The Alba Madonna's $1.1 million journey across Europe and Russia

The Alba Madonna's $1.1 million journey across Europe and Russia

Raphael's Madonnas are the Counter-Reformation's PowerPoint: heavenly propaganda with a fine brush. Impeccable work, yes, but designed to sell purity to an audience that couldn't read. Yet the Urbino genius managed to humanize the Virgin until she became a woman from Trastevere, as the gaze of the Madonna della Seggiola shows — no longer blessing but warning: "son, brace yourself, you're in for it".

Leonardo's influence and the humanizing of the icon

Raphael took sfumato and enveloping compositions from Leonardo, but gave them a more earthly touch. The Madonna della Seggiola, in the Palazzo Pitti, is a medallion of street-level tenderness; the Belle Jardinière at the Louvre has a languor Instagram can't match. Not the beatific gaze of the early Virgins: this is a neighborhood mother. Even in lesser works like the Madonna of Orleans, at the Musée Condé, the expression is more intimate, less like a detergent ad.

The Alba Madonna's odyssey: from ruined nobleman to Mellon

The Alba Madonna (1511) is the perfect example of how art is a thermometer of power. Owned by the House of Alba until 1802, it was sold to the Danish ambassador Edmund Bourke, passed through British and French collections, and in 1836 Nicholas I of Russia acquired it for the Hermitage. A century later, the Soviet government, in need of foreign currency, secretly sold it to Andrew W. Mellon for the record sum of $1,166,400. Today it hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

The Musée Condé: treasures that are never lent

The Musée Condé, in Chantilly (population 11,000), holds the Madonna of Loreto and the Madonna of Orleans, but does not lend works, by the will of its donor, the Duke of Aumale. A policy some see as old-school aristocracy, standing against the media circus of sponsored exhibitions.

The Madonna of Loreto, with doubtful attribution (Raphael's workshop?), and the simpler, more honest Madonna of Orleans complete a catalog proving Raphael was a genius of visual composition. But, as some analyses point out, all that technical perfection can be read as an empty reliquary. Art will remain a thermometer of power, but Raphael's aesthetic purity — empty of content, some say — will keep rising in value.