| Pressing
the right buttons
With Raphael's Madonna saved for the nation, James Fenton
unpins his campaign
badge with pride
Saturday February 21, 2004
The Guardian
She stays: Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks is to remain in
Britain.
On Friday the 13th of this month, I received a letter marked
confidential, as a
result of the perusal of which I decided to unpin the button
of Raphael's
Madonna of the Pinks from my jacket lapel.
It is a handsome, large, eye-catching badge, and I have enjoyed
wearing it. But
you gradually realise that, if you go around the world displaying
an image of
the Madonna and Child on your lapel, people assume that you
are making a
religious statement.
They are perfectly nice and friendly about this. One man,
in Newark Airport, New
Jersey, whipped out a photo from his back pocket and said
"Here's a picture of
the same lady!" And he begged me to take his holy image
of the Virgin from him.
I found that English clergymen of my acquaintance were less
likely to assume a
devout intent. "What on earth are you doing wearing that
thing? What is it?" was
a more typical Anglican response. I replied: "It's an
image of the Blessed
Virgin Mary with the Lord Jesus Christ on her lap." This
was considered
deliberately obtuse, which I suppose it was.
Most people at the National Gallery quickly lost their campaign
buttons. They
were too popular to hang on to. I lost my first button in
Dublin to a nice
single mother who requested it for her child, but I hung on
to my second and
vowed to wear it until the campaign reached its wonderful,
amicable conclusion.
It is interesting to look back on the last 18 months and see
how well known the
painting became over the course of time. Exactly the same
thing happened to the
Leonardo cartoon, when the Royal Academy put it up for sale
in 1962.
The difference is that although by the time it was sold to
the National Art
Collections Fund (who immediately donated it to the National
Gallery), the
Leonardo cartoon was well known to be an important work of
art, it had not been
so for all that long. The earliest image of it, just visible
at the back of a
drawing of the Academy's antique school, is dated 1779. Decades
were to pass
before it became at all famous.
The Madonna of the Pinks, by contrast, was known through engravings
in 17th and
18th-century France (including a colour engraving, which
I have not seen but
which must surely have been an expensive and luxurious undertaking).
Before that it had been engraved in Italy. One of these early
reproductions
bears an inscription which gives us a clue to the meaning
of the picture, at
least for some of its early viewers: "Dilectus meus mihi
et ego illi Cant. 2."
This is a quotation from the Song of Solomon, meaning: "My
beloved is mine and I
am his." The Virgin adores the child, to whom she is,
in a mystical sense,
married.
Around 1814, a development in porcelain manufacture which
I do not claim to
understand (something to do with a casting process) gave an
impulse to the
production of porcelain plaques painted in enamel, reproducing
works of art—and doing so with an uncanny accuracy.
Many people nowadays would think this kind of copying of a
panel-painting onto
porcelain in rather bad taste, but there speaks prejudice.
"Truth to the
material" may be a fine aesthetic slogan, but the developers
of porcelain were
(I suppose) finding out how far they could go with the material.
That in itself
would have seemed to them like a quest for truth.
At all events, one of the most skilful of these painters on
porcelain was a
certain Madame Jaquotot, who copied The Madonna of the Pinks
in this way for the
royal porcelain works at Sèvres. In 1818 she earned a pension
of 1,000 francs
from Louis XVIII, who said to her, as he handed it over, "Madame,
c'est un
commencement." (Madame, it's a start.) What he had in
mind for later on, I do
not know.
It was after this French phase of its fame (when The Madonna
of the Pinks was
also rendered in needlework) that the painting went for a
while to Rome, before
passing on into the Alnwick collection as a star acquisition.
And then the years
of its obscurity began, probably as a result of a misapprehension
which never
quite got corrected until a few years ago.
There is more to be learnt about the early history of this
little Raphael, and
it may be that someone will make a breakthrough and be able
to work out who it
was originally painted for. It is also surprising (but a tribute
to the secrecy
of the French aristocracy) that nobody has yet established
which family owned it
in France.
But it was there for a long time—of this we may be sure.
Indeed, more is
already known about the history of this painting than can
be said for certain
about many works of art. And now it belongs to all of us.
I say: Bravo.
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