Madonna with Beardless Saint Joseph

The Madonna with Beardless Saint Joseph is an early work by Raphael, dated to around 1506 and painted in tempera. It shows the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child and Saint Joseph, who here appears without a beard, a detail that gives the painting its name. Its small format suits the private devotional images common at the time. The picture is usually thought to belong to a group of small Madonnas that Raphael painted for Guidobaldo da Montefeltro during one of his brief stays in Urbino between 1505 and 1506, a city where Giorgio Vasari saw them. This connection is probable but not conclusively documented. The earliest definite record of the painting dates to the eighteenth century, when it was probably in the collection of the Duke of Angouleme in Paris. It then passed to the collection of Pierre Crozat, which Empress Catherine the Great of Russia bought almost entirely in 1772. That holding formed the core of what became the Hermitage Museum, where the painting is now kept. Early in the nineteenth century the work was restored, and this episode gave Alexander Pushkin a reason to mention it in his poem Renaissance and in Mozart and Salieri, where Salieri says the Madonna by Raphael is stained for him. The reference is literary rather than a technical judgement. More recently, the National Gallery requested the loan of the painting for its 2020 exhibition marking the five-hundredth anniversary of the artist's death. The pandemic delayed the project until 2022, and permission for the loan was withdrawn that year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Painter

Raphael

Date

1506

Medium

tempera

Dimensions

72 × 56 cm

Museum

Crozat Collection

Movement

High Renaissance

Genre

religious art

Depicts

boy, Mary, woman, mother, Christ Child

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