An Intimate Show of Raphael’s Madonnas in Berlin Kicks Off a Year of Blockbusters Commemorating the 500th Anniversary of the Artist’s Death

In a rare reunion, seven of Raphael’s Madonnas are coming
together under one roof at Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, which kicks of
a series of shows next year dedicated to the Italian Renaissance
master on the 500th anniversary of his death. Coincidentally,
Raphael died just one year after Leonardo da Vinci, whose 500th
anniversary has been celebrated throughout the world this past
year.

There will be shows for Raphael in Rome, Milan, and London,
following the Berlin exhibition, which opens to the public
tomorrow. The Gemäldegalerie, which is part of the Berlin
state collections, already touts a muscular collection of works by
Raphael, including five paintings of the Virgin Mary with child,
which are rarely seen together. Each of the Madonnas date to
the beginning of the 16th century.

For the exhibition, the museum also secured a significant loan
of another Madonna that is also one of Raphael’s most famous
works: The Madonna of the Pinks. The oil painting
shows Mary with her young son seated on her lap, both holding
delicate carnations. It is on loan from London’s National Gallery
for the first time.

“The show gives a precise view on Raphael before he became the
star artist at the Vatican,” says the director of the
Gemäldegalerie, Michael Eissenhauer, in a statement. The small
exhibition, which concentrates on young Raphael, offers a taste of
two larger shows to come in early 2020. On January 14, the museum
will open a show of etchings by the 18th-century
artist Johannes Riepenhausen, who documented Raphael’s life.
Then, on February 28, the Kupferstichkabinett, another Berlin
state institution, will display its collection of Raphael
masterpieces, which includes rarely shown drawings by the artist as
well as some of his students.

Raphael was born in 1483 in Urbino, Italy, and died suddenly of
mysterious causes in Rome at age 37. Some historic Romans,
including the writer Giorgio Vasari, saw Raphael as a “divine”
artist because of the popular belief that he was born and died on
Good Friday (some dispute his birth date), and for his prolific
career that included religious portraiture.

Following the shows in Germany, Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale
will open an exhibition dedicated to Raphael on March 5 in
collaboration with the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence, which is
lending works for the exhibition. Another major venue will be
the Ambrosiana in Milan, where Raphael is a permanent resident
by way of his large-scale fresco The School of
Athens from 1509. London’s National Gallery will
open a major show dedicated to the artist (it owns 11 Raphael
paintings) on October 3, 2020. For this season-ender, the National
Gallery is procuring loans from the Louvre, the Vatican Museums,
the Uffizi Gallery, and the Museo Nacional del Prado.

“Raphael in Berlin. The Madonnas of the Gemäldegalerie” is
on view December 13 through April 26, 2020.

The post An Intimate Show of Raphael’s Madonnas in Berlin
Kicks Off a Year of Blockbusters Commemorating the 500th
Anniversary of the Artist’s Death appeared first on artnet
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