Artist: Raphael (1483-1520)
Title: The Madonna Della Sedia (Madonna Della Seggiola)
Medium: Antique steel engraving on wove paper after the original oil on panel by master engraver Charles Auguste Schuler (French, 1804-1859).
Signature: Signed in the plate.
Dimensions: Image size 7 1/8 x 7 1/8 inches.
Framed Dimensions: Approximately 16 x 16 inches.
Framing: This piece has been professionally matted and framed using all new materials.
The Madonna della seggiola or Madonna della sedia is a Madonna painting by the Italian renaissance artist Raphael, dating to c. 1513-1514 and housed in the Palazzo Pitti collection in Florence. It depicts Mary embracing the child Christ, while the young John the Baptist devoutly watches. Painted during his Roman period, this Madonna does not have the strict geometrical form and linear style of his earlier Florentine treatments of the same subject. Instead, the warmer colors seem to suggest the influence of Titian and Raphael’s rival Sebastiano del Piombo. Ingres greatly admired Raphael and paid tribute to him by including this painting in many of his works, such in the background of as Henri IV playing with his children and Raphael and La Fornarina, on the table in front of the subject in his Portrait of monsieur Rivière, and worked into the carpet in Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne. Johann Zoffany also included this painting along with many others in his 1770s painting of the Tribuna of the Uffizi.
Raphael, Italian in full Raffaello Sanzio or Raffaello Santi was a master painter and architect of the Italian High Renaissance. Raphael is best known for his Madonnas and for his large figure compositions in the Vatican. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur.