The Madonnas Of Leningrad

Marina remembers her teachers in school describing a phenomenon called pentimento. Indigent painters would sometimes reuse canvases, covering over inferior paintings with a coat of pigment and then painting a fresh picture. With time, as the oils aged, the old image might appear ghostlike behind the new.

that he is simply attracted to the book, as toddlers are. But Raphael’s contemporaries would have seen it differently. They would have seen a miracle.”

She describes the Madonna before her, how small she is, how delicately colored, her formal, upright posture, the way her heavily lidded eyes are distant and peaceful. And the way that the child appears to be reading the open prayer book in Mary’s hand.
“Of course, the logical explanation is

The Conestabile Madonna was one of only three paintings that were packed with their frames. Which is too bad for us, because the frame itself was quite beautiful and elaborate.” She describes the frame and then works her way in to the round canvas at the center. “Everything in the painting has been arranged to fit inside the circle,” she says. “The Madonna’s head is slightly inclined”—Marina demonstrates by tucking her chin just so—“and the shore of the lake and the distant mountains curve into the center.”

One wouldn’t notice the halos at first, but they are there, fine as piano wires. It’s almost as though Raphael was saying that what sets them apart from any other family is almost invisible. They might be us.

one of the most prized paintings in the entire Hermitage collection. The painting is called The Holy Family, and it was painted by Raphael.”
Marina gazes at the panel. “I don’t know that I will be able to do it justice,” she admits. “It’s such a wondrous painting because Raphael took these mythical characters, the Virgin Mary and Joseph and the Christ Child, and he reimagined them as real people, an actual family. If they were real, they wouldn’t be gilt and perfect. And so what he came up with was this rather melancholy little family portrait. On one side,” she says, pointing, “we have Mary. She is beautiful but very distant and unaware. And quite apart from her, over here, is Joseph. He’s much older than Mary. He leans on his walking stick and looks almost frail. Between them”—Marina points to the exact center of the blank square—“standing on his mother’s lap, is the Christ Child. He’s a mama’s boy. He is eyeing Joseph fearfully and his arms are reaching out for his mother. Joseph’s expression, I think, is one of resigned disappointment, a father whose child rejects him for the mother.”

At the start of the war, the Raphael Loggias, a glassed arcade with exquisitely detailed frescoes covering every surface, were boarded over from the inside and sandbagged up to the top of the windows. The frescoes were left in place, though, and as they move down the darkened tunnel, fantastic images emerge from the shadows, wavering in the dim light and then receding again. Painted squirrels climb columns decorated with elaborate scrolls of oak leaves. Greek athletes strike poses in medallions on the walls.
“This loggia is five hundred years old. It is an exact copy of the original in the Vatican, which was painted by Raphael and his students. This style of ornamentation was seen in classical Rome and was called grotesques.”
Every surface is crowded with animals and fruits, with real and imaginary creatures—a porcupine, a crow, a unicorn and a satyr, lions’ heads and equestrian mounts and winged angels—an illustrated encyclopedia of the world. The lamplight flickers in water-darkened mirrors, and as they pass, their own images jump out at them. Above, in a succession of vaults, loom sea-dark scenes from the Bible.

Fyt’s still lifes, with their artful arrangements of dead game and glistening fruit.

Snyders Room, calling up in her memory and then reluctantly rejecting canvas after canvas. They are wonderful—enormous market scenes teeming with dizzying heaps of fish and baskets of produce

himself in the picture, but he’s dressed in bright red, from his head to his toes. So our eye is drawn to him rather than to Mary.
“And then our eye moves here, to the center of the painting. Do you see these two smaller figures in the background?” She catches herself, realizing that she is pointing to a blank square, but the boys and their teachers are all completely focused on the spot where she has directed their gaze. “There are two figures, a man and a woman. They are standing outside, past the studio where the artist is painting his model, and they’re gazing away from the viewer at the landscape beyond. They’re posed between two dark pillars that open onto a light-filled landscape. Our eyes follow theirs to the view of the peaceful river. It zigzags through a beautiful medieval city and off into this very soft, luminous horizon.”
She is awed by the vision and doesn’t say anything for a moment. They all stare at the wall in silence.
“So,” she resumes, “the artist was saying to us that this isn’t really about a Madonna. The real miracle is the painting itself, which lifts us and carries us away to this magical world.”