How can Raphael's Madonnas be reframed?

After visiting Raphael: Sublime Poetry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Caro Fowler emerged with a transformed understanding of Raphael. In this episode, she speaks with curator Carmen Bambach about the exhibition’s moving reframing of Raphael’s Madonna and Child paintings through the lens of maternal and infant mortality in Renaissance Italy. Together they explore the role of biography in art history, Raphael’s extraordinary drawings, and what becomes visible when we take the female body seriously—not as an object of desire, but as a force that makes life, art, and the world itself. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:12

Hello and welcome to Iconoclast Art History with Carol. I went to see the Raphael exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sublime Poetry, and I very unexpectedly emerged from it with a transformed understanding of Raphael. And this is this is just to say that one doesn't always expect to go to a monographic exhibition of an artist whom they feel they know somewhat well and to emerge from it with a fundamentally changed viewpoint of the artist. And this transformation for me happened within one gallery that frames some of his most ubiquitous paintings, the paintings of Madonna and Child. Large, often circular works known as Attondo, works that are in crisp, somewhat sugary tones of muscular Madonnas. And I saw these works anew because of the way in which they were framed. And so I was stopped in the exhibition by a work not by Raphael, but a work that led up to the framing of these paintings, a work that was attributed to the workshop of Verrocchio of a woman dying and childbirth. So this is a sculptural relief, and it was commissioned by the husband of the woman dying in childbirth, Francesca Pete Tornobuoni. It was commissioned by her husband from the workshop of Verocchio after she died, and it lays out in a narrative frieze drawing on the tradition of the battle scene, of the hero dying in battle. It lays out in this narrative frieze the death of his wife in childbirth and the accompanying stillbirth of their infant son. As the label acknowledged, it was exceedingly rare for a husband to commission such a burial monument and such a stark memorial in stone to profound grief as the woman hunches over on her deathbed while the dead infant is displayed to the viewers and family members. This incredibly moving scene was accompanied by a book of wax, which contained the registers for the wax purchase after Raphael's own mother and baby sister died in childbirth. So this is wax candles that would have been used at their funeral liturgies and burials. And there was also a medical treatise demonstrating the complete absence of knowledge of female anatomy at this time. As the exhibition asked us to hold all of this knowledge and imagery in our minds as we moved into the next room to consider the Madonna and Child images, I began to see them differently. And suddenly what was cold and saccharine to me within these Madonna and Child paintings became distant in a really fascinating way. It was a distance that for me articulated the complicated psychological force that it requires to bring a life into this world and to take care of that life. They were no longer soft and tender to me, and again, to use that overuse word saccharine, but suddenly I saw them as fierce and overflowing with bodily presence so as to accentuate the actual force of the female body as the maker and holder of this world, both this material world, both this fallen world, and also within the Christological world, um Christ as well. So their distance for the first time for me seemed to come out of a meditation about the requirements of maternal love, the sacrifices of maternal love itself, and the kinds of the demands it makes on both the body and psyche of the maternal figure. As Freud once stated, the womb is the only place where everyone once lived. And I would also say that for me, this exhibition resonated as I've been thinking a lot about recently the difficulty of art history as a discipline to take seriously the presence of women and the complications of our reproductive body within the discipline of art history. That's another episode for what I've been thinking about that. But in any case, this episode is about Raphael and Carmen Bombach, the curator of the exhibition. And so I have the honor of talking with Carmen Baumbach about these curatorial decisions and how, as art historians, what might happen if we start taking more seriously the female body not as an object of desire or sex, but as the making of art, of life, of the world itself. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Carmen.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

Thank you. It's such a pleasure to have to be part of this program, Caroline. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 5:19

I am particularly invested in the ways in which you framed Raphael's Madonna's and Child paintings, which I found really it changed how I understood and thought about them, which I think is ideally what every exhibition should do, especially of a major artist. But that is something that is in fact often not achieved. So we are gonna get there to talk about that wonderful room that you did to introduce his Madonna and Child paintings. But I would first love to just talk to you about how you think about exhibitions and how you understand the space of an exhibition as distinct from, say, a book or an article, and what you understand that exhibitions can do that maybe other forms of argumentation can't do.

