Raphael's Dresden altarpiece, which Steiner read as the supreme Madonna of the West, its greatness resting on a vast cosmic world-conception.
The Sistine Madonna in Anthroposophy is the altarpiece Raphael painted around 1512 for San Sisto in Piacenza, now in Dresden, which Rudolf Steiner read in his 1916-1917 Dornach art-history lectures (GA 292, The History of Art) as the summit of Renaissance Madonna painting. Steiner placed the work at the close of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Roman age whose final flowering it represents. For him the canvas is unthinkable without a vast world-conception standing behind it: Mary bearing the Christ-child forward on the clouds, the boy's grave gaze already open toward a knowing future. The Sistine Madonna thus marks the moment when the human-divine image reaches a perfection the painter's own personality seems to recede behind, the cosmic theme speaking through Raphael rather than from him.
The Sistine Madonna is Raphael's late masterpiece, a Mother and Child carried on cloud and light between Saint Sixtus and Saint Barbara, with two winged boys resting at the lower edge. Steiner returned to it again and again as the picture in which Western painting raised the individual into the universal. In his reading the work is great because something larger than Raphael speaks through it.
In Steiner's Own Words
We shall presently see how very different it is when we consider in this light, say, the personality of Albrecht Dürer. There it is altogether different. But you might also think of the Sistine Madonna, even as we have now spoken of the Madonna della Sedia. Again we should have to say: What is here placed before us interests us, above all, inasmuch as it stands out against the background of a great world-conception. Without this background of a great world-conception, the Sistine Madonna is, indeed, unthinkable.
What it Means Today
Stand before the canvas itself in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, where it has hung since Augustus III of Saxony bought it from the monks of San Sisto in 1754, and Steiner's claim becomes a thing you can test with your own eyes. Raphael painted no throne and no chamber. Mary walks out of a haze that resolves, on long looking, into uncounted small faces, and she carries the child toward the viewer rather than cradling him inward. The boy does not look at his mother. He looks past her, out and ahead, with an expression too grave for an infant. The two cherubs leaning on the parapet, the pair the gift shops have detached and sold a million times over, were Raphael's quiet hinge between the painted heaven and the room where a worshipper once knelt.
What Steiner added to the art-historical record was the reading of this gaze as a threshold. He set the picture at the end of what he called the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the long Greco-Roman age, and argued that such closing moments bring forth a culture's highest work precisely as it passes. The child's forward look, on this account, is the soul turning from an old world of inherited vision toward the coming age of the conscious individual. That is why, for Steiner, the painting cannot be explained by Raphael's skill alone. A whole cosmic conception stands behind it and speaks through a man who, before this theme, seems almost to disappear. Seen this way in Dresden, the Sistine Madonna stops being a sweet devotional image and becomes a record of a turning point in the history of the human soul.
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