Madonna and Child The Small Cowper Madonna

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Madonna and Child The Small Cowper Madonna: Raphael

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Raphael Oil Painting - Madonna and Child The Small Cowper Madonna

Keywords: Madonna, Child, Cowper, Madonna

Work Overview: Small Cowper Madonna
Artist Raphael
Year 1505
Medium Oil on panel
Dimensions 59.5 cm × 44 cm (23.4 in × 17 in)
Location National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The Small Cowper Madonna is a painting by the Italian High Renaissance artist Raphael, depicting Mary and Child, in a typical Italian countryside. It has been dated to around 1505,[1] the middle of the High Renaissance.

It is not known exactly why the Small Cowper Madonna was painted. It was probably either a private commission [2] or for the general art market; images of the Madonna and Child were often given as wedding presents.[3] It is widely thought that the church on the right hand side of the painting is the church of San Bernardino,[4] where the Dukes of Urbino (where Raphael was born[5]) were buried, and it has been suggested that the presence of the church means the painting may have been "commissioned by the family for devotional purposes."[6] At the same time, it could just be Raphael drawing on memories of the church, which would have been near where he grew up in Urbino.

Sitting in the center of the work in a bright red dress is the Madonna. She is fair skinned with blonde hair. She sits comfortably on a wooden bench. Across her lap is a dark drapery upon which her right hand delicately sits. There appears to be a sheer translucent ribbon elegantly flowing across the top of her dress and behind her head. The faintest golden halo miraculously surrounds her head. In her left hand she holds the baby Christ, who embraces her with one arm around her back, the other around her neck. He, an undeniably precious child, looks back over his shoulder with a coy smile. Behind them, a beautifully clear and bright day unfolds. Off in the distance two figures appear to be ambling toward a reflective pond, enjoying the green scenery around them. A large and very impressing structure stands at the end of a long path, which one could presume to be a Catholic church. Its dome and other structural elements common of Catholic architecture add to the already omnipresent atmosphere of religious divinity and grace.

In 2015 the National Gallery of Art loaned the Small Cowper Madonna to the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts (U.S.) to be exhibited alongside The Virgin and Child (The Northbrook Madonna). The Northbrook Madonna is in the Worcester Art Museum's permanent collection and was once attributed to Raphael.[7] One hope of the exhibition was to identify the Master of the Northbrook Madonna.

The renaissance painter Raphael Sanzio (commonly known as Raphael) created the piece called the Small Cowper Madonna. He used oil on panel as the medium and completed the artworks in 1505. The painting measures fifty nine and a half centimetres long and forty four centimetres wide. It is currently housed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., USA. Some art historians say that Raphael did this work to be given as a wedding gift. During the period wherein this was painted, Madonna & Child pieces were popular gifts during important events as the Renaissance period widened the appreciation of people for works of art.

The Small Cowper Madonna by Raphael, one of the greatest Renaissance paintings in America, will come to Worcester from the National Gallery of Art in Washington for a special, focused installation. Painted at the moment when Raphael made the transition from Urbino to Florence, this work stands at the beginning of the highly influential Madonnas which secured his reputation. Raphael's work will be paired with Worcester's Northbrook Madonna, a work that came into the collection in 1940 with an attribution to Raphael that has long been discarded, but without clear consensus on what relationship the work bears to Raphael and his studio. This two-painting installation, which will also address the underdrawing of the two pictures, will explore Raphael's masterful interpretation and the spread of his early style among followers in Central Italy.

How did The Small Cowper Madonna get its name?
Raphael would certainly be surprised to learn that his picture has come to be known as the Small Cowper Madonna (not the least because he did not speak English). Passing through the hands of a succession of collectors in the centuries after their creation, paintings often acquired the name of a later owner. In the nineteenth century, this and another Madonna and Child by Raphael now known as "The Large Cowper Madonna" were among the treasures of the art collection of Earl Cowper, a British aristocrat. It has been known ever since as "The Small Cowper Madonna."

Raphael’s Small Cowper Madonna mirrors the style and mood of those from Perugino’s shop. But compare these two Madonnas. While the Virgins share a graceful modesty and wistful expressions, the two paintings differ compositionally. Raphael’s figures are tied by interlocking gestures and unified by their shared gaze to a vision of the child’s future. By contrast, Perugino’s recycling of stock figures from workshop repertoire sometimes resulted in figures that are unrelated or gestures that are unexplained by the story being told. Was the child here meant to hold something, as he perhaps did in another painting? Unlike Raphael’s mother and child, who form a seamless unit, Perugino’s seem to exist in separate worlds.

This painting, known as the Small Cowper Madonna because it was the smaller of the two Raphael Madonna paintings owned by the English collector Lord Cowper, was painted when the artist was about twenty-two. It reveals not only the strong influence of his Umbrian master, Perugino, but also that of his Florentine rivals, Leonardo and Michelangelo.

The Small Cowper Madonna is a more analytical variant of the homogeneous and resolute group of the Madonna del Granduca. Here the painter expresses the influence of Leonardo in a broad, soft landscape. This landscape contains a small church with a cylindrical dome, which may be an allusion to Bramante's architecture; it could be the Franciscan convent of San Bernardino near Raphael's native city of Urbino.

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