Human Flower Project

Thursday, January 13, 2005

Pinks

Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks, having toured England, now comes back to its new home, The National Gallery.

Madonna of the Pinks
Raphael
c. 1506-07
The National Gallery, London

After collecting the whopping 22 million pounds to pay for it, The National Gallery draws an international audience of scholars and the rest of us to see Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks.

The delicate painting, about the size of a sheet of typing paper, has been touring England for months now. The museum’s director traveled with it and reports, albeit self-interestedly, on the painting’s reception.

“A newspaper had sent a reporter whose job it was to go round asking visitors what they thought of the purchase, in the evident expectation that they would say that it had been a waste of money.

“On the contrary, every single person who was asked said how beautiful they thought the picture was, and how pleased they were to be able to see it in Manchester.”

(To elicit negative remarks about an Old Master painting—especially one that cost 22 million pounds, with the National Gallery director and chief fund-raiser right there—is no easy matter, as well as hideously rude.)

Actually, I’m less interested in the virtues of Raphael and the management of the National Gallery than I am in pinks, the delicate flowers that bring mother and child together in the painting. In the U.S. you don’t often hear of “pinks”; here, we call these flowers dianthus. Hardly the toy for the Holy Child, they appear in 12-packs at Lowe’s and Home Depot and are usually planted clump-fashion in window boxes or with marigolds in old whiskey barrels.

Renaissance painters, like Virgin Mothers, tended to handle flowers a little more carefully. Of course, pinks were decorative but they were symbolic too. A 16th century viewer would know that these particular flowers betokened a marriage engagement. They offered a subtle way to express an outlandish idea: that Jesus’ mother would also be his bride.

There are many thoroughgoing lists of flowers and their associations (pinks and their relatives, carnations, “mean” many things). But looking up each flower in one’s codebook isn’t the same experience as knowing, as we know, what receiving a red rose means (a subtle way to say something a bit less outlandish but likewise strong).

I’m not usually drawn to Raphael’s paintings, but I do find that his sheer skill makes codebooks less necessary. Just looking at this mother and child pass tiny spicy flowers between them, there are glimmers: what it was to think pinks with a Renaissance mind.

(’Raphael: From Urbino to Rome’ is at the National Gallery, London WC2 (0870 9063891) until Jan 16.)