The Madonna of the Pinks ('La Madonna dei Garofani')

In this painting, Raphael transforms the familiar subject of the Virgin and Child into something entirely new. The figures are no longer posed stiffly and formally as in paintings by earlier artists, but display all the tender emotions one might expect between a young mother and her child. The pair are seated in a bedchamber in an Italian Renaissance palace, and exchange carnations, which are symbolic of divine love and of Christ’s Passion (his torture and crucifixion).

This small picture may have been intended to be held in the hand for prayer and contemplation. A manuscript inventory dating to the early 1520s states that it was made for ‘Maddalena degli Oddi, a nun in Perugia'.

It is freely based on Leonardo da Vinci’s Benois Madonna (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg). For more than a century it was believed to be a copy, but it was rediscovered in 1991 as an original painting by Raphael.

Text: © The National Gallery, London

Painting photographed in its frame by Google Arts & Culture, 2023.