SPEAKER_00 6:04

I think an exhibition is first of all a visual medium and a visual medium with which one can also tell a story. And in the case of Raphael, it was all about recreating a sense of journey for him to show the growth of the artist and his social historical context and have a sense that we are looking over the shoulder of the artist and providing the glimpse as he creates the imagery, as he evolves, as he thinks. And probably the aspect that most really appeals to me is the ability to be able to communicate his personality and show how the biography of the artist does have a place in the way that we consider him historically. It's that has not always been, say, uh lens with which to look at, especially an Italian Renaissance artist, it's not been always popular, but I feel there's something very deep that can be learned from that exercise. And I think lots of things emerge in the exhibition.

SPEAKER_02 7:16

Well, that'll definitely get to where I want to go because I did think that you introduced the possibility of biography in a really interesting way in relationship to his Madonna and Child paintings, but we'll get there. So in mounting this exhibition on Raphael, I'd love to know what did you want to bring out for your viewers and seeing his work? Maybe it was these biographic aspects, or for you, did you get a different sense of Raphael as the artist than say the Raphael that's famously presented in Fassari? Did you want to bring out a Raphael that you understood slightly differently in terms of his biography and personality than one that might usually be considered in some of the canonical studies or histories of Raphael?

SPEAKER_00 7:58

One of the elements of Raphael's work that I very much focused on is his drawings, because in the exhibition we have 142 drawings by Raphael, which I believe give us the insight into his creativity, into his ability to think very large, and we see his discipline as an artist, his ability to work very hard in developing ideas. And actually his artistic courage in understanding when, despite the amount of artistic labor he has put into developing, say, one design concept for a composition, that when he sees it no longer serves him after an enormous amount of work, he's willing to chuck it and start anew. This is not something that we see with many other artists. For Raphael, this period of experimentation is really important. And the way he searches is through drawing afterlife, the models, and also thinking in a very with very concerned with geometry, harmony expressed in geometry, also perspective. So there is a confluence. I mean, the technical virtuosity of the artist has been really the primary element to even want to do an exhibition about Raphael. And I think we see this best in the drawings. And then when we approach the paintings, we can see that the results that we are presented with are just as it as the public justly always agrees, they are technically perfect. But that is the result of a tremendously long process of hard work experimenting and searching. Because in many cases, the technical perfection of Raphael's paintings did lead a generation of probably a public and historians later in the 19th century and 20th century to say Raphael is just too perfect, he is too harmonious, and everything seems to look too easily put together. Well, the drawings really tell us a very different truth.

SPEAKER_02 10:17

That's beautiful. I mean, I would say Raphael as an artist often leaves me a little cold in his paintings, but as a draftsman, I've always been drawn to his drawings. So what you're saying right now about using drawings as a way to demonstrate the labor and difficulty and discipline that he had in his practice is an interesting frame for thinking about those paintings.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

The other element I would say is that the drawings bring out the great humanity of Raphael as an artist, because the exhibition begins with a presumed self-portrait of the artist at 17 that already shows a tremendous psychological presence that is communicated through the gaze of the figure, but tremendous empathy for the viewer. And it's interesting because this becomes something that is a leitmotif for his entire career. This profound awareness of the viewer, but in an empathetic sense. And when we look also at his drawings, we see the humanity of his models or almost portrait-like identity of the models, and then they are per transformed into these perfect beings that are apostles or saints or mythological creatures.

SPEAKER_02 11:38

Well, your point is so well taken for the impact that his studies of the Acts of the Apostles would ultimately have, those facial studies that they would have within, say, 18th century British art theory and the developing of the academy there, and really thinking about him as an empathetic artist who thought a lot about faces and seeing that impact throughout artistic academies and drawing practice.

SPEAKER_00 12:00

And which is really inter and what is really interesting is that he was in love with life drawing, drawing after the living model. And I think that that is again one of the building blocks of his entire powers as a narrative painter, and the ability to communicate through the body and gesture this tremendous sense of animation because motion is very important in his narrative compositions. It's always about action that is in the process of happening. So it is really the most climactic moment. But for that, to deliver that in a credible way, he has studied the figures after the poses in the most dramatic sense and in a very physical sense.

