Madonna della Vallicella

A young Rubens in Rome painted a high altar, saw the light glare on his canvas, and started again on stone. Behind his painting hides an ancient miraculous icon, revealed by pulleys and cords.

The story behind the painting

The Madonna della Vallicella was painted between 1606 and 1608 for the high altar of Santa Maria in Vallicella in Rome, also called the Chiesa Nuova, the New Church. Wikidata gives 1606, the start of the work. It was Rubens's second confirmed commission in Rome, after a lost cycle for Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. His first version, on canvas, is known as Saint Gregory with Saints, but it must not have satisfied the clients because of how light glared on its surface. So Rubens painted a new version on a slab of slate, a material that reflects light differently and removed the problem. The work is about 425 by 250 cm.

What to look for

The church takes its name from an ancient miraculous icon, the Madonna vallicelliana, of the Nicopeia, bringer of victory, or Kyriotissa, enthroned, type. Rubens reconstructed this image surrounded by concentric circles of adoring angels and cherubs. On a copper plate set over it he painted another Madonna, with the Baby Jesus giving a blessing, mirroring the sacred icon beneath. The plate can be raised with a mechanism of pulleys and cords. In the central panel, space seems to spread beyond the frame, a common theme in Baroque painting. Look also at the side walls, where two more slate panels complete the ensemble.

Meaning and intent

In the altar niche the Madonna forms a triptych with two other paintings on slate: Pope Gregory I with Papias and Maurus on the left, and Saints Domitilla, Nereus and Achilleus on the right. The church also owns relics of the saints shown, so the painted figures stand near their own remains. Rubens set the two side paintings away from the central altar and turned them toward the Madonna, so the devotional gazes of Gregory and Domitilla lead the worshipper toward the altar. The arrangement may reflect Annibale Carracci's composition for the Salviati Chapel at San Gregorio Magno al Celio, made only a few years before.

Legacy

The paintings of the Chiesa Nuova are the only works Rubens made in Rome that remain in their original places. Elsewhere, his Roman pictures have moved, but here visitors can still see the whole scheme as he planned it, with the hidden icon, the movable copper plate and the angled side panels. The rejected first canvas had its own afterlife. According to the source on van Dyck's Madonna del Rosario, Rubens took it back to Antwerp, where his pupil Anthony van Dyck could see it, and its Saint Domitilla seems to echo in van Dyck's later Saint Olivia in Palermo.