I will not have seen the Raphael show before it closes tomorrow. But it wasn’t until twelve days ago, that the loss of this opportunity hit me, when @chrissantamaria posted photos of these freestanding side panels, reunited from a lost triptych.
On the left is Mary Magdalene, on the right, Saint Catherine. The St. Catherine is on loan from the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino. The Magdalene sold last year at Sotheby’s for a mere $3.1 million. The cartoon for this panel is also included in the show, a loan from the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. I’m sure they’re a delight for many.
My interest was piqued and my lament intensified when I saw the backs. Though the frames are different, the verso of each panel is an inscribed roundel set into a variegated field of marble or hardstone. Is it? I mean, it honestly doesn’t even look like the grain of a stone at this point. The Magdalene panel on the left apparently includes a fingerprint, indicating Raphael’s technique of applying or working these painted surfaces by hand.
The trompe l’oeil inscriptions together form one entreaty: “NOS CUM PROLE PIA BENEDICAT VIRGO MARIA [May the Virgin Mary bless us with Her Offspring].”
The Mary Magdalene last sold in 2000 as a Saint Mary of Egypt, and has only one entry in its exhibition history: at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1983. In 1990 it was acquired by “a museum foundation,” and then went to a private New York collection, “probably in 1996.” This seems like information that could be known. Yet while the connoisseurial analysis of Christie’s 2000 lot essay for the Mary panel is extensive, the provenance is literally one guy.
Notably, it is the details of the reverse decoration and the measurement of the panels after both works passed through Christie’s (the St Catherine was sold there in 1991) that confirmed these to be side panels of a small triptych, and not fragments of a single, chopped up picture.
I will not see these versos [versi?] together, which is motivation enough to create facsimile objects of them.
Adequate reproductions of these lesser, minor, backs of the important Raphaels had proved difficult to find. Not for the Magdalene panel, obviously, which was well documented by Sotheby’s, even down to the dimensions of the painted areas vs the panel itself.
The Met’s thumbnail was useless, and the GNDM did not even have a photo of the verso, I thought. In response to my plea for visitor photos of the verso, greg.org hero Brian Hilley tracked down images online; it turns out the Galleria does publish it on their Italian site [though a hi-res image is only offered for the recto.]
The Dürer Facsimile Objects made during the pandemic were conceived as surrogates for the inaccessible and underdocumented elements of these objects. They were time-limited to the moments when these Dürers were locked in empty museums. But seeing these Raphaels together will be impossible beginning on Monday, and for the knowable future. That kind of distorts the model.
Previously, related: Albrecht Dürer Facsimile Objects