SPEAKER_02 12:52

Yeah, and also really thinking about those internal machinations of the self, right? And how they're revealed on the surface in very minute ways.

SPEAKER_00 13:00

And this is something that he absorbs also from Leonardo, the whole conceptualization of the motions of the mind, the motions of the soul, which are the activating elements of gesture and physical expression, which is really quite extraordinary. And I think this is one of the major reasons that Raphael's compositions and the figures individually have a tremendous psychological energy that is communicated. And I think that is really the product of this profoundly empathetic soul, but also of extraordinary cogitation. I mean, he has really thought very carefully about where the viewer is in the act of viewing and how one connects as a painter with the viewer.

SPEAKER_02 13:55

Yeah, that's interesting. So I think that sets us up nicely for discussing what I really wanted to gather with you and talk about, which is your framing of Raphael's Madonnas, which, as I said, I thought it was really powerful and it transformed how I saw them. And they are images that have really overtaken our culture in a way that it was difficult, I think, to frame them in a way that we could see them anew. So you set them up with this room preceding the main gallery in which you have so many of those tondos and studies and others. But you use essentially for me three objects that I found really fascinating: the Verochia workshop relief of Francesca Pito Torno Buoni dying in childbirth, an object called a book of wax, and a 15th-century treatise of medicine with illustrations of female anatomy. And so I'm hoping that you can take us through each of these works and discussed the work that you wanted each of these objects to do within the exhibition. And perhaps we could start with the Verocchio relief, which is actually, for me, it was one of the most powerful works in the entire exhibition.

SPEAKER_00 15:02

I am so thrilled that you feel that way. I felt that a message is always best delivered with a very powerful work of art. And so in that case, we see this very long marble relief that is a continuous narrative that seems to move from right to left. So, and at on the right, we have Francesca Pitti Tornabuoni already being held up by the mourners on his her the deathbed. And we see the mourners in different stages of grief, which are really quite extraordinary, each individual figure, one tearing her hair out, the others sort of more quietly mourning, one seated at the bed, at the foot of the bed, in a typical classical stance of a mourning figure. And then on the lower right corner is a nursemaid holding the baby, which is baby is already swaddled. And so as we move to the stillborn, correct? Yes, but let's let's not get ourselves too far into this. And then on the left, we have another group of figures, and they are around Giovanni Tornabuoni, the husband of Francesca Tornabuoni. It's a very faithful portrait of Giovanni Tornabuoni, who is a historical figure. He was the uncle of Lorenzo de' Medici. And so another elderly nursemaid is showing him the baby now, and he is seen with already in a state of grief looking, and he's surrounded by family and friends. So we actually know everything about this particular event because Giovanni Tornabuoni writes to his nephew Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1477 and he says, Yesterday, yesterday, Francesca, my wife, died, and she, after 22 hours of labor, she died. The child was rested out of her womb through cesarean section, and the baby is born dead, and it was his firstborn son. So this is extremely important for Florentine noble family. It's a firstborn, so he says, My grief was therefore doubled by the loss of my wife and the loss of my infant son. So, and I would say that the relief is so powerful in the way that it communicates the historical event. And of course, the event is idealized in uh in a certain sense because the style of it is like an ancient Roman relief, but it states perfectly well the pathos and the different stages of grief that is felt in this really extraordinary sculpture. The relief would have was actually part of the tomb of Francesca Pitti Tornabuoni in the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome. So there's something very human and very just unforgettable. It is a very, very rare representation