Next month, Florence will mount a special exhibition in the Palazzo Medici to celebrate the completed restoration of Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinc. The work took 10 years (see before and after pictures above).
In this painting, as in most of the Madonnas of his Florentine period, Raphael arranged the three figures - Mary, Christ and the young John the Baptist - to fit into a geometrical design. Though the positions of the three bodies are natural, together they form an almost regular triangle.
The Virgin is holding a book, with identifies her as Sedes Sapientiae (”Seat of Wisdom”). The goldfinch is a symbol of Christ’s future violent death because it is a bird that feeds among thorns. One legend has it that a goldfinch plucked out a thorn that was digging painfully into Christ’s brow as he was on his way to be crucified. In the painting, St. John offers the goldfinch to Christ as a warning of his future.
Painted c. 1505-1506, the Madonna was a wedding gift from Raphael to his friend Lorenzo Nasi. Problems with the painting began on On November 17, 1548, when Nasi’s house collapsed in an earthquake and the painting broke into seventeen pieces. It was restored shortly afterwards by a contemporary of Raphael, Ridolfo di Ghirlandaio, who put it back together with nails and painted over to hide the joins, but the damage is still visible (see center photo above).
Eventually the Medici came to own the painting and further harm was done to it by successive attempts to cover up the nails and earthquake damage.
Peter Popham of The Independent recounts the story of the painting’s restoration:
So when Opificio delle Pietre Dure, one of Italy’s state-run picture restoration laboratories, was approached about the possibility of restoring the picture to its original splendour, it approached it with great diffidence. “This patient gave us the most shivers and the most sleepless nights,” Marco Ciatti, head of the paintings department of the lab, told Reuters. “We spent two whole years studying it before deciding whether to go ahead, because with the damage it had suffered in the past – which was clearly visible in the X-rays – a restoration attempt could go wrong.”
In the end they decided to proceed, and the restorer who pulled the short straw was Patrizia Riitano. The painting has been her life for years. “I am just a technician but I probably know this painting almost better than Raphael,” she said. “He looked at it of course, but all these years I have been looking at it through a microscope.” She headed a team of 50 including wood specialists and photography technicians.
The restoration team decided that the larger nails holding the picture together should stay, as removing them risked doing more harm. The grime obscuring the picture’s beautifully balanced golds, reds and blues has been meticulously stripped away.
We’re eternally eager to see the newly restored painting, which the city of Florence says it will welcome home like a prodigal daughter.
