Madonna de Niccolini-Cowper

A playful child reaches for his mother's neckline as if he wants to nurse, and she lets him, the two of them filling the panel against a blue sky. Raphael signed and dated it on the border of her bodice.

The story behind the painting

Wikipedia suggests this may have been the last of Raphael's Florentine paintings before he left for Rome. An inscription on the border of the Madonna's bodice, at centre right, reads MDVIII.R.V.PIN, telling us it was painted in 1508 by Raphael of Urbino. Wikidata gives 1511 instead, so the two sources disagree, and the inscription is the evidence the article relies on. The painting is also called the Large Cowper Madonna, to set it apart from the Small Cowper Madonna, painted a few years earlier. Both bear the names of their former owners.

What to look for

The Virgin and Child fill the panel, which measures about 80.7 by 57.5 cm, and the effect is imposing. Compared with the Small Cowper Madonna, this picture is more complex and the two figures are bound more closely, both in how their bodies are placed and in their intimacy. The Child is full of energy, twisting and reaching up to the top of his mother's dress. Look for the tiny inscription along the edge of her bodice, the signature hidden in the clothing. Behind them, the plain blue sky leaves nothing to distract from the pair.

Meaning and intent

The article links Raphael's gift for natural intimacy to Leonardo da Vinci, and the Child's restless energy to the work of Michelangelo. Here those lessons are joined in an ordinary, tender moment: a baby wanting to be fed, a mother who does not pull away. There is no throne, no saints, no landscape, only closeness. That closeness is what changed from the smaller, earlier Madonna, and it is why this panel is described as more complex even though its subject is so simple.

Legacy

The painting was with the Niccolini family in Florence from 1677 or earlier. The artist Johann Zoffany bought it and sold it to George Clavering-Cowper, 3rd Earl Cowper; the article gives this as after 1772 and about 1775 in one place, and as 1782 and 1785 in another. Zoffany's Tribuna of the Uffizi shows Cowper looking at this very painting as Zoffany offers it. It stayed with the Cowpers at Panshanger for generations, went in 1928 through Duveen Brothers to Andrew W. Mellon, and was given in 1937 to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.