of a woman, if not unique, representation of a woman dying in childbirth. So for me, what felt really important again is that even the consonance of Verocchio's style, ancient Roman classical, is within the vocabulary of what Raphael will be interested in later. And obviously, this is a few decades before Raphael's interest. But it seemed to me so important to be able to think about this reality of the extraordinary high mortality, just devastatingly high mortality rate of women of childbearing age, which is almost often said to be statistically to be about two-thirds of women of that age, of that sort of cohort. And of course, we know children do not live to adulthood. And so this took us then to the biography of the artist himself, and in this book of wax, which is an account book of the expenditures of these wax, which are used for candles and expensive material, and it's used primarily in funerals and in burials. And so there we have this account book from the convent of San Francesco in Urbino. And this account book has the entries for the Magia Charla, Rafael's mother, two entries, one which I was able to interpret. The one entry is probably for the funeral, so the expenditures of candles for the funeral, and then the second one was for the expenditures for the burial for Magia Charla, who dies in September of 1491. Then you turn the page over in that account book, and there is the entry for the baby sister who dies of Raphael. And there the entry it says Mesa in casa, so meaning put in a coffin. So for this baby girl who dies a few days later, she's just buried. And so it was one way of establishing that Raphael's mother dies from childbirth complications when Raphael is eight years old. And this account book is really interesting because it records the deaths or funerals and burials of several members of Raphael's family. And so it's quite a precious account book to have as a biographical document, because in Urbino, unlike in the tradition of in Tuscany, where we have Libri di Familia, so books of the family, where everything about the family is recorded, where, for instance, Leonardo or Michelangelo, we know the date that they were born, the hour of the day where they were born, then we know everything about their baptism, where and when, and then the names of all the godparents. Well, in Urbino, we do not have something like that. And so the record, the ways of record keeping really are sort of in the favor of contracts, so dowries, contracts of property, and all that. And then this precious book of wax, a libro dellecere, which happens to be about death. The other thing that was interesting in my study of this account book, because although the entries had been transcribed already in 1829, historians and scholars kept transcribing Describing only the entries about Raphael's mother and one or two about the family. And what was really interesting, they were divorced from the actual context of this libro de Lecere, which was much more than just an account book. And in fact, it was a notebook that was later put together from two notebooks, rebound. And so the actual notebook where all the Raphael information is stops in 1499. If it had continued, we might also have had a document about Raphael's, a register of Raphael's other circumstances, possibly even an indication of his death, which we do not have otherwise, unless we have letters, you know, by contemporaries in Rome. So it was really important to kind of get into the framework of what this book was really actually about, and to really try to capture this social historical context, the reality, the shocking reality, and that anatomical book attributed to Johannes Getham is published in Venice in 1491, the year that Raphael's mother dies. There is this kind of little confluence of three objects that all of a sudden create a different setting in order to be able to present the imagery of the Madonna and Child by Raphael as what is essentially an aspirational ideal. The Madonna's that are kind of half-length, which is the majority of those that are in that room of the great Madonnas, went into the homes of the Florentine gentry. So they are private commissions. So they provide this ideal of health, of beauty, of innocence, playfulness that is so completely contrary to the actual social reality, and they become kind of beacons of hope in a society that was too accustomed to premature death.

