Day 6 of Mornings with Mary.

These Mornings with Mary hosted by Rebecca has been a different but refreshing and very appropriate one for me during these first days of December.

Not religion just a recognition that Mary, the mother of Jesus was a historical woman who modeled virtues that any woman would want.

Loving, compassionate, forgiving, teaching and painted by every lesser and great masters of their time.

My Mary today is Mary, The Madonna of the Candelabra

by

Raphael

As all my regular readers know I wrote about the unveiling of this, the 2011 Christmas stamp, in our town at the Campus of Nazareth, the first time it has ever been done outside of New York City.

In honor of the Sisters of Charity bicentennial in 2012 which is a year long celebration.

The stamp was taken from this painting by Rachael omitting the angels on the side.

This info from the program the day of the unveiling tells about Raphael and the history of this painting.

For many years, the U.S. Postal Service has issued
"traditional" Christmas stamps featuring the Madonna and Child. The Christmas stamp for 2011 presents a detail from the painting by Raphael. That work , Madonna of the Candelabra, dates to around 1513.

Admired for his graceful style, Raphael was the youngest of three great master of the Italian High Renaissance (the other two are Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo). He was born Raffaello Sanzio in 1483 in Urbino, a cultural center where he received preliminary instruction in painting from his father, described by the 16th. century writer Giorgio Vasari as an artist "of no great merit."


In adittion to being extravagantly talented, Raphael was good-natured and handsome. As a youth, he was sent to Perugia, where he apprenticed with the master known as Perugino. Surviving documents show that Raphael, too, was being called a "master" well before he reached 20 years of age. In 1504, he went to Florence for further study, drawn by the reputations of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, that city's foremost artists.


Raphael drew on Leonardo's techniques of chiaroscuro (contrast between light and dark) and sfumato (use of soft shading to define forms.) From Michelangelo, he leaned the expressive potential of human anatomy. Most commentators agree that Raphael's work is less intense and lighter in spirit than the work of these masters.


In 1508, Raphael was summoned by Pope Julius II to Rome, where he spent the last dozen years of this short life in an inspired burst of activity. The masterpieces he produced there include the painting reproduced on this stamp, Madonna of the Candelabra, and a series of frescoes in the papal apartments of the Vatican. Perhaps the most famous of these, The School of Athens, portrays Plato and Aristotle surrounded by other philosophers, and links classical philosophy with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. After the death of Julius, Raphael was commissioned by his successor Pope Leo X to design tapestries for the walls of the Sistine Chapel.


In adittion to his commissions from the Vatican, Raphael also painted portraits, including a likeness of his friend Baldassare Castiglione, the noted writer. At the time of his death in 1520, Raphael was in charge of all the papacy's various artistic projects. His funeral mass was held at the Vatican and his body was buried in the Pantheon in Rome.


As a recognized master, Raphael ran a large and active workshop. Assistants certainly painted the angels (not shown on the stamp) flanking the central figures of Mary and the infant Jesus in Madonna of the Candelabra, and possibly other parts, This tondo (circular painting), oil on panel, is now in the collection of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.


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