalerie (Berlin)

5 December 2019 - 14 June 2020
2022

The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Raphael

The National Gallery (London)

9 April 2022 - 31 July 2022

Bibliography

1829

F. Longhena (ed.), Istoria della vita e delle opere di Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino del signor Quatremere de Quincy, Milan 1829
1840

A. Constantin, Idées italiennes sur quelques tableaux celebres, Florence 1840
1857

G.F. Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain: Being and Account of the Chief Collections of Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures, Illuminated Mss. […], translated from German by Elizabeth Eastlake, 3 vols, London 1857, vol. 3
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J.D. Passavant, Raphaël d'Urbin et son père Giovanni Santi, Paris 1860
1882

J.A. Crowe and G.B. Cavalcaselle, Raphael: His Life and Works, 2 vols, London 1882
1882

E. Müntz, Raphael: His Life, Works and Times, trans. W. Armstrong, London 1882
1897

B. Berenson, The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance, New York 1897
1904

A. Rosenberg, Raffael: Des Meisters Gemälde in 202 Abbildungen, Stuttgart 1904
1913

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1923

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1934

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1941

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1948

O. Fischel, Raphael, trans. B. Rackham, London 1948
1958

G. Gamulin, 'Una copia della Madonna del Garofano', Commentari, IX, 1958, pp. 160-1
1963

R. Holland, Noble Patronage: An Exhibition devoted to the Activity of the Percy Family, Earls and Dukes of Northumberland, as Collectors and Patrons of the Art (exh. cat. Hatton Gallery, November - December 1963), Newcastle upon Tyne 1963
1966

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1967

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1971

L. Düssler, Raphael: A Critical Catalogue of His Pictures, Wall-Paintings and Tapestries, trans. S. Cruft, London 1971
1982

P. de Vecchi, Tout l'oeuvre peint de Raphael, Paris 1982
1983

J.-P. Cuzin, Raphaël et l'art français (exh. cat. Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 15 November 1983 - 13 February 1984), Paris 1983
1985

G.B. Pezzini, S. Massari and S. Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, Raphael invenit: Stampe da Raffaello nelle collezioni dell'Istituto nazionale per la grafica catalogo, Rome 1985
1987

J.H. Beck, 'Raphael, Florence, and Quattrocento Sculpture', in M. Sambucco Hamoud and M.L. Strocchi (eds), Studi su Raffaello Atti del Congresso Internazionale di Studi, Urbino - Florence, 6-14 April 1984, Urbino 1987, pp. 73-8
1987

G. Dalli Regoli, '"Non...da natura, ma per lungo studio": Riferimenti, citazione e rielaborazione nelle Madonne di Raffaello', in M. Sambucco-Hamoud and M.L. Strocchi (eds), Studi su Raffaello (Atti del Congresso Internazionale di Studi, Urbino - Florence, 6-14 April 1984), Urbino 1987, pp. 419-428
1992

C. McCorquodale, 'London: Raphael Re-Discovered in Northumberland Collection. Raphael's "Madonna of the Pinks" has Now been Firmly Reattributed after Cleaning', Art Newspaper, III, 1992
1992

N. Penny, 'Raphael's "Madonna dei Garofani" Rediscovered', The Burlington Magazine, CXXXIV, 1992, pp. 67-81
1993

J. Dunkerton and N. Penny, 'The Infra-Red Examination of Raphael's "Garvagh Madonna"', National Gallery Technical Bulletin, XIV, 1993, pp. 6-21
1994

T. Clifford, J. Dick and A. Weston-Lewis, Raphael: The Pursuit of Perfection (exh. cat. National Gallery of Scotland, 5 May - 10 July 1994), Edinburgh 1994
1995

P. de Vecchi, Raffaello: La mimesi, l'armonia e l'invenzione, Florence 1995
1996

C. Baxter, The Camuccini Collection, S.l. 1996
1996

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1998

H. Guratzsch, Maximilian Speck von Sternburg: Ein Europäer der Goethezeit als Kunstsammler (exh. cat. Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, 17 July - 13 September 1998; Haus der Kunst, 26 August - 24 October 1999), Leipzig 1998
1999