SPEAKER_02 24:13

Yeah. I have two questions from that. One is it seems, and this gets back to your early point about biography. I'm curious to what extent you were thinking about framing about the ways in which inserting the loss of Raphael's mother at age eight, it subtly provides a framework or a lens by which to think about his continual meditation on the figure of the Madonna as mother. And I would just love to hear more about because as you said earlier, biography can be quite controversial in and thinking about an artist and their work, and obviously there's a whole history of Madonna and child painting, so it's unique to Raphael. But but one saw it in a different way. And I will say for me, what came out in seeing it is the Madonnas, which to me have always left me a little cold in the paintings. For the first time I saw them as fascinating figures of force and strength, as a meditation on what it requires to be a mother, and that being a mother is not necessarily tenderness, generosity, and grace, but that the maternal figure is a figure necessity of force and strength. Exactly. Um, and so I would just love to hear more about your thoughts on the ways in which including the Book of Wax engages with biography in a way that is sometimes controversial in art history.

SPEAKER_00 25:39

I felt that it is really important as a historian, and and I am a historian that's very tied to documentary evidence, perhaps even to a fault. So had we not had the Book of Wax, even though I have always understood and believed that high mortality was a very important element of this society, that I would not have felt confident enough, or that I was overstepping perhaps in some way historical method. If I had not had that evidence, I would not have been prepared to make that argument. And I think that what often sort of emerges in the imagery of the Madonna, and especially the drawings of the Madonna and child, is this tremendous humanity because in many ways it sort of goes beyond the perfection of the muse-like beautiful woman. But it is really about this humanity and the tenderness. And I have also noted that Raphael is reinventing the Madonna or the mother of tenderness, because in the Byzantine period, already from the 13th century, there had been the tradition of the Madonna Eleusa, so the Madonna of Pity and tenderness. But at that point, we're talking about an iconographic symbol almost. And yes, people like Desiderio da Cetignano and Luca della Robia and Donatello, they all produced imagery of the Madonna of tenderness. What I have tried to do with in the case of Rafael and the paintings and the drawings is that he seems to go a step further because the humanity of them, through this magical way of painting with color, with the harmonies of colors, a beautiful command of the technical execution of flesh passages and all that, that he really brings them alive. And that there is this sense that we have almost he has made the unreal in many ways, very real and very human. And I maintain that for the next generation of art historians, it should be impossible for them to unsee this contrast of the ideal of the Madonna and child in Raphael's paintings and drawings, and they would not be able to unsee the fact that they are an aspirational ideal, a beacon of hope in private homes, were basically because a lot of these Madonna are given as also as marriage or engagement gifts or to recently married uh couples, sort of as an aspiration of health at a time when there is such sorrow in losing children and losing mothers.

SPEAKER_02 28:51

Well, it's interesting too. I'd I would love to hear your thoughts because one thing that struck me is that there is also a difference in the way that he thinks about the Madonna and child in drawings versus in painting. I would say that in drawings, he allows a greater tenderness and he allows a greater softness between the two. And then when he translates that into paintings, he's more interested in conveying. To me, what was interesting in the paintings is that he actually conveys a certain physical distance between or psychological difference between the Madonna and child. So while the child might be sitting on the lap or playing with her, she remains somewhat psychologically distant from the child. And I found that fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 29:33

Yes. And it's interesting because Raphael, whose mind never stops in creating and inventing imagery, what the drawings and even drawings of just models in life drawings, they do have a kind of identity of the model. It's always portrait-like, and you sense the personhood of the model who is in front of him paintings. And I'm thinking of several that are in the exhibition. There is that contrast between the playful, innocently playful child and the Madonna who is more somber. And there the religious meaning sort of kicks in because the Madonna, in many ways, is in her gaze that's somewhat melancholy, is actually foreshadowing what will happen to the child when he grows up. So again, I mean, Raphael sort of creates these alchemies of meaning and effect. Yes, there is all the tenderness, but he also does not lose sight of the maybe the religious function of the image in the painting. And it is interesting that he is always negotiating that space between the holy remoteness, because really, when he does even apostles, we can take the drawings for the transfiguration, the studies on paper for the apostles of the transfiguration. We see all of those young or older men who are the models this profoundly human way. Yeah, that's true. And then they are stylized beyond recognition, and they become apostles, they become almost really just symbols that way.

SPEAKER_02 31:16

That's so true. And so I would love to know. Obviously, you're your foremost scholar of Italian art, you've been thinking about Raphael for a very long time. But in the course of an exhibition and researching and mounting and thinking with the works, your understanding changes. So, I mean, we've already talked about it a little bit, but perhaps to kind of draw many of these points to a close. What were you surprised by how much your understanding of Raphael's Madonna's changed over the course of this exhibition? Was this a part of the exhibition that you were looking forward to working on, or were you concerned about it because they are so widely reproduced? How did your relationship to this material change over the course of the of creating this exhibition?

SPEAKER_00 32:00

Well, probably let's say that the real challenge or the call to arm myself with my argument came when one of our really beloved supporters of the museum said, and we were just this was like three years before the exhibition opened, and he says to me, I'm not sure what to think of Raphael, and he did all those Madonnas. I hope you're not going to put a row of Madonnas in the exhibition. And I said, uh his first name, I said, but you have to wait and see what is a way of reframing them again to see meaning in this imagery. Because it's true that the replication of these Madonnas, especially in the Victorian age, kind of eroded the importance of these Madonnas. And yes, it looked too sacrine and sweet. So, yes, it was my sort of great moment where I felt that I needed to really articulate it. It did take a leap of faith in deciding to bring Verrocchio's marble relief because I said to myself, I'm not just going to write this on a chat in the exhibition, words read in something. No, this has to be impactful. And so I reached out to the one image that for me has always signified this reality, in a sense, about the society of the time, sort of went at it. And then when it became clear that there was this account book with all this information about the funeral and death of Raphael's family, I said, I need to have this object. I need to see it and I need to bring it to the exhibition. From the point of view of red tape, it was the most difficult of the loans to get to the museum's exhibition. And I would not budge because it felt so important. And it was having the object in my hands, and believe me, the quest was to find it in the archive of the convent of San Francesco because the scholars who had been writing about it did not ever publish a shelf number, a call number. So I'm pretty certain they never had seen the actual manuscript. And when I had it in my hands and started leaping through it and realizing what it actually contained about the family of Raphael, I was really so moved. And that's why it was push, push, push through all their different layers of red tape to get it. Because it's never been outside the convent of San Francesco and Urbino. And it seemed to me we need to reinsert all this into the literature on Raphael. Um that was so precious.

