Colonna Madonna

The Madonna Colonna is a painting from the late Florentine time of Raphael.

The reading Maria with the child is referred to by its previous owner as Madonna Colonna. It has been painted at the end of Raphael's stay in Florence and is fully consistent with his then style. The Madonna Colonna is a stage of a digitally created image composition, enacted by Raphael in various forms and of those with the Bridgewater Madonna in Edinburgh ( National Gallery of Scotland ) and the Madonna d' Orléans in Chantilly ( Musée Condé ) present more examples.

An early preliminary study is on a drawing in London ( The British Museum ), on which also a sketch for Bridgewater Madonna is seen. Two more drawings in Vienna ( Albertina ) show a further development of the two compositions.

There have been repeated attempts to identify the Madonna Colonna with a mentioned by Vasari Madonna, who has been begun by Raphael and completed by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio. This assumption is now rejected by most researchers who suggest that Vasari rather sogannannte La belle jardinière said today in Paris (Louvre) is located.

The image was successively in the collections of Salviati and the Collezione Duchessa Maria Colonna Lante della Rovere, before it was purchased in 1827 by the Prussian state for the Royal Museum in Berlin. Although the authorship of Raphael is undisputed that employees of an assistant is suspected in the execution since the 19th century by individual researchers over and over again.

The image was consistently exhibited by the acquisition by the Royal Museum until 1939. After that, it was outsourced in the Friedrichshain flak tower. When the hostilities of World War II ever approached Berlin, the image has been outsourced in the spring of 1945 in the potash mine Kaiseroda - flag in Thuringia, where it fell into the hands of the Americans. This made ​​it to the General Art Collecting Point in Wiesbaden. Finally, in 1956 it returned to Berlin, where it was issued from 1956 to 1997 permanently in the Dahlem Museum. Since 1998 it is shown in the new art gallery at the Cultural Forum in Berlin.