The Sistine Madonna
What to say about the mother? His simple face does not have the usual sentimentality (in Raphael's Madonnas). She does not hold her head hugging, the baby's forehead barely rests against her cheek; she has large and frank black eyes, but which for the moment do not look at anyone. On her arms, or rather between her two hands, she has placed her boy, at ease as in an armchair, she presents him of course, but her large beige veil draws a kind of flexible shell that could contain her bust and everything. the baby. But that does not lock them up: the kid has his whole shoulder and his shaggy head out of all confinement. It goes without saying, basically, if it is a revelation.
[Grapic content source: Wikipedia]
Jesus' little bare foot seems to indicate a direction to follow: and our gaze can descend along this beautiful blue mantle, of which four large parallel folds outline the movement of fall or descent, but at the bottom of the mantle, a wind rolls up its edge, another or the same inflates his left side in the same direction as he inflated the beige veil. Life is in the folds, it's a certainty when you study old painting. Bustle in smaller, messy folds, though pushed in the same direction, at the bottom of the red dress, obviously made of a fabric lighter than the cloak.
And so, the feet! Only know of another large Madonna appearing barefoot. It is that which Caravaggio will give, a century later, for the church of Saint Augustine in Rome, and which is called the Madonna of the Pilgrims. To this couple of two poor old people, kneeling and showing us the soles of their feet, all black from the path they have traveled, a tall, robust Roman appears at the decrepit threshold of her house, carrying a tall little boy. She too, poor and not proud, came on the walk barefoot. In addition, she is wearing on pointe and crossing her feet, obviously she is dancing. Oh! very little, she sketches a dance, like that of Raphael sketches a step towards us.
The Sistine Madonna, however, remains on her base of clouds, which tightens a little and swells like cotton wool under its immaterial weight, but which occupies the whole picture beyond the curtains, indicating the other world where she now resides. We are up to the two small-winged kids, we look up, she shows herself, she says nothing, does not make promises or threats like at La Salette or Fatima! The cult of the Virgin had not yet reached these heights of stupidity. To us, more or less incredulous of astronautical times, at least it reveals the immensity of a genius of half a millennium ago, and undoubtedly also the pinnacle of the history of the Madonnas, of these inexhaustible representations of a woman of whom nothing is known, at least not what she looked like, and whose painters and sculptors have gradually formed the portrait of the absolute woman.
The looks of the Sistine Madonna
In the Sistine Madonna there are six gazes. To our right, Sainte Barbe or Barbara, indifferent to the apparition of the Madonna, posing on her knees in a garment of six magnificent colors and her pretty head artistically combed, totally lowering her eyelids: she is looking at the two additional cherubs at the bottom of the table .
These, the age of baby Jesus, blond and tousled like him, look up from the parapet where they've been relegated, finger to mouth, to the apparition up there.
On our left, the Saint Sixtus, noble old man with the superb golden cape, raises his profile towards the double face of the apparition. At the same time he directs an index, not stretched, not imperative, towards the place of the spectator, towards us. Some say that it is to make the connection, as befits a pope, intermediary between us and the divinity. But if we take into account all her pose, it seems to us rather to suggest to the Blessed Virgin and her divine child to take into account us, to lower her gaze towards us.
Because she, and her child too, their full-on faces, looking at who knows what, but especially not at us. All that was needed was a minimal deviation of their eyes. She and her baby-god, what are they doing, what are they dreaming of, for whom do they appear on the carpet of clouds?
There is a curtain raising. Although all the characters are "in heaven" on thick wadding, the Madonna surely appears for them, not only for us, on the march, and her vaporous but firm ground may seem in continuity with that of the two saints, she is a little behind the double green curtain which has just opened. The right side of the bearded noble pope is quite clearly in front of the green cloth, while the said pope has placed his tiara near him, several meters from the feet of the Madonna. Yet the left side of his cape touches it!
The astonishing spatial uncertainty, true and deliberate cheating with depth, committed by a great master of perspective, is a brilliant find to relocate the appearance. The place of the divine couple, the place where the Virgin comes from, it is only indicated by something very well known to painters: a cloud, there at the bottom, a mist of a light blue which dissolves into white, and of which the flakes are made up of a thousand heads of baby angels, without a body.
More often than not, we gave them volume and color, rather unnecessary illusion effect, because we do not have to make us believe that these heads, often flanked by tiny wings, actually exist.
Raphael was entertained enough to place two downstairs, not at all cloudy, behind a thin parapet that hides them below the bust but suggests that they have a full body. They use their elbows, their finger, they choose where to direct their eyes, they are not substitutes for flakes.
There is of course something to intrigue them, especially since they do not know where they are any more than we do. Apparently on the same plane as the pope's tiara, and behind them the cloud is a little darker than elsewhere.
The Secret of the Mystery
Is the spatial uncertainty that mentioned new? After Raphael in any case, the mannerists - and particularly El Greco - will float the characters in weightlessness in a non-place. But in our painting, it is an innovation: the characters are not distorted in the mannerist way, we believe we are in full reality. However, without our being aware of it, the depth is rigged, the planes overlap, the very distinct clouds nonetheless blend into each other, with illusory recoil effects. There is the secret of the apparition there, much more than in the drawn curtains. Like the pilgrims of Caravaggio, we see her with her child, very clear, real, coming to us. But she does not advance. The terrestrial place is not represented: the two cherubs below lean on the frame of the painted picture, they are not like us on the ground. It is like a piece of "sky" which is revealed to us, but without any of these little things which indicate, in all kinds of sacred works, as a sign would do "this is divine": god the father in an ether golden, halos, diving or torchbearers angels, red cherubs etc.
Thus this Raphael always so well drawing, wise, conform, whose even beautiful Madonnas are without mystery, simply pretty young women with a large naked baby, this Raphaël surpassed himself, transcended in a painting which, by himself, without illustrating one of the "mysteries" of religion such as creation, redemption, annunciation etc., is constituted in Mystery.
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