The Sistine Madonna

Commissioned by Pope Julius II for the high altar of the monastery church of San Sisto in Piacenza, the painting was completed around 1512, a period when Raphael was simultaneously at work on the Vatican Stanze frescoes and at the absolute height of his powers as a Renaissance painter. It was one of very few altarpieces he executed entirely in oil on canvas rather than panel, and it remained in Piacenza for more than two centuries before Augustus III of Saxony negotiated its purchase for the Dresden court in 1754, where it became the prized centrepiece of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. The acquisition was considered among the greatest coups of Enlightenment-era collecting. The painting exercised a profound influence on subsequent European sacred art, and the two cherubs at its base have achieved an independent visual life of their own, becoming among the most reproduced details in Western art history. Raphael's sfumato-adjacent modelling of the Virgin's face, his mastery of contrapposto in her stance, and the miraculous illusion that she walks toward the viewer rather than floating in a static altarpiece space mark the work as an unsurpassed achievement within the Renaissance tradition.