M.B. Hall, After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge 1999
1999

R. Freiherr Hiller von Gaertringen, Raffaels Lernerfahrungen in der Werkstatt Peruginos: Kartonverwendung und Motivübernahme im Wandel, Munich 1999
1999

K. Oberhuber, Raphael: The Paintings, Munich 1999
1999

C. Wagner, Farbe und Metapher: Die Entstehung einer neuzeitlichen Bildmetaphorik in der vorrömischen Malerei Raphaels, Berlin 1999
2001

C. Baker and T. Henry, The National Gallery: Complete Illustrated Catalogue, London 2001
2001

J. Meyer zur Capellen, Raphael: A Critical Catalogue of His Paintings, vol. 1, Beginnings in Umbria and Florence, ca. 1500-1508, Landshut 2001
2002

J. Fenton, 'Don't Take Our Raphael!', New York Review of Books, XLIX, 2002, pp. 50-2
2003

J. Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources (1483-1602), New Haven 2003
2004

National Gallery, The National Gallery Review: April 2003 - March 2004, London 2004
2004

'Acquisition of the Year: The National Gallery, London, "The Madonna of the Pinks" by Raphael', Apollo, 2004
2004

D. Cooper, 'New Documents for Raphael and His Patrons in Perugia', The Burlington Magazine, CXLVI, 2004, pp. 742-4
2004

D. Ekserdjian, 'The Making of Raphael', Apollo, CLX, 2004, pp. 76-8
2004

P. Joannides, 'Raphael: A Sorority of Madonnas', The Burlington Magazine, CXLVI, 2004, pp. 749-52
2004

C. Plazzotta, 'Catalogue of Grants: London, National Gallery', National Art Collections Fund Review, 5420, 2004, pp. 86-7
2004

A. Roy, M. Spring and C. Plazzotta, 'Raphael's Early Work in the National Gallery: Paintings before Rome', National Gallery Technical Bulletin, XXV, 2004, pp. 4-35
2004

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2004

H. Chapman, T. Henry and C. Plazzotta, Raphael: From Urbino to Rome (exh. cat. The National Gallery, 20 October 2004 - 16 January 2005), London 2004
2005

J.H. Beck, 'Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks: A Connoisseurship Challenge', Source, XXIV, 2005, pp. 50-9
2006

J.H. Beck, From Duccio to Raphael: Connoisseurship in Crisis, Florence 2006
2007

M. Spring, 'Raphael's Materials: Some New Discoveries and their Context within Early Sixteenth-Century Painting', in A. Roy and M. Spring (eds), Raphael's Painting Technique: Working Practices before Rome: Proceedings of the Eu-ARTECH Workshop, Florence 2007, pp. 77-86
2007

A. Roy, 'The Re-Emergence of Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks', in A. Roy and M. Spring (eds), Raphael's Painting Technique: Working Practices before Rome: Proceedings of the Eu-ARTECH Workshop, Florence 2007, pp. 87-92
2022

Plazzotta, Carol, and Tom Henry, National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, 4, Raphael, London 2022

Frame

This sixteenth-century cassetta frame is from the Veneto region of Italy. The frame retains its original water-gilt surface. The back edge has a fillet and cavetto, which steps to the frieze. Using the pastiglia technique, the frieze has fine decorative double guilloches, which were press-moulded and glued onto the cushioned section, with the joining lines becoming visible over time. The inner moulding has an astragal, and steps to the cavetto sight edge.

In 2005, the current frame was donated to the Gallery by Mr and Mrs Ludovic de Walden, and was fitted to Raphael’s The Madonna of the Pinks.

About this record

If you know more about this painting or have spotted an error, please contact us. Please note that exhibition histories are listed from 2009 onwards. Bibliographies may not be complete; more comprehensive information is available in the National Gallery Library.

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