The Madonna of the Pinks is the popular title of a work attributed
to the Renaissance master Raphael, painted in Florence in about 1508. The
picture, in oils on wood, is loosely based on a Leonardo da Vinci picture
known as the Benois Madonna, which is found in the Hermitage
museum, St. Petersburg. Raphael's picture shows the Virgin Mary with the infant
Jesus playing on her lap. She is dressed in a grey and yellow dress with a blue
skirt and a small white veil, and Jesus sits naked on a white pillow on her lap. A
window in the top right corner shows some tumbledown buildings, and behind the
Virgin, on the left of the picture, is a curtain in a dull green colour. The
picture takes its name from a bunch of pinks, most of which Mary is holding in
her left hand, and one of which the infant Jesus is holding up to show to his
mother. Jesus looks serious but contented, and very naturalistic, unlike the
child-man image of Eastern icons and earlier western religious art. Mary seems
actually to be laughing. Both, of course, appear as fair-haired white-skinned
caucasians, out of place even in Italy, let alone Palestine; but that's a
characteristic of much art of the period, and we need not blame Raphael. The
execution of the work is masterful, and at less than a foot
square1 the picture may be described as small but
perfectly formed.
The image was a successful and popular one in Raphael's own time, and his studio
produced several copies. The one thought to be the original was in the Italian
Camuccini collection until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Algernon,
Fourth Duke of Northumberland purchased it. At that time a great many Renaissance
works were purchased for private and public collections in Britain, which was then
one of the richest nations in the world. It then hung on the wall of an upstairs
corridor in the family quarters at Alnwick Castle, the Duke's residence, for over
a century. In 1991, Nicholas Penny, a Renaissance art expert then working for
the National Gallery in London, visited the castle to meet the 11th Duke and look
at the major art works housed there, and happened to notice the small, rather dirty
picture labelled 'Raphael' in the corridor. According to Penny's version of events,
his gaze was first attracted by the frame rather than the picture itself, which was
considered to be one of the copies and was not prominently displayed. According to
the present (12th) Duke of Northumberland, the 10th Duke, his father, had always
considered it likely that the work was genuine, and had hung it at an appropriately
well-visited spot in the apartments. In any case, the National Gallery restored the
painting, and were granted a long loan of it by the family. It hung in the National
for over ten years, becoming one of its more celebrated treasures.
In 2002, the J Paul Getty Trust arranged to purchase the picture from the
present Duke for £35 million. Selling a work 'off the wall' of another gallery in
this manner is not unknown, and the Getty has done so before, but it is considered
to be poor taste in museum circles. This has provoked a national outcry in the UK,
and a great deal of controversy which is not yet resolved. A temporary bar has been
placed on the export of the picture, to allow time for the National Gallery to put
together a competing bid. Due to tax concessions offered in such cases, the National
need only raise £29 million to outbid the Getty, but such a sum is still no mean
feat in the present climate of depressed art funding. An unprecedented £20 million
has been tentatively offered as a grant by the Heritage Lottery Fund, but the
expenditure of such a large sum of public money for the benefit of one of the
country's richest men has been is unlikely to be popular in all quarters. In a
letter to The Daily Telegraph published on January 13, 2003, the
Duke defends his action in selling the work by pointing out that the money will be
used not for his personal pleasure, or even for his wife's pet project of laying out
a public formal garden at the castle, but to maintain his estates of farms and
tourist sites which are significant employers in their respective sectors in the
north-east of England. The previous day's Sunday Times had been
implicitly critical of the 111th richest person in Britain seeking to dispose of an
item of national heritage, and had unkindly alluded to the death by accidental drug
overdose of his older brother, the 11th Duke. I at least have difficulty seeing how
a work by an Italian master is an essential part of Britain's national
heritage, but I dislike the Sunday Times' handling of the story,
which seems to be argumentum ad hominem. Nicholas Penny, now a senior
curator at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, has lent his voice to the media
personality, former head of the BBFC, the
First Church Estates Commissioner Andreas Whittam-Smith, has argued that the
Getty, being richer and owning fewer Raphaels, has every right to take the work.
1: 29 x 23 cm