Study for the Kneeling Infant St John

Author: Albert Elen

This small drawing is universally accepted as an autograph work by Raphael. It has been attributed to him since it was first published by Passavant in 1860. It is the smallest of three surviving preliminary studies for Raphael’s famous tondo The Alba Madonna, now in Washington (fig.).^[1] The painting shows the Virgin seated on the ground, leaning against the stump of a tree, set in a landscape, her gaze fixed on the cross held aloft by the naked Christ Child sitting in her lap. The infant St John the Baptist kneels before them. In the folds of his camel-hair drape he holds freshly plucked flowers. In his left hand he grasps a simple wooden cross, which is indicated summarily with a line in the drawing. In this preliminary study Raphael concentrated on the figure of the kneeling Baptist; the Virgin can only be identified by the outline of the reserve for her right knee. In the painting she touches John’s shoulder with her right hand, while the Christ Child in her lap grasps the cross with his outstretched right hand, symbolically accepting his eventual fate – the Passion. In both the drawing and the painting, John gazes up at the hand of the serious-faced Christ Child.

In Lille there is a large sheet, drawn on both sides, with a red chalk study of the whole composition on the recto and a study of the seated Virgin alone on the verso.^[2] The composition study shows John, squatting on his haunches, with a lamb on his lap that he appears to be offering to the Christ Child with outstretched hands. The Christ Child’s right arm is drawn in the final position in pen and brown ink, but the cross is missing. The Rotterdam figure study is closer to the painting, which means that it must have been made later than the composition drawing in Lille. It does, though, vary from the painting in details, such as the position of John’s right hand, which in the drawing clasps the edge of his drape but is partly hidden behind the Christ Child’s right leg in the painting.

Interestingly, Raphael did not execute this drawing in the same technique (red chalk) as the composition study and the detail study in Lille, but instead used metalpoint, which by this date was rather old-fashioned. The paper was prepared first with moistened bonemeal applied with a brush. There are several known drawings by Raphael in this technique. The numbers ‘19’ and ‘75’ in the top centre and top right suggest that this is a sheet from a lost drawing book, like the so-called carnet rose.^[3] There are eight loose sheets from this held in other museums, with similar measurements and numbering, all drawn with metalpoint on a pink ground.^[4] The Rotterdam sheet is slightly smaller, however, and the ground is white, not pink, so it is uncertain whether it ever belonged to that small drawing book or to a similar one.