Raphael, Marriage of the Virgin, 1504, oil on panel, 174 × 121 cm / 69 × 48″ (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re in the Brera in Milan, and we’re looking at an important early Raphael.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:10] Raphael’s in his early 20s when he paints this, and the subject is the marriage of the Virgin. It’s taken from a book called “The Golden Legend.”
Dr. Zucker: [0:19] This is a medieval book that basically tries to fill in all the missing stories in the Bible. If you think about this deeply religious Christian culture, they look to the Bible to understand the sacred story, but there are so many omissions, there are so many things that are missing, that people created the glue to tie the stories together.
Dr. Harris: [0:37] That’s what’s collected in the book we know today as “The Golden Legend.”
Dr. Zucker: [0:41] This story is about the marriage of the Virgin Mary to Saint Joseph, and the story says that there were a number of people that wanted to marry Mary.
Dr. Harris: [0:50] She had many suitors.
Dr. Zucker: [0:52] Each of these suitors had a rod, and that she would be married to the one whose rod flowered.
Dr. Harris: [0:58] Miraculously flowered.
Dr. Zucker: [1:00] Needless to say.
Dr. Harris: [1:01] And so they went to the Temple, and the man whose rod flowered was Joseph.
Dr. Zucker: [1:06] We can see that in this painting. Joseph, who’s got that wonderful yellow drape over his shoulder and around his waist, is putting a ring tenderly on the Virgin Mary’s finger, and he holds in his left hand a rod that indeed has leaves at its end.
Dr. Harris: [1:22] There are other suitors behind him, who you can see have rods without flowers on the end, and one suitor in the front is annoyed, has decided to break the rod on his knee.
Dr. Zucker: [1:32] This wonderful human narrative quality here. This is not just the sacred event, but really is enacting it before us as a kind of performance.
Dr. Harris: [1:40] Right in the center we have a priest marrying Mary and Joseph, and the painting is so symmetrical in so many ways with that temple behind, and we have this rationally constructed perspective space, and that priest is in the middle between Mary and Joseph but he tips his head a little bit so he’s just off center.
Dr. Zucker: [2:00] In fact, there’s a little bit of the chaos of the crowd, that people are moving this way and that. The people are focusing here and there.
Dr. Harris: [2:06] This painting is often compared to an early Renaissance painting by Raphael’s teacher Perugino, “The Giving of the Keys to Saint Peter,” and you can begin to see here in this early work by Raphael indications of what we understand now as the High Renaissance style as opposed to a kind of stiffness of the 15th century, of the early Renaissance. Raphael gives us figures who seem to move very easily and elegantly.
Dr. Zucker: [2:32] So make no mistake, this is a painting that is still clearly indebted to Perugino, but I think you’re absolutely right. Raphael is beginning to step out of his master’s shadow.
[2:41] He’s signed the painting, and if you look very closely at the front of the temple, you can see it says, “Raphael Urbinas,” Raphael from Urbino. There is a beautiful sense of elegance, especially in the Virgin Mary. She is painted so tenderly.
Dr. Harris: [2:57] She stands in a lovely contrapposto, tilts her head down. There’s that typical Raphael sweetness.
Dr. Zucker: [3:04] Whereas the early Renaissance so often was trying to reveal the truths of what we see of the world that we live in, here there’s an attempt to perfect, to create a kind of balanced, harmonious representation of an ideal heavenly place.
Dr. Harris: [3:18] Ideal beauty, perfection, harmony, are qualities we associate with the High Renaissance. We see that in the background of this painting.
[3:28] If we follow the linear perspective system and we track the orthogonals created by those paving stones behind the frieze of figures in the front, we see a centrally planned temple in the background, a form that was considered ideal by the architects and the artists of the High Renaissance.
[3:45] We can think of Bramante, for example, and his Tempietto.
Dr. Zucker: [3:49] It’s a spectacular building, and I love the way that the linear perspective leads our eye back there, past the frieze of figures in the foreground, and then our eyes are allowed to move around that arcade that’s occupied by those smaller figures.
[4:03] But then my eye goes back to the doorway, and then through the building, to the doorway on its far side, and to the sky that’s revealed beyond even that. There is that diminishment of the scale of the one doorway and then the farther doorway, giving us a real sense of the completeness of this space.
Dr. Harris: [4:23] There’s a real love of creating an illusion of space and the way that the sizes of the figures shift as we move further back into space. We have this real harmony here that I think is very typical of the High Renaissance between the architecture and the figures, where one ennobles another, where one is as ideal and perfect as the other.
[4:45] It’s this High Renaissance moment, although the very beginnings.
Dr. Zucker: [4:49] Of course, we’re looking with hindsight as to what will happen.
[4:52] [music]
