The tiny fruitwood panel of the “Madonna dei Garofani” in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland had long been considered merely one of the innumerable copies after a lost Raphael original, (it hung in a minor corridor at the Duke’s home in northern England, Alnwick Castle). It has now been cleaned by Herbert Lank, revealing a painting of very high quality in perfect condition and the current consensus of opinion in the art world is that the work is by Raphael himself, and dates from his later Florentine period, around 1507-1508.
A certain degree of secrecy has surrounded the rediscovery, with the various parties involved unwilling to commit themselves on the sequence of events linking Sotheby’s attribution and probate valuation, and the decision by Nicholas Penny, Clore Curator of Renaissance Painting at London’s National Gallery, as to authorship. The only person apparently willing to comment on the picture in the London art world has been Francis Russell of Christie’s, who says that its quality is superlative, and comments that it shows the young Raphael at a time when he was thinking in larger compositional terms while continuing to work on a small scale, resulting in a a picture which is “somewhat over-wrought”.
The picture remained in the Oddi collection in Perugia for 300 years, then passed to Paris in 1836, arriving at Alnwick in the 1850s. The fruitwood base (Raphael normally used poplar) misled nineteenth-century scholars into considering it a studio work, and Berenson published it as by Giulio Romano.
The new dating makes it contemporary with some of Raphael’s greatest three-quarter-length Madonnas, such as the Bridgewater Madonna (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland) and the Madonna Tempi (Munich, Alte Pinakothek). Its composition ultimately derives from Leonardo da Vinci’s “Madonna Benois” in the Hermitage, painted a generation earlier. Inspection with infra-red light has revealed an underdrawing which is certainly Raphael’s. Its authenticity is accepted both by Professor John Shearman of Harvard University, among the leading experts on Raphael, and by Nicholas Penny. Penny was responsible for reaffirming the old attribution to Raphael, still borne by the nineteenth-century frame in which it hung at Alnwick Castle; he will publish his research on the painting in the February issue of The Burlington Magazine, coincidentally with the work going on display at the National Gallery on 10 February.
Sotheby’s points out that the figure of £20 million quoted by the national press as the possible value of the picture was in fact merely the figure suggested by Sotheby’s to provide national indemnity while it was at the National Gallery for cleaning, inspection and, eventually, exhibition, and bears no relationship to its present value at auction.
With the recent sale by the Duke of Northumberland of his thirteenth-century “Northumberland Bestiary” at Sotheby’s for £2,970,000 (29 November 1990) the question of the possible forthcoming availability of this picture might be seen as delicate.
If the Minister for the Arts goes ahead with his proposed list of works of art which cannot leave the country, cave the Duke—the new Raphael may be Number One!
