A Thousand Words
Raffaello Sanzio's
The Sistine Madonna
by Mary Elizabeth Podles
.jpg)
St. Sixtus (left), St. Barbara (right)
While it is seldom polite to mention a lady's age, the Sistine Madonna celebrated a landmark birthday last year when she turned 500. The years have treated her well. The painting is one of an established type known as a sacra conversazione, in which the viewer is granted a vision of the Madonna and Child conversing with selected saints in heaven.
In Raphael's version, a curtain has just been pulled back to reveal the Virgin coming towards us on the clouds, against a backdrop of a heavenly choir of cherubic heads. On her right, St. Sixtus, an early pope, looks upward at her and gestures actively outward toward us, the viewers outside the fictive heavenly space; and on her left, St. Barbara looks down contemplatively at the little angels who rest against the parapet that divides their space from ours.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
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.
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on art from the online archives
33.2—March/April 2020
An Architectural Sign of Mere Christianity by Michael Ward
32.4—July/August 2019
on Single-Mindedness in Durer's Ritter, Tod, und Teufel by Anthony Costello
more from the online archives
27.5—Sept/Oct 2014
The Culture of Death's Campaign Against the Catholic Church by Brantly Millegan
32.2—March/April 2019
Reality Shows, Even in a Popular TV Series by C. E. Smith
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
