Raphael’s Small Cowper Madonna is a rendition of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child which is located in Washington D.C. in the National Gallery of Art. This painting is an oil on panel, and it depicts Mary and Child in an Italian countryside with a church in the background on the right-hand side. Mary, represented as blonde and with fair skin, sits in the front center of the piece wearing a vibrant red dress. There appears to be an exceedingly faint, almost translucent golden halo behind her head. This halo harkens back to the Byzantine technique invoking a sort of anagogic space; however, Raphael invokes this sense of otherworldliness without the typical stiffness and two-dimensionality often found in Byzantine art. Mary holds the baby Christ in her lap, and emotion can be seen in his expression as he glances over her shoulder. This movement and emotion within the piece is another sharp deviance from the previous paradigm of Byzantine art which focused more on religious symbology than on realism of the material world.

Sources Used:

Brown, David Alan. "Raphael's 'Small Cowper Madonna' and 'Madonna of the Meadow': Their Technique and Leonardo Sources." Artibus Et Historiae 4.8 (1983): 9–26. JSTOR. Web. 28 Feb. 2018.

“Small Cowper Madonna.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 18 Feb. 2018. Web. 28 Feb. 2018.

Image Courtesy of Wikipedia, page titled Small Cowper Madonna. Image is Public Domain.