A Thousand Words
Raphael's
Alba Madonna
by Mary Elizabeth Podles
In 1508, the young Raffaello Sanzio was hired away from Florence to Rome to assist in the decorations of the Vatican Palace, work that occupied him until the time of his death. During his Roman years, he also accepted private commissions for easel paintings like this one (Figure 1). The physician, writer, and prelate Paolo Giovio most likely commissioned the Alba Madonna around 1510 or 1511, intending to hang it over the altar of his church in Nocera.
At first blush, it is a simple enough devotional image: the Madonna, seated on the ground and leaning against a grassy bank, holds the baby Jesus on her lap while the infant John the Baptist looks on; behind them spreads a serene and pastoral landscape.
The Tondo
The round shape is a little unusual. The tondo (from rotondo, round) shape was not unheard of for altarpieces in Florence and Rome, but it was more commonly used for paintings commissioned to celebrate the birth of a child. The circle suggested multiple meanings: the wedding ring, perhaps the birth canal, and certainly eternity. To have a child hedges against mortality, for at least a part of oneself lives on. The tondo, then, is certainly appropriate to celebrate the nativity on earth of the Eternal One.
The round shape presents the artist with something of a compositional challenge. A circle is inherently unstable, and if it is not anchored properly, it always looks as if it would like to roll away. The strong horizon line holds us steady here, and the solid pyramid of the three figures is firmly set on its broad base and will not be moved. While in Rome, Raphael undoubtedly knew Michelangelo's ongoing work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and, under its influence, his own figures take on the weight and muscularity Michelangelo had absorbed from the art of Antiquity.
Even Raphael's Jesus is solid, sturdy, and alert, a heroic baby. And in more ways than one: he reaches out to embrace the cross his little cousin offers to him, and the three exchange a series of sorrowful glances. John holds anemone flowers in his lap, and more blossom behind him (Figure 2). In the traditional iconography* of the West, the anemone signifies sorrow. Already implied in the joy of the Incarnation is the future sadness of the Passion.
The Flowers
Art historians love flowers. They very nearly always carry a veiled meaning. To the Christian way of thinking, everything in the natural world conveys a meaning beyond itself in the supernatural realm: the physical expresses the metaphysical. We know this from the extended metaphors of the wordiest of the church fathers, and it is often their writings that are the ultimate source of Renaissance visual symbolism.
In Raphael's painting, Mary, Jesus, and John sit in a circle of carefully painted plants, each of which is a clue to our ultimate understanding of the picture. The next two plants, reading from left to right, are the lowly dandelion and sweet cicely (Figure 3). Traditionally, the dandelion was used as one of the bitter herbs of the Passover supper, and in Christian times it came to symbolize the bitterness of Christ's own Passover. The Latin name of the sweet cicely is Myrrhus odoratus, the scented myrrh, which recalls the embalming spice brought by the Magi to the infant Christ: even at the moment of his birth, the manner of his death was foreshadowed.
At the far right is sweet woodruff, or bedstraw, which is also associated with Christ's Nativity: tradition has it that woodruff, which smells sweet even when dried, was laid in the manger (Figure 4). Some people still dry it for use in their Christmas creches.
To the left of the bedstraw, is another plant, the violet. Violets, hidden, sweet-smelling, low-growing, lovely, and unobtrusive, have long stood for the virtue of humility (Figure 5). The pose of the Madonna, too, seated on the ground, is an iconographic type long known as the Virgin of Humility, recalling the words of the Magnificat and reminding us of both Mary's humility and that of Jesus in taking on our human condition.
One final plant, the plantain, is set front and center at the bottom of the tondo. The plantain was a common roadside weed with broad, flat leaves that always seem a little cooler than the ambient air. Traditionally, pilgrims on their way to important shrines sought out the plantain to ease their aching and blistered feet, and called the plant by a name that means "Follows in the steps of Christ." In the visual arts, then, it came to be used as the symbol of the path that Christians walk to follow Christ in the world.
The Setting
As for the world, we look to the background landscape set to the left and right of the central figures (Figure 6). In the distance, there are mountains and trees, and houses such as Raphael might have known from the Roman Campagna surrounding the city, a portrait of contemporary Italy, the stuff of ordinary life.
But separating the ordinary space from the heavenly figures in their presumably heavenly realm is a body of water. Water in a religious picture almost certainly signals baptism, and such an interpretation makes perfect sense here: in order to follow Christ on the pilgrim way, we must die to sin in baptism and rise to new life in the world of grace.
We should keep in mind that this painting was not originally designed to grace the walls of the National Gallery in Washington. It was meant to be an altarpiece, and of course, an altarpiece always implies an altar. The painting would have appeared to be an extension of the real space of a church, a window opening onto another reality. To an educated and prayerful audience, it would have offered much for contemplation: the Incarnation and the Passion, the Mother of God and her virtues, the sacrament of baptism, the help of intercessors, and the path of the Christian to the joys of heaven. •
* The term "iconography" in relation to Christian art is rather vexed. In the Eastern church, it refers to the process of making or "writing" an image; here I use it in the conventional Western sense of the investigation of symbolic meaning implied by certain visual images.
Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.
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