Strange tales: Raphael and the wine barrel

The great Renaissance painter Raphael, who died on this day in 1520, has a persistent legend surrounding him that he first sketched one of his most famous paintings on the bottom of a wine barrel.

Johann Michael Wittmer’s portrayal of the scene now housed in the Royal Collection

Raphael is of course one of the great trinity of High Renaissance painters the others being Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

Famed for his works such as ‘The School of Athens’ and his portrait of Pope Julius II among a raft of profound religious artworks and expressive portraiture of Florentine and Roman notables, Raphael’s talents were so acute and his death aged just 37 so sudden that legends about him were bound to follow.

One such legend concerns a preliminary sketch for one of his famous works, a vintner’s daughter and a wine barrel.

The fable goes thus: one day a conveniently nameless hermit was set upon by a pack of ferocious wolves and forced to hide in a tree until he was saved in a conveniently vague and unexplained way by the daughter of a local winemaker; whereupon the grateful hermit prophesises that both she and the tree he hid in will, somehow, be immortalised one day.

A few years later Raphael is out for a stroll when he happens upon the daughter and her children and is so struck by their beauty that he is moved to sketch them as the Madonna and child and infant John the Baptist, which he would later turn into the ‘Madonna della sedia’.

Having no canvas on which to compose the cartoon he dashes out a version on the nearest thing to hand, the base of a wine barrel, which (of course) has itself been made from the tree the hermit scaled to escape the wolves bringing his prophecy to a neat conclusion.

Far too neat of course, and tales of delivered hermits and fortuitous prophecies have more than a whiff of the hagiographic about them. An even more tendentious addition to the story is that the round base of the barrel was the origin of the ‘tondo’ or ‘rotondo’ composition, where works of art are placed in a circular frame.

Detail of a tondo on a Greek kylix

Although one might stretch to the notion that the model for the Madonna della sedia was the daughter of a winemaker and Raphael himself was an exquisite draftsman who was always doodling, the tondo form was not only already being used at the time of Raphael’s birth in the 1480s but the tradition goes as far back as the time of the Ancient Greeks in the 6^th and 5^th centuries BC.

In fact, some of the best examples of Greek tondi can be found in the bowls of their kylix, the broad, low cups from which they drank wine at symposia and flicked the dregs while playing kottabos.

Not that artists let myth and legend get in the way of a good composition, quite the opposite in fact. If other artists painted the scene then the only one of any note that has come down to us is a version by the German artist Johann Wittmer.

Painted in 1853 in a typically mid-19th century sentimental style, it was acquired by Prince Albert the same year as part of his mania for all things Raphael related which had been kick-started by Queen Victoria giving him a watercolour reproduction of the Madonna della sedia which he hung in his bathroom.

And, before going, it would be remiss not to mention that even if Raphael didn’t use a wine barrel as an impromptu canvas than others certainly have. The Langudoc estate, Château Puech-Haut in particular has a collection of decorated barrels that it keeps at the winery.

Started in 2000 the ‘Bib’ Art’ collection now includes 100 pieces with designs from various artists – including Guy de Rougemont who designed the art for the Mouton Rothschild 2011 label – and the barrels have been displayed in art installations around the world including London, Shanghai and Copenhagen. They can be viewed here.