Madonna Sistina

Raphael painted this altarpiece around 1512 to 1513 for a church in Piacenza, San Sisto, and the commission came from Pope Julius II. The Virgin walks toward us out of a haze that, if you look closely, is not cloud at all but hundreds of faint angels' faces. Two figures kneel below her. On the left is Saint Sixtus, the church's patron, whose face is thought to be modelled on the pope's own family, and he points out toward where the congregation once stood. For most of its life the picture stayed in that Italian church, until in 1754 the ruler of Saxony bought it and carried it off to Dresden, where the German Romantics treated it almost as a religious object in itself. Then look at the very bottom edge. Two small winged children lean on a ledge, chins on their hands, gazing up, a bit bored. Raphael added those 2 cherubs late, mainly to steady the composition, and they have long since floated free of the rest. They turn up on postcards and mugs and wrapping paper far from the solemn Madonna above them, who most people looking at them have never seen.