SPEAKER_02 35:00

Yeah. That's amazing. And so I would be curious to know after all this work and careful framing. My casual observation has been that the critical response hasn't picked up this room as much as some of other parts of the exhibition. Although a friend of mine told me that Isabella Rossellini was a huge fan of this room and that she posted about it on social media, which I thought is a major win for anyone. Yes. But I would love to know has anyone come to you? Has there been programming around it? Have you received a response from the larger public at the Met in response to this particular installation?

SPEAKER_00 35:39

Enormous, enormous, enormous responses, and both from scholars, from students, from general public. And there have been also cases where people have wept. Because it is really a very visually impactful kind of room and trying to re think about this. So huge numbers of appreciation. One reviewer in a scholarly journal thought the room was unnecessary. But what I would say there is clearly this person did not or had never seen actually the account book of Raphael's family, the death, and most importantly, is from an older generation. And let me just say this: a man perhaps not accustomed to thinking from a feminist perspective, or actually from a woman's perspective, motherhood, childbirth has got to be the biggest event a woman has, at least physically, let's say, and even leaving aside anything. So if you haven't gone through it and are a guy, and I don't have children, but the level of empathy I feel is different. But there were many, many men who actually also said how incredibly moved they were by that room, and also commented about the fact that they have not ever read or seen an interpretation of Madonna imagery from this point of view, and certainly not about Raphael's Madonnas. So, yes, that was a leap of faith. It was a tremendous intellectual risk, but I feel that it was a really it it has moved people, and that really is the point.

SPEAKER_02 37:28

Yeah, I found it incredibly moving. So, final question that I try and ask everyone is there anything you're particularly enjoying right now that is outside of work? So anything that you're reading, that you're watching, that you're doing in the world that has nothing to do with Raphael or the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

SPEAKER_00 37:46

No, right now it's all Raphael full blast. Because I will tell you, my once the exhibition was hung, I have probably given at least 300 guided visits, lots of talks, many formal lectures. So actually, it the work of the curator is in full blast throughout the run of the exhibition.

SPEAKER_02 38:12

Do you have plans for the summer? What are you gonna do after it closes?

SPEAKER_00 38:15

I will take a vacation. I am planning to go to Sicily and be with friends at a beach house in Agrigento in Sicily. So that's really the plan. And then in the fall, I will also take time off and sort of really think um about further ideas.

SPEAKER_02 38:32

As my husband likes to say, you've done three out of the four Ninja Turtles: Michelangelo, Rafael, and Leonardo. And so I won't ask if you're doing a Donatello exhibition, but do you have a dream exhibition that you're hoping to turn to in the back of your mind?

SPEAKER_00 38:49

No, no, I and I will, and I know that it would be something that would really, again, I am more and more invested in sort of recovering the deeper meaning of works of art, and whether they're secular subjects or religious subjects, but for the Italian Renaissance, and I feel very privileged that I have worked on those three major artists, also from a very deep dive sort of point of view, and it's been interesting to be completely immersed in that culture. So whatever I do next will be again coming back to that very charged moment in the Italian Renaissance.

SPEAKER_02 39:29

Yeah. Well, it's great, it's a gift for art history. There's still so much work to do on that period and to think with. Yes. It's such an interesting challenge to present it in a new way so the audience sees it differently. Well, thank you very much, Carmen. Thank you.edu. And we'll have a couple more episodes, and then the season is going to close out for the rest of summer, and we'll see you again in the fall. Please do feel free to like or subscribe. Thanks so much. Bye.