Raphael (Italian), La belle jardinière (also, Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist), 1507

Raphael (Italian), La belle jardinière (also, Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist), 1507, oil on panel, 48 × 31½ in (122 × 80 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris)

Speakers: Drs. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker

We're in the Louvre and we're looking at a painting by Raphael called

La Belle Jardiniere, and its a lovely Raphael Madonna, and child

with the infant Saint John the Baptist in that pyramid

composition that we often associate with the high Renascence

What's interesting is the virgin Mary is not in a religious enviroment

we see no archway, and she's got no throne

if we argue if she had a throne at all it would be

the throne of nature. She sits on a rock in a field with

a beautiful atmoshphere and persecptive behind her creating this

lovely verdant enviroment. As we look down

at the foreground we see plants and perhaps the edge of

a pond, and little flowers, the loveliest passages to me are

the way that Christ on the left, stands on his mother's

foot, really showing that kind of dependence on his mother

and yet also a growing sense of independence as he seeks to take the book

out of her hands, and looks up at her.

And of course, the content of that the book foretells his own demise

and it foretells the crucifiction. And the look on Mary's face is one that suggests

that she knows this, she's looking at him in a sense gaged wheter or not

he's ready for that knowledge. She puts her right arm around him protecting him

and, seems to hesitate for a moment with her left hand

whether to allow him to take that book, or not.

Same with John the Baptist who kneels in prayer towards Christ

is on-- a very graceful pose,he kneels down on his right knee

tilts his neck up, and looks up at Christ. We have that high Renascence gracefulness

and ideal beuaty. Let's look for just a moment at

the gazes in the painting. I think you're right to start with John the Baptist,

and his eyes gazing up at Christ, who in turns body and face moves up to Mary

Mary then returns that gaze and sends our gaze back down

to Christ. So, everyone's gaze is really focused on Christ

And now we're sorta in the middle of that triangle

as we watch them look at each other. And Mary is ideally

beautiful and we have only the faintest outline of a halo

that halo is disappearing as we enter the high Renascence, because

the figures exude a kind of divinity by their ideal beauty.

We don't need that symbol of a halo anymore. And for Raphael, its nature that

takes on that role, no longer that stage props of divinity necessary as you said,

but its the landscape itself, its god's world, that he has created

that is in an expression of divinity, and its beauty itself that is the expression

of divinity here. Mary's beauty, Christ's beauty, and even John's beauty.